We've been talking every week, but I feel as though I have a lot to catch you up on!
The first two weeks of May here were full of holidays, both celebratory and somber. On May 2nd, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), we commemorated the tragedies of the Holocaust, remembering the six million Jews and eleven million additional people who were killed because they were the "wrong" ethnicity, suffering from a physical or mental disability, or gay or lesbian in the 1940's. To mark the day, businesses closed early and I had the opportunity to hear a Holocaust survivor speak. His grandchildren opened up their home to host people as their grandpa sat and recalled his experience. He had grown up in Hungary and was eventually sent to a concentration camp in Poland. Miraculously, he was not killed in Poland and made it all the way to Israel, where he married and raised a family. His story was both heartwrenching and uplifting, because it had such a scary beginning and finally an uplifting end with promise for the future. It is sometimes difficult to think about how recently such a traumatic event happened, only 73 years ago in 1945. There are many people alive today who were alive then!
