Rain fell. It extinguished the yahrzeit candles and watered the flowers left by those paying their respects who trickled by throughout the day.
At the Holocaust Memorial in Lincoln Park adjacent to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, statues of white corpses lay languidly on the ground. Another gazed through the barbed wire.
Among those present on this grey and dreary Sunday in San Francisco was Mila Bograd of Ukraine, a survivor of the Holocaust. Born into the undertow of the Nazi regime in 1935, she lost her father, Yosef Harovsky, at age 6.
On a freezing December day, he and other Jews were gunned down before a mass grave. “Only because they were Jews they were killed,” said Bograd. “Some were still alive” in the grave.
Mother’s Day this year fell between Holocaust Memorial Day and Israel Independence Day. In recognition of the convergence of these commemorations, the B’nai B’rith chapter of San Francisco chose May 8 as the day for its “Unto Every Person There is a Name Project.”
The commemoration was scheduled to take place at the Holocaust Memorial in Lincoln Park, but was relocated to Congregation Chevra Thilim on 25th Street due to rain.
The project began in Israel in 1989 as a way to memorialize the 6 million Jews who lost their lives in the Nazi genocide. The name springs from a title of a poem by the Israeli poet, Zelda. The San Francisco B’nai B’rith chapter began holding commemorations in San Francisco that same year.
“The project selects a special theme for each year. Because the project this year coincides with Mother’s Day, we decided to associate our theme with Mother’s Day,” said Cantor Julius Blackman, one of the organizers of the event.
The ceremony at Chevra Thilim consisted of readings of the names of Holocaust victims, an hourly recitation of the Kaddish and El Maleh Rachamim, and readings from women in the Jewish community.
“Because our theme is connected with mothers, we asked women rabbis, women cantors and women leaders in the community to participate with us,” said Blackman. “Their presence dramatizes what the Jewish community lost. More than 3 million were killed and were prevented from living out their lives as mothers or potential mothers.”