A Yom HaShoah Reflection for Our Times

This is the 2025 iteration of a message I post annually on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). If you can read only part of it, jump to the last paragraph.

In July of 2007, I volunteered to accompany a group of 48 NFTY-ites (the Reform Movement’s youth group in North America) on a L'dor v'Dor journey to Poland, the Czech Republic, and then on to Israel. (Crazy, I know.) One of our many visits to significant sites was a mass grave in the woods in Tikochin, three hours from Warsaw and two hours from the Lithuanian border. The time we spent there was, for me, perhaps the most difficult of the entire trip—and there were many difficult moments.

But those in the forest were personal.

My paternal grandfather, Abraham Charmatz was born in Lithuania, one of 19 children (yes, 19!). He was the youngest, and only a handful came to this country. (We originally believed that his name was changed to "Herman" at Ellis Island, but I have since learned from Dara Horn, author of "People Love Dead Jews," that it is a fallacy that names were changed there. According to Horn, they were changed afterward, and there are court records that prove her assertion. I have not searched court records for my grandfather's name change.)

To hear my father tell this part of our family's story, when he was growing up on Mapes Avenue in the Bronx in the 1930s and 1940s, his father frequently received letters from his brothers and sisters in Lithuania. Until the letters stopped.

I lit a yahrzeit candle at the mass grave in the woods in Tikochin, and today, once again, I remember all those unknown aunts and uncles and cousins. May they rest in peace in the shelter of the Eternal.

And while we're remembering, it would be wise to remember, too, that the current administration's efforts to "protect" Jews from antisemitism, especially on college campuses, are nothing more than a facade that tramples the civil rights of immigrants, many of whom are living and studying in this country legally and have the right—just like the rest of us—to assembly and free speech. In America, when those freedoms are denied to anyone, we all lose, and no one, including Jews, is safe from the forces that wish to see us gone—from this country or from the world.