32 North Shore Towers Courier n May 2013 NEVER FORGET Towers hosts Holocaust remembrance BY MAGGIE HAYES Residents and guests packed Towers on the Green to reflect on the Jewish faith and remember the events of the Holocaust. Rabbi Michael Klayman began the evening with a personal story about his trip to a revived synagogue in Cuba. Klayman noted that until recently, Judaism was suppressed in Cuba, but after sharing in a Cuban boy’s Bar Mitzvah, it was clear that Jews were free to worship as they pleased. “We bore witness to a Jewish revival,” he said. “I experienced a young generation of Cuban Jews. It was a Jewish revival which no one anticipated nor expected in a country where Judaism had once been discouraged and rendered unacceptable.” He recalled young Cubans singing passionately, participating in the ceremony, and the Bar Mitzvah boy and his family leading the service in Hebrew. Klayman is married to a third generation Holocaust survivor, and reminisced on the time that his wife’s grandmother spent in the concentration camp. “She said goodbye to her mother, and never saw her again,” he said. Addionally, several survivors joined in the event and participated in a candle-lighting ceremony for the six million Jewish men, women and children who survived the Holocaust. David Werdiger, Diana Albert, Eva Kessner, Florence Norych, Sidney Norhauser, Ricky Norhauser, Marvel Smigel and Herb Cooper were among those survivors. “I know there are many other survivors here, and you are also in our hearts and lighting the candles,” said Eneas Arkway to the audience. “As these lights burn, please stand up for a moment of silent meditation.” Attendees followed suit, and men and women stood in silence to honor the memory of Holocaust victims. Arkway recited two poems, one written by a 10-year-old girl who was not Jewish. “We are the ones who will remember,” said the poem. “Horror seen through frightened eyes, horror seen through common ties. It’s all but lost in the history book. But we must do more than just regret, we must learn from the past, do not forget.” Guest speaker Annette Insdorf, director of undergraduate film studies at Columbia University, took the podium and spoke about her own growing knowledge of the Holocaust and of the period’s evolution over time through film. GROUP PHOTO LEFT TO RIGHT: David Werdiger, Annette Insdorf (guest speaker), Eneas Arkway, Diana Albert, Eva Kessner, Florence Norych, Sidney Norhauser, Ricky Norhauser, Rabbi Michael Klayman and Marvel Smigel Insdorf is the daughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, as she called it, but admitted that throughout her adolescence, she never tried to know more about what her parents went through. “I heard the term ‘the camp,’ I saw the tattoo on my mother’s arm,” she recalled. “It embarrassed me when my mother became visibly emotional when recounting her memories.” But, when she was a grad student, she saw a documentary that “gave her an inkling of what her parents had gone through,” and thought, if she needed a film to shape the horror, then what would other people need to truly understand that time period? Now, as a professor, she finds herself using cinematic masterpieces to “put students in touch with values, like lucidity and sympathy.” She has become committed to the study of cinematic art which sheds light on the human condition, and said that every part of her own life is informed by values rooted in Judaism. “The aspects to Jewish tradition to which I am most deeply drawn are based on respect for the individual and repair for the world,” she said. And in “repairing the world,” she noted that Holocaust films have evolved from depicting scenes of horror, to scenes of heroism and representing survivors with respect. “I have no direct experience of the crimes, but films have alerted my students and I and many others to crimes that are simply beyond are immediate lives,” she said. “Films don’t only preserve memory, they create memory.”
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