P I T TS B U R G H
May 4, 2018 | 19 Iyar 5778
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Candlelighting 8:01 p.m. | Havdalah 9:05 p.m. | Vol. 61, No. 18 | pittsburghjewishchronicle.org
Community commemorates 6 million at second annual Walk to Remember
NOTEWORTHY LOCAL First went the duckpins, then went the lanes
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Students discover locals knew a lot about Nazi threat By Toby Tabachnick | Senior Staff Writer
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Neighborhood haunt Forward Lanes turns the lights out after 94 years as bowling destination.
forget the people who died. There was a very good chance in 1943 that I would be among them.” On Sunday, Farhy joined six other local Holocaust survivors for the second annual Walk to Remember, an event organized to commemorate the 6 million Jewish lives lost and the importance of Holocaust education. Close to 100 people gathered at the Gary and Nancy Tuckfelt Keeping Tabs: A Holocaust Sculpture to walk six laps around the Community Day School property. The walk, which was created by Jacki Savage Gelernter and organized by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and CDS, raised money for the Holocaust Center and to support Holocaust education at CDS. Organizers are still counting donations from this year’s walk. Savage Gelernter, whose mother-in-law is a Holocaust survivor, said she organized the first Walk to Remember last year after
t long has been a myth that Americans were unware of what was happening to Jews during the Holocaust. But “Americans and the Holocaust,” a new exhibit at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, flatly dispels that myth while examining why, despite extensive media coverage of Jewish persecution, the rescue of the Jews of Europe never became a priority for the U.S. government. Two teachers at Winchester Thurston School in Shadyside and their students have contributed to that exhibit by doing hands-on research of local newspaper reports from the 1930s and 1940s, including those published in the Chronicle’s predecessor paper, the Jewish Criterion, and providing those articles to the museum in Washington. Callie DiSabato, who teaches middle school English, and Jared Gervais, a social studies teacher, led their eighth-grade students on the search for truth as participants in the “History Unfolded” project of the USHMM, scanning hundreds of newspaper articles to find out what Pittsburghers could have known about the Nazi threat, and then submitting their findings to the museum’s online database, thereby making that information available to the general public. Each year, Winchester Thurston’s eighth grade studies the Holocaust, and travels to Washington, D.C., to visit the museum. When the teachers learned of the “History Unfolded” project, they were eager to get their students involved as a way to do useful historical research. DiSabato and Gervais took their students to the Carnegie Library to examine local newspapers of the time period, and also worked with Martha Berg, the archivist at Rodef Shalom Congregation. Berg
Please see Walk, page 16
Please see Archive, page 16
Page 2 LOCAL Unbounding faith, in uniform
Albert Farhy, a Holocaust survivor who now lives in Pittsburgh, stands by the Gary and Nancy Tuckfelt Keeping Tabs: A Holocaust Sculpture at Community Day School. Farhy participated in the Walk to Remember on Sunday, April 29.
Naval officer speaks to Jewish women in the South Hills. Page 3 LOCAL Moral truth Rabbi Joseph Telushkin will offer universal message during visit. Page 5
Photo by Lauren Rosenblatt
By Lauren Rosenblatt | Digital Content Manager
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hen Albert Farhy was 12 and growing up in Bulgaria, he wasn’t allowed to walk the streets after 9 p.m. He also was not permitted to shop at certain hours of the day or have a bar mitzvah. One night, he looked outside his window to investigate what sounded like a buzzing sound coming from the streets. He saw crowds of people approaching his building, a mostly Jewish complex, yelling, “Death to America. Death to the Jews.” “It felt like we were mice,” he said. “You could not escape.” Farhy, now 88 and living in Pittsburgh, grew up amidst the rise of the Nazi regime in Eastern Europe. He was lucky, he says, because most Bulgarians helped the Jewish people. “It was a time when you didn’t know tomorrow,” he said. “Commemoration [of the Holocaust] is very important. Never
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