SAN DIEGO (Press Release)–On Sunday, April 11, the San Diego Jewish community will commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, with a special program at 1:30 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center in La Jolla, open to the public. The theme of this event will be “Remember, Honor, and Teach: Liberation 65 Years Later.”
Stephen Smith, Executive Director of the Shoah Foundation, will address the group, followed by a premier showing of a short film featuring interviews with three local survivors and U.S. military camp liberators. Mayor Jerry Sanders will also make a few remarks.
The event will recognize and honor World War II veterans, Jewish and non-Jewish, with a military color guard and participation in the candle lighting ceremony. In addition, the Miryam Quartet of San Diego will perform. The entire program will last approximately 90 minutes.
Steven Spielberg created the Shoah Foundation shortly after filming Schindler’s List. His intention was to interview and preserve the memories of as many Holocaust survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust (military liberators and others) as possible. The archive, now containing 52,000 interviews, is permanently housed at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The film to be shown at this year’s event was developed especially for this program and utilizes footage from the Shoah Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
The event will begin promptly at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, April 11, 2010 at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, in the David and Dorothea Garfield Theater, 4126 Executive Drive, La Jolla. The San Diego Holocaust Commemoration, which has been ongoing for more than three decades, is the largest Yom HaShoah program in the United States. Last year more than 650 people packed the theatre at the JCC, with an overflow crowd watching the program on a big screen in the library.
This important commemoration is a collaboration of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Federation of San Diego County, the New Life Club, the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center Jacobs Family Campus, the Agency for Jewish Education, Jewish Family Service, Jewish Community Foundation, and the San Diego Rabbinical Association.
The event is free and open to the public. For more information about the 2010 Community Holocaust Commemoration please contact event chair Michael Bart mikebart@roadrunner.com or Lisa Haney at the UJF, 858-571-3444, lisah@ujfsd.org.
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Preceding provided by United Jewish Federation of San Diego County