With a spirit that met the heaviness of the moment this year, the phrase “never again” became a focal point of this week’s Yom HaShoah Community Observance in San Francisco.
Hundreds of people attended the six-hour event on Sunday at the JCC of San Francisco to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust — and to learn strategies for dealing with the current spike in antisemitism.
“I think it’s very important for people to be politically active,” Anita Friedman, executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services, told J. “Petitioning our government is a key feature of American democracy, and working with our elected officials to educate them about issues of concern to us is how we will prevail.”
The JFCS Holocaust Center and the JCC co-presented the event in partnership with more than two dozen Jewish groups and congregations.
As part of the day, Friedman hosted a discussion titled “Our Schools: The Fight for the Hearts and Minds of Children” with Tony Thurmond, California’s superintendent of public instruction. They discussed efforts to build a curriculum that teaches California children about antisemitism, the Holocaust and other genocides.
“Education is the most effective tool that we have to counter hate,” Thurmond told J. “When people get co-opted by neo-Nazi groups, it’s often very young people who give way to stereotypes that they hear.”
Thurmond noted that a new speaker series organized by his California Department of Education and launched earlier this year is enabling public school students to hear directly from Holocaust survivors and their families in a way that makes the stories more vivid and impactful. He also supports the passage of a state bill that would establish an Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Education. The office would enable staff to investigate incidents of intolerance and offer stronger protections for students including those who are Jewish, Black and LGBTQ.
While many in the audience were Jewish, one non-Jewish participant included Moanalani Jeffrey, a prominent San Francisco photographer who attended several parts of the day, including the reading of names of people murdered in the Holocaust, a Yizkor (memorial) service and the discussion with Thurmond.
“As a mother with a child in the public school system, it was a relief to hear the superintendent speak with conviction and authority as a champion of reason against the antisemitism that I see young kids posting online in support of Hamas,” she said.
Jeffrey noted that she has received dozens of hate messages since she began posting on social media against Hamas, the terror group that massacred 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7 and took an estimated 250 people as hostages.
“It is so clear to me to see how facts get lost in these conversations that start online where people have questioned my Blackness just because I stand with the Jewish community,” she said. “So learning that educators are working against sheer hate and misinformation at school brought me hope.”
Sessions were packed, with people lining the walls, including for “What Can We Do About Antisemitism?” and “How Much Suffering Is Enough?” Throughout the day, attendees took time to view “Beauty and Terror,” an exhibition by artist Robin Bernstein.
The day’s atmosphere was captured in the reading of “Remembrance” by poet Tova Ricardo. It reads in part:
“We think about the Holocaust again, and again and again, and we can’t help it because our classmates keep telling us to get over Auschwitz / It’s been months since October 7th, and I’ve started to wear my Star of David again / I have no other choice but to be Jewish and proud / I choose to remember what can happen if people forget.”