Community invited to participate in 2022 Holocaust Commemoration events

The Holocaust Commission of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater’s annual community events to honor the Holocaust Day of Remembrance, Yom Hashoah, will be held both on Zoom and in-person on Wednesday, April 27.

The Reading of the Names will take place on Zoom. As it is when it is in-person, it is possible to participate or simply observe and honor.

The first in-person Yom Hashoah commemoration event since 2019 will take place during the evening at Congregation Beth El. The free event includes a guest speaker, a poignant candle lighting ceremony, and prayers from area clergy and leadership.

Holocaust survivor, Dr. Al Munzer, is this year’s guest speaker. Born in the Netherlands in 1941, Munzer and his two older sisters were entrusted to two different Gentile families for their protection when their parents sensed peril. Munzer was lucky to have been cared for by a Dutch-Indonesian family and their Muslim nanny, who treated this endangered Jewish boy as their own child. Their family was the only one he knew until he was almost five years old.

At war’s end, Munzer and his mother were the only survivors from their family, his sisters having been betrayed and deported, and his father succumbing to the harsh treatment in various concentration camps, and dying shortly after liberation.

Munzer and his mother immigrated to the U.S. in 1958, and he went on to a distinguished career as a pulmonologist. As one of the youngest Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Munzer shares his story, and his memories, which are created mainly through photographs and his mother’s shared history, as a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Dedicated to educating students on the history of the Holocaust and its lessons, Munzer will also speak to students from five local schools while he is visiting the area.

In addition to hearing from Munzer at Yom Hashoah, student winners of the Holocaust Commission’s annual Elie Wiesel competitions and recipients of the Commission’s Excellence in Education awards will be honored and recognized. This year’s competition, the second with completely online entry, received more than 1,200 entries, from Tidewater, across Virginia, as well as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Utah, and California.

Special awards will also be presented to distinguished Holocaust educators.

For more information, visit www.HolocaustCommission.org, email info@holocaustcommission.org, or call 757-965-6100.

–Elena Baum