As we traditionally light a remembrance candle on the anniversary of an immediate family member's death, the FJMC Shoah Yellow Candles™ project requests your community's participation in the program to shed light on what the Holocaust means to us. The Yellow Candle project honors the Six Million Jews who perished in the Holocaust through home and community observance. The Yellow Candle project is intergenerational. In our communities, we have children of survivors of the Holocaust known as second-generation (2Gs), third-generation (3Gs), the grandchildren of survivors, and now we have the fourth-generation great-grandchildren (4Gs). Still, many victims never had known surviving family members. May each of the individual victim's memories be for a blessing.
Why Yellow Candles? By participating in this program, you build the next link in the chain of memory. The flame makes the victims come alive for 24 hours as we acknowledge their names in our homes. This is a tangible way of teaching about the Holocaust. The project is also essential in the fight against Holocaust denial, which has become more visible in recent years.
Nothing has the same power as the words of both survivors and children and grandchildren of such victims and survivors. Your organization can make a difference.
- Rabbi Farber's Bookends Video
- The short film Tikkun
- A poem by Brittany Berger
- The Kempner and Freidenreich Family History
Click Here: BOOKENDS! Video with Rabbi Edwin P. Farber
Please click on the image below to watch the short film Tikkun (click on the film once it loads).
This poem was written by Brittany Berger, after her visit to Majdanek. She is a member of Beth Torah Benny Rok Campus, North Miami Beach, FL. She is the author of 25 and Self-ish.
Hallow souls, flesh and bones, linger by the permanently fading remembrance of the Holocaust. One of many terrors, that’s structure can operate within 48 hours to date. Majdanek. This terrorized facility is surrounded by abundant, blooming nature with residential families living on the shared property line. The weather breathes ice on the skin, until tempering warm upon entering the front steps of the camp. This routine climate change was much more soulful than physical. The textured air bled like a spirit’s forecast of history through acts of nature. From Sun, to a clouded drizzle. Winded rain, to craters of hail. Darkness projected into a visual night over the dome of human ashes. At first, we felt the warmth of the sun. Golden flowers stem through shaded green. Where death died, rebirth sustained. Thousands of Jewish footsteps pace over concreted survival. Torched skin, permanent pain resides intact collected in a dome of dust. Rain is not just rain. Hail is not just hail. It is the suffering, healing, and remembrance of our ancestors’ spirits, on the lands of the largest Jewish cemetery in the world. Yet, there is no one to see. There is no one to touch. There is no one to tell their story. There is only us, as Jews, promising to be the channels to educate this new world of hate, to never stand for this extermination of chaim ever again. To never leave a hallow soul empty ever again. L'chaim, L'chaim, to our Jewish life.
Be the cure, not the cause.
The Kempner and Freidenreich Family History by Irv Kempner from Sharon, MA - A history of the families from the early years in Poland in the early 1900's to recent times.
To make a submission, please send it to info@yellowcandles.org. Please post your yellow candle lighting stories to #YHYellowCandle or Facebook.