AOF Activities & Events

April is Holocaust Remembrance Month. As humanists and as humans, we should mark it, and know it: a warning for the future and a caution to ourselves. But can our minds ever encompass a horror so vast?

Over 60 years have passed since the Holocaust. To some the memory is ever present, almost suffocating.  For others it is distant and abstract, ancient history painted in sepia tone. We wish to know and teach the truth of it. But difficult questions continue: What happened? How did it happen? How could it happen? Could it happen again? And what of the Deniers?

We can try to answer ignorance with education, bigotry with understanding, disbelief with evidence. Above all we can remember those who suffered, who fought and who died. Six million Jews murdered, that alone must stagger us, but it was not just Jews: gays, gypsies, the handicapped, atheists, humanists, war resisters, political dissenters too. Many families completely decimated. A generation lost.

It was not the first genocide, nor the last, nor perhaps even the worst. But it reflects them all, staining history's page like a bloody tear.

At this special meeting, the weekend after Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, AOF will be honored to host speaker Elizabeth Igra, president and founder of the Central Valley Holocaust Educators Network (CVHEN). A retired educator, Elizabeth taught at all levels from preschool to graduate school, helped create Sacramento’s Shalom School, and founded the CVHEN after retiring from the Elk Grove Unified School District. She is also a Holocaust survivor. Together with her mother, Liz survived Nazi persecution by escaping from a ghetto in Poland, walking from Poland across Czechoslovakia to Hungary, and hiding there until the end of the war.

Elizabeth has has spoken to people of all ages and interests, from elementary school and college students to rabbis and congregations to professional groups and civic organizations. She shares her story hoping to promote understanding of the Holocaust and tolerance. Join us, and remember.

The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral
purification of our public life, are creating and securing the
conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life.
~ Adolph Hitler, speech to the Reichstag, March 23, 1933