Stowe, Burlington events to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day
April 20, 2022 | By Waterbury Roundabout 
Screen shots from the film “3 Minutes – A Lengthening.”
Events in Stowe and Burlington next week will observe Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Jewish Community of Greater Stowe with the Greater Stowe Interfaith Coalition, Stowe Jewish Film Festival, and Vermont Holocaust Memorial will host the Annual Gathering for Holocaust Remembrance, on Wednesday, April 27, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.
The program’s theme, “saving memories,” will feature prayers, a candle-lighting ceremony, readings, and the film “3 Minutes – A Lengthening.”
Created from a home movie found in an attic in Florida, the film uses footage taken in the late 1930s showing Jewish citizens of a small Polish village on the brink of World War II. Filmmaker Bianca Stiger identifies people and details of this community focusing on its humanity and individuality.
A discussion will follow, facilitated by Stephen Pite, assistant dean of Goddard College and former director of the Masters of Fine Arts in Film at the Vermont College of Fine Art. Author Glenn Kurtz who found the 1930s footage also will join via Zoom.
The in-person gathering will be open to 35 attendees via Zoom. Registration and more information is online at jcogs.org or call 802-253-1800.
In announcing the event, organizer Patti Rubin shared a quotation from Austrian Holocaust survivor and writer Simon Wiesenthal: “For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people. We saw it begin in Germany with Jews, but people from more than twenty other nations were also murdered.”
Burlington professor, Holocaust survivor featured speaker
Born in Lithuania, Henia “Henny” Lewin survived the Holocaust as a child. The award-winning Jewish educator will be the featured speaker at the Fletcher Free Library's Holocaust Remembrance Day event. Photo courtesy the Vermont Holocaust Memorial
On Thursday, April 28, a Holocaust Remembrance Day event at Burlington’s Fletcher Free Library will focus on child victims of the Holocaust and will mark the end of an exhibition at the library titled, “The Courage to Remember: The Holocaust, 1933-1945.”
Supported by a grant to Vermont Holocaust Memorial from Vermont Humanities and by exhibit sponsor Northfield Savings Bank, this annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) tribute focuses on children and lessons from that era that can be taught today.
The free event begins at 7 p.m. and the public is invited to join Vermont descendants of Holocaust survivors, legislators, and interfaith clergy who will light 11 memorial candles in remembrance of the six million Jewish, and five million other victims, murdered by the Nazis throughout Europe during the Holocaust.
Child Holocaust survivor, former University of Vermont faculty member and Burlington resident Henia Lewin will be the keynote speaker. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, historians estimate that one and a half million children perished in the Holocaust and their stories are the least documented. The nonprofit Vermont Holocaust Memorial has an ongoing Leaf Project to memorialize youth who died in the Holocaust.
More information is online at holocaustmemorial-vt.org.