CHJ's annual Yom Ha' Shoah program was very moving.  In addition to hearing Lou Reens talk about his experience of being sent away from his family in order to survive the Nazi occupation of Holland, Zelig told us a new story--one about recently meeting a Polish nurse in the hospital who told him about all the non-Jewish Polish tradesmen who had worked at Oswiecem (Auschwitz) and were then slaughtered so they could not go home and tell anyone about what they had seen.  Then Manny Lobel, a survivor we had not met before, told about leaving Berlin for Shnghai when he was four and then celebrating his bar mitzvah on a ship from Shanghai to San Francisco.  These are the stories of the past and the present.

One of CHJ's mitzvah students, Scotty Luntz, talked about his bar mitzvah project (The Warsaw Ghetto) and then read a poem he wrote about the Holocaust.  He is the future.  Our prayer is that his generation does a better job of "never again."  Read his poem here.

Until next year,
Gail Ostrow

Thank you to photographer Joyce Laitman and the Westport Minuteman for the wonderful photos.