Jewish community leaders to hold programs for Holocaust remembrance
Winners of a student writing and multimedia contest will be honored as part of a local annual Holocaust remembrance ceremony in Youngstown.
On April 27 and April 29, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Youngstown will hold ceremonies and film screenings for Yom Hashoah.
Yom Hashoah is an internationally recognized day set aside for honoring all the lives lost during the Holocaust.
Youngstown’s theme for Yom Hashoah in 2025 focuses on Auschwitz.
First, the annual Shoah Memorial Ceremony will be at 4 p.m. on April 27 at the Jewish Community Center of Youngstown, located at 505 Gypsy Lane.
The Memorial Ceremony at the JCC will feature short video clips of Survivors with connections to the Valley.
A memorial candle lighting ceremony to honor the six million who perished will be part of both events.
Then the 32nd annual Community Holocaust Commemoration event is happening at noon April 29 in the Rotunda of the Mahoning County Courthouse, located at 120 Market St.
Both programs are free and open to the public.
Winners of the writing and multimedia contest will be recognized during the commemoration at the courthouse.
“Auschwitz — A Place On Earth”
The World Holocaust Remembrance Center exhibit is available for viewing in the Thomases Family Endowment of the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation Art Gallery in the Jewish Community Center.
The exhibit by Yad Vashem depicts the only known visual documentation of the arrival of a transport of Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It is on display now through May 6.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from May 1940 to January 1945, was the largest of the concentration and extermination camps.
Auschwitz-Birkenau differed from other extermination camps because it included a concentration camp and a labor camp, as well as large gas chambers and crematoria.
Historians estimate that at least 1.3 million people were deported to the Auschwitz camp complex between 1940 and 1945, and of these deportees, approximately 1.1 million people were killed.
The Holocaust Commemoration and Education Task Force, a committee of the JCRC, is chaired by Rabbi Joseph Schonberger and Rochelle Miller, children of Holocaust Survivors, and is comprised of numerous children and grandchildren of Survivors, and other interested volunteers from the community.