MONTREAL — Sustained applause punctured the usual silent solemnity of the Yom Hashoah service at last Sunday evening’s community-wide event.
From left, Stanley Grunfeld, his survivor father Max Grunfeld, and his grand-nephew Elliot Weiss light the third memorial candle at this year’s annual Yom Hashoah commemoration.
It came after native Dane Dr. Hans Möller, too frail to use his walker to mount the podium, succinctly and articulately chronicled how every one of Denmark’s 72,000 Jews – due to be imminently deported to probable death in October 1943 – was saved by his fellow Christian countrymen.
“It was spontaneous. It was unanimous,” is how Möller, who helped warn the Jewish community of the danger they were in, described the sense of duty felt by the Danish people.
How the righteous – Jew and non-Jew alike – saved Jewish lives out of the sense of having “no other choice” – was chosen as the theme for this year’s commemoration at Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem 65 years after the end of World War II.
Speakers and participants in the centrepiece memorial candlelighting portion of the service made it clear through their words on video screens that the evening was indeed about “making a difference.”
Max Grunfeld, of Medzilaborce, Slovakia, and his brother were saved by a Christian family friend who hid them in an in underground cave on his farm.
Michael Kutz from the town of Nieswiz, Poland, miraculously emerged from a mountainous pit of just-murdered Jews, found refuge in a Catholic convent, and fought as a partisan.
Renata Skotnicka-Zajdman escaped the Warsaw ghetto and was saved by a Catholic nanny and by the late renowned Irena Sendler.
“We have a duty to pay tribute to those Jews and non-Jews who saved lives,” said Marcel Tenenbaum, co-chair with Jack Dym of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre’s (MHMC) Yom Hashoah committee.
His comments were echoed by Rivka Augenfeld, representing the second generation, and by Israeli consul Avi Lev-Louis, who, like the others, spoke of the duty to remember the six million “systematically murdered” by the Nazis.
The service also included the recitation of names, the promise by the current generation to carry forward the legacy of the Holocaust, readings, several songs by the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue Choir under Stephen Glass, and the recitation of prayers and psalms. Nathalie Constantine provided translation into sign language for those with impaired hearing.
Several speakers also paid tribute to victims of the airline crash the day before that killed Polish president Lech Kaczynski. Kaczynski was a “great friend of Israel,” Lev-Louis said, had visited Israel in January and supported the construction of a Holocaust memorial in Warsaw.
Those attending the 90-minute service before a full house included representatives from the diplomatic corps and all levels of government.
The next morning, Mayor Gerald Tremblay was to participate with students in a Holocaust commemoration at Montreal City Hall at a B’nai Brith Canada Quebec region event.
