TIME
OF HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE:
Please proceed deeply, slowly, deliberately
Invocation: (A Woman: written in pencil in the sealed railway
car)
Leader: Here in this carload
People: I am Eve
Leader: With Abel my son
People: If you see my other son
Leader: Cain son of all
ALL: Tell
him I
from Gates of Repentance:
Leader: For the sin of silence.
People: For the sin of indifference.
Leader: For the secret complicity
of the neutral.
People: For the closing of the borders.
Leader: For the washing of the
hands.
People: For all that was done.
Leader: For all that was not done.
People: Let there be no forgetfulness
before the throne of glory.
Leader: Let there be remembrance
within the human heart.
ALL: And
let there at last be forgiveness.
Candlelighting and Confession:
(In Israel, on Yom Hashoah, sirens go off and everybody stops
and
stands quietly for two minutes. Even the cars on the roads and
freeways
stop. The entire country stops to remember.)
Leader: We begin – with silence
People: The silence of death, the silence of life.
Leader: The silence after destruction.
People: The silence before creation.
Leader: In silence we light six candles in memory of the six
million Jews.
We commit ourselves to dignity and to responsibility of and for
one another, to build upon this earth a world that has no room
for hatred,
no place for violence. Together we pray for the strength to
fulfill
this vocation.
(Volunteers please come forward to light six of the candles – in
the names of,
Amersfoort, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen,
Buchenwald, Chelmo, Cracow, Dachau, Flossenberg, Majdanek,
Mauthausen and Gusen, Mittelbau Dora, Natzwiller-Struthof,
Ohrdruf, Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Sobibor, Terezin,
Treblinka, Vught, Westerbork, . . . )
Leader: We light five more candles in memory of the slaughtered
from among the many other nations of Europe – communists and
other political dissidents, Gypsies, Slavic peoples, homosexual
persons, persons with different challenges, different needs.
(Volunteers please come forward to light the other five
candles.)
Leader: First they came for the Jews.
People: And I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Leader: Then they came for the Communists.
People: And I did not speak out because I was not a
Communist.
Leader: Then they came for the trade unionists.
People: And I did not speak out because I was not a trade
unionist.
Leader: Then they came for me.
ALL: And there was no one left to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemoeller
(Short period of silence)
ALL: I believe.
I believe in the sun even when it is not shining.
I believe in love even when feeling it not.
I believe in God even when God is silent.
-- Unsigned inscription found on the wall of a cave
in Cologne where Jews had been hiding
I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messianic Age,
and though it be delayed, yet do I believe.
Ani Maamin
