Zachor, Remember

We know the importance of remembering.  It is a clear Jewish value to remember Shabbat, to remember our ancestors, to remember not to remember our enemies, and, of course, to remember the exodus from Egypt.  In the Torah, we are commanded seven times to remember events in our history.    We are even told to remember them each day in our liturgy. Two of them relate to the leaving of Egypt and one of those occurs in our parsha this week, Parshat Bo.  "And Moses said to the nation: 'Remember [zachor] this day, when you went out from Egypt'"  

Remembering doesn’t mean just mentioning that something happened.  It means to learn about it, to discuss it, to work toward making sure we learn from it.  On Passover, we have a seder to discuss each part of the experience of the journey from slavery to freedom.  

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  Instituted by the United Nations on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism. 

It is hard to believe there are still many people who do not know what happened to their family members during the Holocaust.  We have, however, found a new way to remember and to perhaps find some.  From Numbers to Names is a project that takes a photo uploaded by a visitor to the website and uses artificial intelligence to perform facial recognition and identify 10 images that are similar to the face in the photo uploaded.  It will search about 34,000 photos with about 170,000 faces in a couple of seconds.  This project is giving the nameless in these thousands of pictures of groups of people, back their names.  It also can allow survivors and their families to find extended family, with whom they lost touch during the war.

In a way, it means that we are not only remembering those who lost their life, renewed connections to the living world and making their memory a blessing for even more people to remember.

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Beatrice Himes                                  Mother of Susan Pross

Rachelle Herzog                                Wife of Herb Herzog

                                                                Mother of Eileen Kanter

Sondra Morgenstern                      Mother of Lloyd Morgenstern

                                                                Grandmother of Lisa Weinberger

Miriam Yunger                                  Mother of Adele Yunger

Rosa Pressman Richelson             Great Grandmother of Brian Pearlman

                                                               Great Grandmother of David Pearlman

Ruth Lavine                                        Mother of Harriet Chesler

Joseph Closner                                 Uncle of Karen Closner

Beth Rudowsky                                 Daughter of Jack Rudowsky

Lorna Michaelson                            Friend of Deborah Greenberg

Rita Lieber                                         Mother of Steven Lieber

Minnie Borden                                  Aunt of Alan Borden

Elaine Sachs                                        Mother of Judith Sachs

Joel Dolinsky                                      Father of Karen Borden

Samuel Zaritt                                      Father of David Zaritt

Geraldine Miele                                Mother of Benjamin Miele

Carol Ann Citrin                                 Sister of Paul Citrin

Joseph Weisman                              Father of S. Gilbert Weisman 

Weekly Talmud Study with Rabbi Blatt.

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Saturday, January 28 at 8:30am

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