yom hashoah
Apr. 9th, 2002 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidtoday is yom hashoah, holocaust remembrance day.
i haven't done any thing for it (other than this entry, i suppose), just like i've managed not to do anything for it for the last couple of years. and for that i feel bad. maybe some of it is that the day falls so soon after the end of passover- it sneaks up, unaware.
in college, it was a much bigger deal. i remember there was a whole week of activities, but the one i usually took part in was a 24-hour vigil on the day itself with people taking half-hour or hour long shifts reading the names of those killed. during the day, the reader was at the foot og the steps going to rabb, in the humanities quad. at night, they moved to pearlman lounge, for light and heat and safety. there were yahrtzeit candles burning, and there were always at least 2 people on a shift, one to read and one to listen. i remember being on some dead-of-night shift, writing writing writing in my journal, unable to cry. it was an intense time.
and now, i do nothing, really, to mark the day. though in some ways i find it odd that this wasn't made into a short fast day, or have some other official type of mourning tied to it.
in fact, on tish'a b'av (a major fast day in the summer that commemorates the destruction of both temples and just about every other massacre & pogrom jews have been subjected to), one of the kinot (sing. "kinah". they're... complicated elegies, written in exteremely-hard-to-understand lyrical medieval hebrew) added in, at hillel, at least, is for the holocaust. so why this separate day? not sure. maybe i should read that kinah when i get home...
i haven't done any thing for it (other than this entry, i suppose), just like i've managed not to do anything for it for the last couple of years. and for that i feel bad. maybe some of it is that the day falls so soon after the end of passover- it sneaks up, unaware.
in college, it was a much bigger deal. i remember there was a whole week of activities, but the one i usually took part in was a 24-hour vigil on the day itself with people taking half-hour or hour long shifts reading the names of those killed. during the day, the reader was at the foot og the steps going to rabb, in the humanities quad. at night, they moved to pearlman lounge, for light and heat and safety. there were yahrtzeit candles burning, and there were always at least 2 people on a shift, one to read and one to listen. i remember being on some dead-of-night shift, writing writing writing in my journal, unable to cry. it was an intense time.
and now, i do nothing, really, to mark the day. though in some ways i find it odd that this wasn't made into a short fast day, or have some other official type of mourning tied to it.
in fact, on tish'a b'av (a major fast day in the summer that commemorates the destruction of both temples and just about every other massacre & pogrom jews have been subjected to), one of the kinot (sing. "kinah". they're... complicated elegies, written in exteremely-hard-to-understand lyrical medieval hebrew) added in, at hillel, at least, is for the holocaust. so why this separate day? not sure. maybe i should read that kinah when i get home...
no subject
Date: 2002-04-09 07:15 am (UTC)