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A Yom HaShoah program will be held at the Agudath Achim Synagogue, 7901 W. Capitol Ave. in Little Rock at 7 p.m. Thursday.

In English, the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis is called the Holocaust, from the Greek for holocaust.

In Hebrew it is known as Shoah, a word that means “Catastrophe” and sometimes translated as “Calamity” or “Destruction”.

Yom HaShoah, sometimes called Holocaust Remembrance Day, has been observed in Arkansas since at least the mid-1980s.

On Thursday, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews will gather at the Agudath Achim Synagogue in Little Rock for this year’s observance.

Similar ceremonies will take place around the world.

Poet Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach will speak at the Little Rock rally.

His great-grandfather disappeared shortly after the Nazi occupation of kyiv. He was reportedly one of 33,771 Jews massacred at Babyn Yar on September 29-30, 1941, shortly after the German takeover.

Currently a Murphy Visiting Scholar in English-Creative Writing at Hendrix College, Dasbach lived for a time with her great-grandmother after immigrating to the United States from Ukraine in 1993. While the elderly woman has never shared her wartime experiences, late in life, with the onset of dementia, she was tormented by fear that a Nazi would find her and frustrated that her family would not help her while she was in hiding.

In recent weeks, as Russia has rained death on his native country, Dasbach, who moved to the United States at the age of 6, watched in horror as his native land was once again terrorized, in a move that the invaders called “denazification”.

“For me, as a writer, I keep trying to write but there are no words,” she said. “I just wrote a poem and I’m just saying, ‘My body hurts, but nothing is hurt. It’s physical pain I feel, and yet it’s not me who’s physically hurt. ‘ And even that’s its own kind of pain, because it’s watching this atrocity from a distance knowing there’s so little I can do.

The destruction in Ukraine is happening in our time; we are all witnesses, she noted.

“We imagine these atrocities as things that happened so long ago, and these are things that happened somewhere far away, and these are things that could not happen again,” she said. declared. “We are seeing these same atrocities happening right now.”

Bad news arrives instantly on the Internet and hourly on the radio.

“I couldn’t leave my car when I heard that the mobile crematoria were being used for civilians. In Mariupol there are so many dead that’s what they do to get rid of the bodies,” said she declared. The city’s mayor, Vadym Boichenko, estimates that 21,000 civilians have already died.

“There are going to be so many children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who, again, have no trace of their mother, father, great-grandfather,” he said. she declared.

“I didn’t think another generation was going to have to put up with it. I would have thought we would have learned something,” she said. “Agony is not a sufficient word to capture him.”

Rabbi Mark Biller of the Agudath Achim Synagogue said it was important to pause and reflect on those who have suffered.

“We remember people who were taken just for who they were,” Biller said. “To me, there is a sanctity in remembering those lives.”

Rabbi Barry Block of Congregation B’nai Israel emphasized the vastness and sophistication of savagery.

“There has never been an event in human history like the Holocaust, where there was an official government policy organized to exterminate an entire people from the entire surface of the Earth, using the most advanced technology breakthrough,” he said. “It’s terribly important to remember that.”

Rabbi Pinchus Cement, director of Lubavitch of Arkansas, said the Yom HaShoah commemorations “remind humanity of how quickly we can move from aid to destruction.”

“We have a responsibility and an obligation to bring the world to a place where something like this will never happen again,” he said.

Yom HaShoah is usually celebrated on Nisan 27 on the Jewish calendar. It comes a week after the end of Passover.

“It’s a big deal in Israel, a day of remembrance and observance, but it’s also observed by Jews across the Diaspora,” said Dorian Stuber, an English professor at Hendrix College who teaches literature on the Holocaust.

World War II ended in 1945; the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948. The first observances of Yom HaShoah were held there in 1951.

“In the 1950s, the first decade of the State of Israel, about a third of Israel’s Jewish population were Holocaust survivors,” Stuber said.

As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, their stories will be told by generations to follow.

“I think the memory of the Holocaust really remains central to identity,” Stuber said. “I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”