It is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Remembrance Day. This is the time we remember the 11 million people (including he 5 million non-Jews too often left out of our remembrance) who were killed by the Nazis in WW II.

Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freight Car

Here, in this freight car,
I, Eve,
with my son Abel.
If you see my older boy,
Cain, the son of Adam,
tell him that I...

--Dan Pagis, as quoted in Ariel Hirschfeld's chapter in Cultures of the Jews, David Biale (ed.)

The diary below was originally posted in my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal on October 14th.

FDR was singularly responsible for defeating Nazi Germany's brutal anti-Semitic regime. Yet sixty-one years after his death, FDR's legacy is entwined with allegations he was anti-Semitic and disinterested in the Holocaust.

As a liberal Jewish American I was always conditioned to regard FDR with an asterisk. Many times I've heard my predominantly liberal family say, "FDR was a great President, but ..." And they proceed to indict him for being unsympathetic to European Jewry during the Holocaust. In particular, FDR's critics cite the SS St. Louis, which arrived in Havana Harbor on May 27, 1939 with 936 European Jews seeking asylum, but were turned away. There was also FDR's failure to fire Breckinridge Long. While serving in FDR's State Department, Long obstructed and delayed visas, causing the deaths of Jews desperate to escape Europe.

This is adapted from a talk I gave to the Latvia Special Interest Group luncheon at the Jewish Genealigical Conference in NYC this week. I don't know how much it will resonate with a general readership, but it means something to me and to those who heard it. It's adapted from a Powerpoint presentation, so the format is different than what I normally do.

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

When I was a child attending Hebrew School in New York in the late 1960's, in addition to learning to read and write Hebrew, studying Jewish heritage and spiritual practices, and practicing the melodies of prayer in the Torah, we also learned a lot about the Holocaust.

Through films, photographs, and stories, each of us had etched in our minds the horrors of people being rounded up, taken away from their homes, brutalized, tortured, raped and killed.

Because our elders wanted us to remember, and never let things like that happen again, to ANYONE, despite the trauma that it might cause to children so young, we were exposed to atrocities that no child should even have to imagine.

That's why, when I read the newspapers this week, my skin crawls and my blood boils, and I wonder how we can sit idly by.

What follows is a very personal account of a non-political project I have been working on. It began as a quest I started some three years ago, delving into my genealogy and finally actually visiting the town in Latvia where one branch of my ancestry came from. What I found there was a Jewish population that had almost been wiped out by the Nazis and that may yet die out, fulfilling, in part, Hitler's dream of eliminating Jews from Europe. There is one surviving synagogue in that town, though it is now a condemned building. That building has stood through 160 years of weddings and pogroms, hope and the Holocaust.

This is the story of my family's roots in Latvia, my rediscovery of the synagogue where my great grandparents probably were married, and my ongoing attempts to save that synagogue. I am going to submit this to some Jewish newspapers when I get the chance so I want editorial feedback.