This year marks the 34th anniversary of the global Shoah memorial initiative Unto Every Person There is a Name”. This public recitation of names of Holocaust victims will be held around the world on Yom Hashoah, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes Remembrance Day observed this year on Tuesday, April 18, 2023.

This extremely moving program usually takes place in Atlanta on a Friday close to Yom Hashoah in the rotunda of the Georgia State Capitol Building downtown at 206 Washington Street SW. This public recitation of names of Holocaust victims will be observed this year in Atlanta on Friday, April 28 at the Georgia State Capitol & virtually.More details httpswww.atlantajewishconnector.comunto-every-person-there-is-a-name-2023-remembrance-ceremony (1)

The Achim/Gate City Lodge of B’nai B’rith International invites you to join us and mark Holocaust Remembrance Day either at the Georgia State Capitol or from your homes, offices, and schools. Help us to restore the memory of those murdered during the Holocaust by bringing “Unto Every Person There is a Name” to Atlanta through an in-person gathering at the Capitol or a Zoom virtual webinar on Friday, April 28th from 8:00 am to 11:00 am Live & Virtual at the Capitol and 11:00 am to 3:00 PM Virtual. We invite attendees to register in advance to attend the in-person and virtual reading of the name at https://bit.ly/2023UntoEveryPersonThereIsAName. Individuals who wish to participate as readers of the names should indicate on the online registration or contact Harry Lutz, program chair at harry.lutz.45@gmail.com or 678-485- 8179.  We will provide lists of names or you may read the names of the family you have lost.

The “Unto Every Person There is a Name” ceremony provides the opportunity to remember the victims of the Holocaust, six million Jews, among them one and a half million children as the names of victims are read aloud, they are remembered. The annual recitation of the names of victims is one way of posthumously restoring the victims’ names, of commemorating them as individuals. We seek in this manner to honor the memory of the victims, to grapple with the enormity of the murder, and to combat Holocaust denial and distortion.

Helen Scherrer-Diamond, President of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith lodge commented, “For many on these lists, it is the only time their name will be said aloud as their entire family was murdered or there is no one left to remember them. It is important that the Atlanta community join this global effort to memorialize the six million individuals we lost in the Holocaust.”

The project is coordinated by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in consultation with the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and enjoys the official auspices of the President of the State of Israel, the Hon.Isaac Herzog. Coordinated by Yad Vashem through the efforts of four major Jewish organizations – B’nai B’rith International, Nativ, World Jewish Congress, and World Zionist Organization, “Unto Every Person There is a Name” sets time aside on Yom Hashoah for reading aloud names of the individual lives mercilessly taken by the Nazis. The readings are done in hundreds of Jewish communities around the world. In the U.S., this nationally observed program is organized by B’nai B’rith International, and in Atlanta, it is coordinated by the B’nai B’rith Achim/Gate City Lodge.

Harry Lutz, the local coordinator of this program for many years for the Atlanta B’nai B’rith lodge says, “the Unto Every Person There is a Name remembrance ceremony is always an incredibly moving experience for me, both hearing names being read and reading aloud the names of victims myself. I am constantly picturing in my mind that there are more than SIX MILLION of these names.”

The theme for Holocaust Remembrance Day 2023 announced by the international committee is Jewish Resistance during the Holocaust – Marking 80 Years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Yad Vashem’s online exhibition, “Voices From the Inferno”: Holocaust Survivors Describe the Last Months in the Warsaw Ghetto” brings together excerpts from many hours of video testimony given by the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and former combatants in the uprising. Other aspects of Jewish resistance may be seen in Yad Vashem’s extensive collection of video testimonies by Holocaust survivors.
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As Isaac Herzog, the President of the State of Israel said, “In the smallest of symbolic gestures – gathering to publicly read out the names of real people who perished in agony, robbed of their dignity and of their lives – there is a measure of reclamation of life, a symbolic  act of restoring their humanity, their dignity, their unique, irreplaceable, and tragic story on Earth.”
“Unto Every Person There is a Name” rests on the success of Yad Vashem’s Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project which has identified more than 4,800,000 names of Shoah victims with over 2,750,000 names registered on Pages of Testimony submitted by relatives and others who knew of the victims. Yad Vashem continues its quest to recover all the six million names.
You can assist in the ongoing names collection campaign by downloading and distributing Pages of Testimony, or by submitting them online through the Yad Vashem website: www.yadvashem.org.
Dani Dayan, the Chairman of Yad Vashem, commented, “Sadly, the generation of Shoah survivors is dwindling rapidly. As the bearers of their legacy, we must do everything possible to perpetuate the memory of the Holocaust’s victims. By reciting their names, ages, and places of death, we keep their memory alive and remind ourselves that each man, woman, and child was, and is an entire world.”

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