In spaces scattered throughout Beth El Synagogue on Wednesday evening, small groups gathered to hear the stories – heartbreaking and hopeful – of how their families survived the Holocaust.
Zikaron B’Salon – Hebrew for “remembrance in the living room” – is an Israeli tradition launched in 2011 to mark Yom HaShoah through intimate conversations in homes and communal spaces. This year it was added to the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas’ annual Yom HaShoah community event, as part of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It was the first time the JCRC offered the experience preceding the community commemoration.
Meira Besikof, who works for the JCRC with the Holocaust education program and speaker’s bureau, said that as she checked out the different spaces, she saw participants who were engaged in what the speakers were saying, and asking good questions.
Susie Greenberg, the director of Holocaust education at the JCRC, said that the zikaron b’salon was a unifying experience.
“They didn’t feel like somebody who was just watching a presentation; they felt like they were engaged and there was participation, and that was our hope,” Greenberg said. “The intention of these is to create an intimate environment where there is discussion, conversation, emotion, and experience. It’s a different thing [from larger community or school presentations], and I think we were successful with it.”
Allen Kuperman and one of his children, Lisa Aronauer, co-led the presentation talking about Kuperman’s parents, aunts and uncles surviving the Holocaust. Aronauer is new to the JCRC’s speakers’ bureau, where the descendants of Holocaust survivors go to school and speak to classes about their family’s experiences. She said she was inspired by her father, who has been going to classrooms for several years.
“At some point [my dad] goes away in the winter for three months, and the people that are telling these stories, that are second generation [survivors] like him are doing the same thing, so they’re not around to tell the stories,” she said. She spoke to her first group at Benilde-St. Margaret last week.
“It’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” she said. “My dad has been inspirational to me on the importance of it.”
Said Kuperman: “As a parent, you can have no greater joy than to do something with your kids, whatever it is. And to do something like this that’s so important to me…is so fulfilling. It’s completing the circle that you don’t even think about. It just happens and you have a great deal of gratitude for it. That’s what I feel.”
Aronauer talked about how, as the grandchild of survivors, how her grandparents were role models for her in how they were “actively Jewish.”
“They came from a place where they were persecuted for being Jewish, but they didn’t give that up, and it was part of who they were, always, through their entire lives,” she said. “They really instilled that in me. You can see through the stories that they put family first and they supported each other through everything they went through.”
Greenberg and Besikof said that 150 people registered to attend a Zikaron B’Salon session – the maximum they could have – and had started a waitlist. Nearly 700 people attended the full commemoration in the main sanctuary at Beth El or watched the livestream of the event. Only a few of the Zikaron B’Salon hosts are regulars on the speakers’ bureau.
“Because they’re sharing such a personal story, that kind of vulnerability comes out and lends itself to people being comfortable asking questions and sharing feelings,” Besikof said. “Whether they are veteran speakers or not, they know their family story, and it’s a very personal and important thing they want to share.”
Orono teacher awarded
Jared Shogren, a history teacher at Orono Middle School, was announced as the winner of the Leo Weiss Courage to Teach Award, which the JCRC gives each year at the Yom Ha’Shoah event to a Minnesota educator who goes beyond the requirements of the curriculum to teach and inspire young people about the lessons of the Holocaust.
Shogren, who has been teaching for 22 years, said in the early years he didn’t appreciate the significance of people understanding the “true atrocities” of the Holocaust.
“It’s grown into a more robust understanding of not just teaching about the Holocaust, but the development of the rise of Nazism and the conditions that allow Nazism to rise, and the history of antisemitism going back prior to the 1930s,” he said.
Since 2017, Shogren has been able to bring speakers from the JCRC into his classroom to help drive home the lessons.
“It’s becoming more and more significant, just the idea of identifying hate, and hoping to get people to understand, how do you avoid this from happening again,” he said.
Shogren said that understanding context is important for his students to understand as they learn about the events of the Holocaust.
“To know a setting, to understand a setting, I think you need to be able to identify similarities between present day or in the future, and what has happened in the past,” he said. “Asking the question ‘How does somebody like Hitler rise to power?’ and being able to track that? And it’s not for me to tell them; it’s for kids to discover this and think critically about it, because if they’re not doing the thinking around it and we’re telling them all the answers, they’re not going to be doing the critical thinking when it actually truly matters.”
