International Brigades remembered on Yom Kippur
Hershl Hartman writes:
IB fighters remembered in Secular Yom Kippur program
Since 1973, progressive Secular/cultural Jews — including many intercultural families — in Los Angeles have marked yonkiper/Yom Kippur (day of purgation/atonement) in an alternative observance in which personal reflections are combined with social concerns, and poetry replaces prayer. Reflecting our general anti-fascist heritage and the presence of family members of Lincoln vets, the following reading has been part of our ceremonies these past 39 years. It will be repeated Tuesday, 7:00 PM, Sept. 25, at the Professional Musicians Union, Local 47, 817 North Vine Street, Hollywood. Details at http://www.sholem.org/
From the kolnidre program of The Sholem Community and SoCal Arbeter Ring/Workmen’s Circle:
- Yizker. We remember. Our personal memories are braided with our collective history of love, sorrow and loss. We remember. In the sixth decade after their liberation, we remember Auschwitz and Treblinka, Dachau and Bergen-Berlsen, Maidanek and Chelmno, an all the other murder-factories of genocide.
- Yizker. We remember that long before the liberators came to the death camps, militants among our people rose up in resistance. We remember Warsaw, and Sobibor, and Vilna, and Bialystock, and Minsk, Paris, Brussels, Belgrade and all the ghettos and forests where armed Jews and partisan brigades spoke directly to Nazi madness.
- And we remember Madrid, where 78 years ago, the tide of blood and Fascist murder might have been stopped before it turned into a holocaust, had the world heeded the fighting prophets of the International Brigades in Spain, among whom our people’s presence was strong.
