Ridgewood, NJ Interfaith Holocaust Memorial Service: Ridgewood residents of all faiths will join together in prayer in memory of the millions of men, women and children murdered during the Holocaust at Temple Israel & Jewish Community Center in the Village on Sunday, April 8, 2018 at 7:30 pm.
Rabbi David J. Fine, will lead this solemn, annual service, joined by the members of Ridgewood’s Interfaith Council, the pastors, ministers and imam of the village’s multiple faith communities. Rituals from various traditions and the offering of special prayers will be included to mark Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Survivors and relatives of survivors will conclude the Ridgewood, NJ Interfaith Holocaust Memorial Service with a moving candle lighting ceremony.
The featured speaker this year is Ridgewood psychoanalyst Dr. Sylvia Flescher. She will share her experiences as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. Her father, Joachim Flescher, lost his entire family in Poland. Two years ago, she and her husband traveled to Europe on a trip sponsored by the Holocaust Education Foundation. Visiting death camps and Holocaust memorials affected Sylvia in ways she could not have predicted. Upon her return, an unlikely series of events led her to an unexpected and deeply moving discovery.
Dr. Flescher trained in psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center. A graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, she has maintained a private practice first in Manhattan and then in Ridgewood since 1990. Her paper, “Googling for Ghosts” (published in 2010 in Psychoanalytic Review) tells the story of her non-Jewish mother Anna being honored as a Righteous Among the Nations for her role in hiding Sylvia’s father during the Nazi occupation of Rome. Sylvia is proud to have been a member of Temple Israel since 1992.
Special music includes the world premier of Postlude: Anne Frank for choir, soprano solo and harp, by Adam Har-Zvi, the Heimat String Quartet who will perform Fantazie a Fuga, composed by Gideon Klein while he was interned in the Terezin concentration camp, the Village School Chorus and the Interfaith Adult Choir conducted by Dr. Tamara Freeman, Holocaust ethnomusicologist and artistic director for the commemoration.
All are welcome, free of charge.
Located at 475 Grove St. in Ridgewood, New Jersey, Temple Israel & JCC offers two worship alternatives within one community: egalitarian Conservative and Reconstructionist. Service schedules and more information are available at www.synagogue.org.
Find more Bergen County events on the mybergen.com Events Calendar.
