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Holocaust Memories
MSU Hillel student committee helps plan Michigan's
official Holocaust commemoration.
Dani Gittelman ) jewish@edu writer
n April 11, I had the honor of
attending and giving the keynote
address at the Official State
of Michigan Holocaust Commemoration.
Sponsored by the Michigan Jewish
Conference and the Jewish Federation of
Metropolitan Detroit, more than 200 people
gathered in the Capitol Rotunda in Lansing
to honor the 6 million Jewish victims of the
Holocaust.
Attendees of the ceremony consisted of
Holocaust survivors and their families, leg-
islators, community members, leaders of the
Michigan Jewish community and Michigan
State University students.
Last fall, I became part of a student com-
mittee to help organize the Holocaust com-
memoration. Along with three of my fellow
students, we planned the commemoration
with the help of advisers at the Lester and
Jewell Morris Hillel Jewish Student Center at
MSU and the Michigan Jewish Conference.
Every year, the commemoration is held in
honor of the survivors as well as the 6 mil-
lion Jewish people who lost their lives dur-
ing this dark period in history.
This year marked the first time the event
was planned with the help of a student
committee. As a committee, we personally
chose the theme of the commemoration
to be "memory." The number of Holocaust
survivors is smaller and smaller each year, so
we believe that it is now our job to keep the
memories alive of the people who can't tell
their stories.
As the granddaughter of two Holocaust
0
survivors, I am considered a "3G" (third gen-
eration), and I was asked to write a keynote
speech to read during the ceremony. My
grandmother, Helen Mechlowitz, attended
the ceremony. That I had the honor of stand-
ing up on that podium in front of her and
my family is a feeling I will never forget. My
grandfather, Ira Mechlowitz, passed away in
2003, but I know he would have been proud
of my connection to him and our past as a
Jewish people.
In addition to my work with the
Holocaust commemoration, this year I also
took on the project of transcribing, editing
and hopefully publishing a manuscript that
my grandfather left behind after he died.
This project is built around remembering a
story that cannot be told anymore. I have
made it my job to become my grandfather's
voice.
As people filtered out of the Capitol
Rotunda after the ceremony, I hoped that
the theme of memory impacted them as
much as it had impacted our student com-
mittee. The future, after all, is us. The world
has made a promise of "never again" and
the only way to carry out that promise is
to act on it — tell stories, be involved and
learn everything you can learn so that the
future will bring a generation that considers
the word "genocide" a part of our past. @
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Dani Gittleman of Bloomfield Hills is a
junior at Michigan State University in East
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MSU student committee: Gittleman; freshman Ilana Woronoff
of West Bloomfield; junior Alex Scharg of Bloomfield Hills; and
freshman Nate Strauss of Farmington Hills.
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2300 Haggerty Road, Suite 1110
West Bloomfield, Michigan 48323
JIB
May 23 • 2013
121