For years, Jews all over the country have commemorated the Holocaust in a simple but powerful way. They have read aloud the names of some of the 6 million Jews who perished.
This year’s San Francisco reading took place Sunday in Lincoln Park in front of George Segal’s Holocaust memorial. Titled “Unto Every Person There Is a Name,” the event was sponsored by the Greater San Francisco Unit No. 21 B’nai B’rith, San Francisco Humanities Inc. and a coalition of other Jewish and community groups.
Gathered around the white memorial sculpture for some four hours, hundreds of participants took turns reading lists of victims’ names. Also, a series of rabbis, cantors and community leaders delivered messages of remembrance.
“In general, [Holocaust events] bemoan the Holocaust but individual names are obliterated,” said Julius Blackman, president of B’nai B’rith’s greater San Francisco unit.
Henry Drejer, a San Francisco resident who survived six different camps, told the crowd how he tailored uniforms as a prisoner for the Gestapo.
“I was a tailor, somebody important. This is what saved my life,” Drejer said in an interview.
During a 1969 visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Drejer discovered that all the Jews in his hometown of Flupza, Poland, had been buried alive. He was the only surviving member of his family.
Drejer, who speaks often to schoolchildren about his experience, says it is difficult to talk about, but still he feels an obligation to do so.
“When I talk about the Holocaust I cannot dream for months afterwards. It is [survivors’] responsibility to talk about it. Otherwise, when we are gone, who will talk about it?”
Blackman estimated that several hundred people visited Sunday’s memorial.
Warner Oberndoerfer came to read the names of his uncles, cousins and aunt who died in the Shoah.
“It’s always moving,” Oberndoerfer said in an interview. “My cousins were my age. I wonder what kind of folks they might have become had they been given the opportunity.”
The names of children were read by 12 teenagers from two B’nai B’rith Youth Organizations.
One of the teens who read, 15-year old Lowell High School student Michelle Ovacia, said the memorial was “sad, depressing and strong. At times I cried. If we forget, it allows a chance for it to happen again.”
There were periodic recitations of the Kaddish and the memorial prayer, El Maleh Rachamim.
Seven candles were lit. Six of these were dedicated to victims of the Holocaust: children, mothers, fathers, Resistance heroes, martyrs and the group of rabbis, scholars and teachers. The seventh was a candle of hope.
Barbara Kaufman, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and state Sen. Quentin Kopp (Ind.-Calif.) were among the political leaders who spoke.
Rabbi Alan Lew of Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco suggested responding to the Shoah with silence — not the silence of evasion, but the silence with which “we approach all mysteries.
“We are in the presence of something far larger, far more horrible than we can speak of,” he said.