“We share a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to honour those who stood against it.”
-- Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust
Holocaust Education Week
14.11.2016
The Neuberger’s 36th Annual Holocaust Education Week program concluded with a poignant commemoration of the November Pogrom at Temple Sinai in Toronto, Canada.
A capacity audience of 900 members of the public along with government representatives attended a commemoration which included a candle lighting ceremony in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. The ceremony was conducted by Holocaust survivors, and a moving, keynote address was delivered by Hannah Lessing, Secretary General of the National Fund of the Republic of Austria. The full programme of the closing event can be consulted here.
Ms. Lessing - Head of the Austrian Delegation to the IHRA - shared the compelling account of how she unexpectedly retrieved an item of Judaica connected to her family, more than 75 years after the pogrom. She discovered that a pair of silver Torah finials (rimonim) originally owned by her family was included in an auction house catalogue. Plundered by Nazis from a Viennese synagogue during the pogroms that took place on November 9-10, 1938, the finials appeared to have been purchased in good faith as part of a Judaica collection. The finials were engraved with a dedication dated in 1930 by David and Beila Lessing in memory of their son, who had died that year. The finials had belonged to her father’s relatives and had been donated to the synagogue from which they were stolen, over 75 years ago. In 2016, on the 78th anniversary of the November Pogrom, Lessing shared the ongoing relevance of restitution on a personal, national and international scale as well as the lingering effects of the Holocaust, generations later.
More than 35,000 members of the general public took part in programming across the city of Toronto throughout the eight-day educational forum. Programs included film screenings, cultural productions and exhibitions in addition to lectures and panel discussion presented by internationally known speakers.
Photo: Hannah Lessing, Head of the Austrian Delegation to the IHRA, addresses the audience at the closing event. Credit: Michael Rajzman