Students mark 'Shoah' with talk, campus vigil

Students gathered on College Green last night holding white candles and wearing yellow stars similar to the ones Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. The difference was that the stars this time read "Never Again." In commemoration of Yom Hashoah -- Holocaust Remembrance Day -- the vigil, which began at sundown yesterday, will continue until sundown tonight. During that time, students and faculty members will continuously read the names and ages of Holocaust victims for the purpose of remembrance and future prevention. "Remembering the people who died in the Holocaust may prevent a similar event from happening again," said Ari Gershman, a College freshman. "Every name read here was a real person." The list of names, however, will not be close to complete. "In 24 hours, not even half of the names of those who died will be read," said Michael Berenbaum, the speaker who began yesterday's ongoing event. Berenbaum delivered his speech, "Preserving the Legacy of the Holocaust into the 21st Century," before a crowd of about 100 students in Logan Hall before the vigil. Berenbaum spoke about the importance of remembering the Holocaust. Referring to the current attempt of NATO to end the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, he claimed that "the force of memory has made this Yom Hashoah different from others." "The difference between Kosovo and the Holocaust is that today atrocity is taking place and the world cares," Berenbaum said. "That is the greatest achievement the Jewish community has made in preserving the memory of the Holocaust." Berenbaum is in the business of memory preservation as the president and chief executive officer of movie director Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, an enterprise trying to videotape all Holocaust survivors who want to tell their stories. The goal of the foundation is to ensure that future generations will be able to hear firsthand accounts of WWII from these primary sources. To date, 50,200 survivors have given 115,000 hours of testimony on tape. When finished, the videos will be distributed for educational purposes. In addition, the foundation produced James Moll's 1998 film The Last Days -- consisting of video testimonies of Hungarian Holocaust survivors -- which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Following Berenbaum's speech, about half of the audience attended the beginning ceremony for the candlelight vigil. Many more students were expected to attend. "Kids will be coming out all night long," said Tamara Kushnir, a College sophomore and co-chairperson of the Holocaust Education Committee that sponsored the event. And though the crowd quickly diminished as the name-reading began, students walking by the Green and sitting on the steps of Van Pelt Library turned to listen to the names of those who died. College sophomore Atara Margolies, the other co-chairperson of the committee, described the effect the name-reading has on students. "Last year when we did this, people came up to me and said how pervasive the sound of the names is across campus," she said. "It really affects people. It really echoes."