How to mark Yom Hashoah?
At a small, suburban New Jersey synagogue next week, a pair of Holocaust survivors will pray, bar mitzvah children will recite the poem “Butterfly” by a teenage death-camp inmate and a choir will sing the El Maleh Rachamim blessing of God’s compassion. Jeff Marder, a keyboardist for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, also will premiere new music at the unusual April 19 event called “Never Forget” that Beth Haverim, a Reform synagogue in Mahwah, and Ramapo College’s nearby Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies have commissioned to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom Hashoah. “There is a sense that first-hand witnesses to the Shoah are fewer and fewer every year, and it becomes important that we find new ways to remember,” says Beth Haverim’s rabbi, Joel Mosbacher. “Never Forget” joins scores of new productions across the denominational spectrum creating new liturgy to mark Yom Hashoah, which falls this year on April 18. Nationwide, synagogues are staging events featuring candle lightin
