Service of Dedication of The Woodside Park Synagogue Holocaust Memorial
Sunday 22 January 2023
The chilly January weather did not prevent some 350 people attending a service in Woodside Park Synagogue on the Sunday before Holocaust Memorial Day to dedicate its own Holocaust Memorial which depicts angels ascending to a flame from behind a ring of barbed wire.
The guest speaker was survivor, Mrs Mala Tribich MBE, who spoke movingly of her years in the Piotrków ghetto and the Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Theresa Villiers and Alison Moore both spoke and emphasised the importance of remembering the Holocaust and of understanding the circumstances that had led up to it, so that mankind should never again suffer a genocide. Twelve-year-old Talia spoke on twinning her Bat Mitzvah last year under the Yad Vashem programme with Talia Borenshtein, who had perished in the Holocaust aged 6. Six memorial candles were lit in memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust by the 5th North Finchley Guides and the 20th Finchley Scouts. The service concluded with an address by Senior Rabbi Pinchas Hackenbroch, who asked whether the Polish railway signalman, who was only doing his job when he gave the trains carrying Jews to Auschwitz a green signal, bore any responsibility for their subsequent deaths. Should he have changed the signal to red? He concluded that the lesson to be learned is that it was not only the individual who poured the Zyklon into the gas chamber who was guilty of genocide, but that that guilt must be shared by each and every individual who performed each single but vital step that had enabled and led to the final solution.
Following the conclusion of the Dedication, a lovely Tea, generously donated by the Ladies@WPS was greatly enjoyed.