The Ridgefield Clergy Association (RCA) is hosting a service at St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church for Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Memorial Day—on Wednesday, April 23, at 6 p.m. The internationally recognized date for the service corresponds to the 27th day of Nissan on the Hebrew calendar, which marks the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in German-occupied Warsaw. St. Andrew’s is located in Ridgefield at 6 Ivy Hill Road.
The 45-minute service, led by Shir Shalom’s Rabbi David Reiner and Cantor Bryce Megdal, as well as other members of the RCA, remembers the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and five million others who were killed under the Nazi regime for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons. There will be a brief reading after each of the 11 candles is lighted—one candle for every one million victims. One of the readings is based on text by Elie Wiesel, and another is a poem by Hannah Szenesh, a Hungarian Jew who fought Nazis and was killed by Nazi soldiers.
The reading after candle six includes text found on a cellar wall written by a person hiding from the Nazis in Cologne, Germany. “People of all faiths are invited to this moving service,” said The Rev. Beth Anderson, pastor of St. Andrew’s. “Yom HaShoah reminds us where hate can lead. Coming together to remember empowers us to drive out hate and insist on active love.”