A Holocaust remembrance

For many Five Towns residents, the Holocaust is much more than a dusty memory on the shelf of history. It’s a living, breathing series of events that must be remembered.

“The message of Jewish hope and survival is something that has to be passed down from generation to generation,” said Dana Frenkel, a lifelong Woodmere resident. “It is also important for the younger generations, who may not be as closely connected to the events of the Shoah, to never forget the atrocities that were committed in the Holocaust.”

In Hebrew, the word shoah has meant destruction since the Middle Ages. In the 1940s, it became the standard term for the Holocaust, in which 13 million people were exterminated by Nazi Germany, including 6 million Jews — one-third of all the Jews in the world at the time.

Frenkel and Nathaniel Rogoff, also of Woodmere, organized the annual Holocaust remembrance memorial service, to be hosted by Congregation Beth Sholom, at 390 Broadway in Lawrence, on May 4 at 7:30 p.m. That date is recognized in the U.S. as Holocaust Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when the inhabitants of the largest such community under Nazi rule battled against deportation to concentration camps for nearly a month before the revolt was crushed.

The memorial service is expected to draw more than 1,000 people, including congregants from 24 area synagogues. Longtime Woodmere resident Reuben Levine’s mother, Rachel “Chelly” Slagter, a Holocaust survivor and a lecturer and docent at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, a Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum, will be the keynote speaker. Jordana Mastour, a seventh-grader at the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, will present fourth-generation reflections, and the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach’s fifth-grade choir, under the direction of Sandy Shmuley, will perform.

Frenkel and Rogoff began chairing the event in 2013. Frenkel’s father was a longtime committee member, and she has attended the memorial service for years. “All four of my grandparents were Holocaust survivors,” she said. “The importance of remembering the Shoah was instilled in me by my parents throughout my childhood.”

Rogoff’s grandparents, who did not feel the full brunt of the Holocaust, had several close family friends who survived Auschwitz, one of the Nazi concentration camps. Those relationships made an impact, he said: “It is imperative for the community to join together to remember the holy souls who perished in the Shoah, as well as honor the survivors.”

The program will also include video testimony from a Holocaust survivor who recounts the story of Le Chambon, a French town populated by Protestants that organized to shelter more than 5,000 Jewish people.

Slagter was born on April 3, 1940, in Apeldoorn, Holland, the daughter of Rabbi Lion and Rebecca Slagter. Rachel had a sister, Chaja, and a brother, Samuel. In 1943, the family was forced into the Amsterdam ghetto. They were spared from forced transport to a concentration camp after German soldiers failed to search the attic where they were living, and her parents sent the children to institutions before going into hiding.

Rachel and Chaja were sent to a deportation center, where they were rescued by a Dutch Christian. The sisters were then sent to separate foster homes. Rachel lived with 16 different families. She spent the most time with the Van der Veers in the town of Stein, Holland, and she recalls that the family made her feel as if she were one of them.

Samuel went to a nunnery, where he remained through the duration of the war. Rabbi Slagter and his wife were eventually deported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, and Rebecca died there. When the war ended, Rabbi Slagter located his children and returned to Apeldoorn. Rachel left home at 17 to study social work at a school in Amsterdam, and moved to Israel in 1962.

“I was hidden for two years by some very brave Dutch people, and transported to them by a young man who saved thirty-three Jewish children when he was 18-years-old,” Rachel wrote for the Human Element Project. “My wish for the future is that our children remember these proud, religious, respectful God-fearing families, and their children should do the same.”