Holiday: Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day
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Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial In Kiev, Ukraine
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah. Every year I try to post something relevant to this very sad day, and this year I am sharing photos that I took just two days ago on my first visit to the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial site in Kiev, Ukraine. As always, there are no words to express the horrors of the injustices inflicted upon the Jews in Europe. Standing at the very site of the greatest mass killing of its time, on a hilltop within the city of Kiev, one can barely imagine how roughly 33,000 Jews were brutally murdered over the course of just two days. And yet, it did…
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Why Is The Butterfly A Symbol Of The Holocaust?
The butterfly has become a symbol for the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust and for Holocaust Education, and I did a little research to find the source. What I was truly stunned to discover is that there are three separate sources in which concentration camp victims used the butterfly in their art and poetry. A connection that I haven't seen written anywhere, but may or may not have been in the minds of the artists, at least in the painting above, is that the yellow butterfly can be likened to the yellow Jewish star that Jews were forced to wear on their clothing…….a star however that is not…
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Holocaust Education Project: Labels Do Not Define Us
After a sad day thinking about the Holocaust, and doing a little research as well, I had the idea that one could make a project in which yellow Jewish stars become butterflies, as the butterfly is a symbol that has and is being used to represent the Holocaust and in one case specifially children who perished in the Holocaust. So I cut up a bunch of yellow Jewish stars, only the butterfly idea didn't really become anything, so I decided to take my own advice and do a collage with the stars. As I was making this little collage, an abstract conceptual piece of sorts, I started to reailze that…
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A Somber Collage Of Jewish Stars For Holocaust Remembrance Day
Photo credit: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, here in Israel. I realized today that on this day I generally post a photo, which is a message of sorts, but not really the kind of message that is my forte, namely education thought crafting and creativity. So today, as I personally remember the victims of the Holocaust, which certainly did include relatives of mine who did not flee Europe in the early 1900s as did the families of my grandparents on both sides, I am going to make a small attempt to present some ideas for craft projects that might be appropriate today, or any time…