Students read in remembrance of Holocaust
Decades after the end of the World War II and thousands of miles from its infamous concentration camps, one Dartmouth student has worked tirelessly to make sure the Jewish victims of the Holocaust are never forgotten.
For the past three years, Andrey Dolinko '11 has brought the international day of remembrance for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to the College. Armed with a computer and a microphone, Dolinko and a group of volunteers spent seven hours on the Collis porch reading the names of 6,400 Jewish Holocaust victims, Dolinko said. The names represented "one-tenth of one percent of the number of Jews who were killed," Dolinko said. "This started because my grandfather was a survivor and I decided to organize his family's names," he said.
Celebrated on the anniversary of the day of the Warsaw ghetto uprising in the Jewish calendar, Yom HaShoah — as the Holocaust Remembrance Day is known in Hebrew — invokes the memory of the millions of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, according to Dolinko. A list of the names of victims is complied by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, and distributed around the world to be read in memoriam, Dolinko said. Dolinko said he has organized the event annually since his sophomore year at Dartmouth. He began this year by reaching out to students across campus for names and biographical
information of any of their relatives who perished in the Holocaust, he said.
Thirteen students submitted the names of 161 victims, which were listed on a poster hung up during the memorial, Dolinko said. After the name reading, a short memorial service organized by Saul Zebovitz '11 was held on the Green. Attendees received programs that included the stories of several victims and a series of prayers, according to Zebovitz. Zebovitz said he included "the prayer that is said by mourners when they are mourning loved ones." Zebovitz also included another version of that prayer typically heard only at funerals because the vast majority of Holocaust victims never received a proper burial. "In a sense this is their funeral," he said.