Five Towns marks Yom HaShoah Sunday nite By Jeffrey Bessen Seventy-two years ago to the date that Marion Blumenthal’s family — her father, Walter; her mother, Ruth; and Marion and her brother, Albert — were liberated from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945,
the Hewlett resident, now Marion Lazan, will be the keynote speaker at the Five Towns Yom HaShoah event at Congregation Beth Sholom (390 Broadway, Lawrence) this Sunday night. Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 27th day of Nisan, marks the anniversary of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The greater Five Towns Community Yom HaShoah commemoration, which begins at 7 pm on April 23 and involves 23 synagogues, will also feature: a reflection by Jake Levy, the fourth-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor and an
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eighth-grader at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway Middle School; a video presentation; and singing by the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach’s fifth-grade choir, directed by Sandy Shmuely. See Shoah on page 3
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as “The Jerusalem of the North” and described as the focal point of Jewish civilization, with famous yeshivas, rabbis and scholars. As the film notes, the city was home to 77,000 Jews, had 105 synagogues, the largest Jewish library in the world, and six daily Jewish newspapers. The vigorous Jewish life in Vilna started to decline in 1940, when the Soviet Union absorbed Lithuania. It was almost completely destroyed after German armies attacked Russia in 1941, quickly conquering Lithuania. Within a year, Nazis shot — in the days before Auschwitz-type gas chambers — most of the Jews and tossed their corpses into huge pits in the nearby Ponar Forest, initially dug by the Soviets to store fuel and ammunition. One pit alone held 20,000 to 25,000 corpses. In late 1943, with Russian armies advancing from the east and partisans attacking German supply lines in surrounding forests, Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin decided to cover up the See Great Pesach escape on page 6
PBS recounts great Pesach escape from the horrors of a doomed Vilna By Tom Tugend, JTA television program airing this week on PBS links an incredible Holocaust escape story — which climaxed on the last day of Pesach in 1944 — to advanced scientific techniques. “Holocaust Escape Tunnel,” a Nova production to be shown on WLIW Channel 21 at 10 pm on Thursday, sheds new light on the attempt by 80 imprisoned men and women — mostly Lithuanian Jews — to make a break for freedom in the face of Nazi bullets. The show documents the application of scientific methods to verify what would otherwise be a nearly unbelievable story. The documentary is set in and around Vilna, the Yiddish and Hebrew designation for Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. At its peak, before World War II and the Shoah, Vilna was known
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The “Burning Pit” used by the Nazis to burn the remains of thousands of Jewish victims who had been Ezra Wolfinger for WGBH shot to dealth early in the war, in order to eliminate evidence.
Verizon welcomes Making a better world, Jews to ‘Palestine’ 1 day, 1 person at a time mont. He had traveled to Israel to see his daughter, who is studying in a master’s degree at Bar-Ilan University. “I was shocked that an American company was falling into some BDS rhetoric,” Rosenblatt said. According to the most recent study of the wireless market by the research firm Strategy Analytics, Verizon was America’s largest cell carrier at the end of 2016. See Verizon on page 19
By Rabbi Binny Freedman Sunday is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. ny serious student of history will recognize that there are moments, all too rare, when a door stands open, waiting for a person, a people, or even the entire world to walk through, and change life as we know it, forever. Such a moment came and went in 1967, when paratroopers, on the wings of
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eagles, stormed the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. There was a magic in the air that day. It was as if anything was possible and dreams could come true after 2,000 years of longing and waiting. A friend of mine, who was one of the paratroopers who liberated the Old City on that magical day, told me an incredible story. Most of the paratroopers
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By Karen McDonough, JNS.org When Mark Rosenblatt touched down at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on April 5 and powered on his cell phone, he got the surprise of his mobile technology life. Rosenblatt received a text message from his cell phone carrier, Verizon, reading, “Welcome to Palestine.” “I did a double take,” said Rosenblatt, a high-tech consultant from Edge-
had broken in to the Old City through the Lion’s gate, but an elite company had come in from the south, storming the Zion gate and gaining a foothold in the Jewish quarter. Lechimah Be’Shetach Banui (urban warfare) is one of the most difficult types of combat. In addition to the normal pressures of fighting an enemy who is entrenched in his positions, one has the addiSee Making on page 19