This year as I sat through the service my thoughts began drifting back to the Holocaust memorial in Frankfurt Germany, where I spent a couple of days on my way to Israel. There outside the Borneplatz, the synagogue which was destroyed on kristallnacht, I gasped as I came upon the memorial of over 11000 stone blocks, incorporated into the Frankfurt Jewish cemetary wall, depicting the names of Frankfurt’s Jews, who were murdered. Virtually the entire community was murdered, and the thought raced through my head that if had been a Frankfurt Jew during the Nazi period I would not have had a chance of survival. I contemplated this truth after wandering through the opulent palace where the Frankfurt Rothschild’s had lived (which is now a Jewish Museum run by the municipality of Frankfurt). I contemplated this truth on realizing that many of the founders of Frankfurt’s Goethe University were Jews—Their. contributions to the city, be it to Goethe university or the Clementine Children’s Hospital  had not helped save them one bit during the Nazi period. And the part that made me gasp the most was that when I spent an hour reading the last names of   Frankfurt’s Jews  who were murdered, I recognized so many of them (for example, Klein, or Rosenberg) as I know people with those last names. It was a very unsettling and eerie experience.

Below is the list of people who read out the names of  murdered Jews duing the Holocaust at the ceremony: