Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophe. It is the term used to describe the catastrophic destruction of 6 million European Jews between 1938 and 1945. Each year, Yom HaShoah is the day set aside to remember those who suffered, those who fought, those who perished and those who survived.

Savannah’s observance of Yom HaShoah will take place Wednesday, April 23rd at the Jewish Educational Alliance.

Prior to the Yom HaShoah observance, the Savannah Jewish Federation sponsored the annual The Sherry Dolgoff Holocaust Art & Writing Contest for Chatham County middle and high school students. The entries are exhibited in the Jewish Educational Alliance (JEA) Art Gallery throughout the month of April.  Art and Writing contest winners will be recognized during the evening program.

The Day of Remembrance observance will begin at 9:00 am in the JEA front lobby with the Reading of the Names. The Reading of the Names will take place from 9:00am-5:30pm on April 23rd and from 9:00am-9:00pm on April 24th. During this time, community members take 15-minute shifts to read the names of the children who perished in the Holocaust and their memories honored. 

This year’s program will include the first ever public archival exhibit of the US State Department Apology to the Jewish refugees of the ocean liner, SS St. Louis. The Apology was made to atone for the US refusal to grant safe haven to the 907 passengers aboard the SS St. Louis who sought asylum when they were off the coast of Miami in early June 1939.

The State Department “Admission of Wrongdoing” was made on September 24, 2012 and given by current outgoing CIA Director William Burns, who was then Deputy Secretary of State, serving under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  A delegation of 14 surviving passengers were present along with State Department Foreign Service officers and ambassadors and representatives from Belgium, The Netherlands, France and the UK. 

The SS St. Louis was the Jewish refugee ship that left Hamburg, Germany on May 13, 1939.  The 937 mostly Jewish passengers were bound for Havana, Cuba, where they sought safe haven from Nazi persecution. After arriving in Havana on May 27, 1939, the Cuban government refused to allow the passengers to disembark and on June 2, President Frederico Bru ordered the ship out of Cuban territorial waters. 

The ship’s captain, Gustav Schroeder, turned the ocean liner towards the US and on June 3, the SS St. Louis entered US territorial waters off the coast of Miami, Florida, in sight of the city lights and palm trees. The passengers hoped that the US Government and President Franklin D Roosevelt would grant them safe haven.  The United States refused the desperate pleas of the passengers and the ship was forced to return to Europe where 254 ultimately perished during the Holocaust.

The event became a symbol of world’s indifference to the plight of European Jews suffering under the Nazi regime and sent a clear message to Adolf Hitler that the European Jewish community was expendable.  The SS St. Louis incident became one of the most tragic impactful events in Holocaust history.

The SS St. Louis Archival Exhibit will feature SS St. Louis passenger eyewitness accounts of the transatlantic voyage and life aboard the ocean liner on the way to Havana, dramatic and tearful passenger accounts of being turned away by the Cuban and US governments and the frightful prospects of having to return to Germany and face death and torture in the concentration camps, video excerpts from the American and Canadian apologies to the delegations of SS St. Louis passengers that attended the ceremonies in Washington, DC (September 24, 2012) and Ottawa, Canada (November 7, 2018), video segment of The Trial of Franklin D Roosevelt that was performed as part of the State Department Apology Ceremony.  The play explores the political motivations of FDR in refusing to assist the Jewish refugees during the prewar and wartime period, live Zoom engagement with surviving SS St. Louis passengers who will relate their emotional responses to the US and Canadian apologies, commemorative ceremony for Yom HaShoah and the 86th Anniversary with a Proclamation of Remembrance presented to Mayor Van Johnson, and a tour of the exhibit with creator and curator, Robert M Krakow, Executive Director of the SS St. Louis Legacy Foundation.

The exhibit will remain open to the public from 10:00am-4:00pm at the JEA on April 24th and 25^th with SS St. Louis Legacy Foundation Executive Director, Robert Krakow to give tours.

The Yom HaShoah Program is free and open to the public. People from all faiths are invited to attend.