Yom Hashoah Commemoration will honor Jewish martyres

The Mandell JCC and the Jewish Federation Association of Connecticut will honor the memories of the Martyred Six Million at the annual Yom Hashoah Holocaust Commemoration on Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 7:30 p.m. at The Emanuel Synagogue, 160 Mohegan Dr. West Hartford, CT. The commemoration, which is free and open to the public, will feature guest speaker Anita Ron Schorr who endured Auschwitz and persevered the Holocaust.

 

Anita Ron Schorr is a native of Czechoslovakia and a long-time resident of Westport, CT. In 1934, at the age of 8, she was arrested along with her family. Anita and her family were brought to the Terezin concentration camp. Of the over 140,000 Jews sent to Terezin, 33,000 died and 88,000 were deported and killed, Anita was one of 19,000 who survived.

 

Anita and her family were then deported to Auschwitz, where her family was murdered. Anita then served in a slave-labor unit in Hamburg before ending up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. She was eventually liberated, went to Palestine, joined the Haganah, and she fought in the Israeli War of Independence. Later, Anita married a fellow Czech and lived on a Kibbutz until 1959, when the couple came to the U.S.

 

The Yom Hashoah commemoriation will open early at 6:30 p.m. for an hour-long continuous Reading of the Names of Holocaust Victims and Deceased Survivors. To submit names to be included, please contact Sheri Gaudet at the Mandell JCC, sgaudet@mandelljcc.org, 860-231-6351. Survivors and their families will march in a candlelight procession at the beginning of the service.

 

For more information about the Yom Hashoah Holocaust Commemoration, call 860-236-4571 or visit www.mandelljcc.org. The Mandell Jewish Community Center, Zachs Campus, 335 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hartford, CT, is open to everyone and supported by funds raised by the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford, a recipient of funding from the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Hartford, and a member of the JCC Association of North America.