Leaders from Los Angeles’ Jewish and Israel communities came
together to celebrate Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day for
its fallen soldiers and victims of terror, on April 14 at
Stephen S. Wise Temple in Bel Air. This week, Jews around the
world observed Holocaust Remembrance Day. This day ought to be
universally observed, because the lessons of the Holocaust are
universal. Here are some of them: Spring came exceptionally late
to southern Poland this year, the patches of snow along the
railway track into the former Birkenau concentration camp a
reminder that winter had begun to loosen its grip just two days
earlier. In what was anything but a typical Yom HaShoah
assemblage, more than 300 people — including two rabbis, a
Methodist preacher, a Catholic priest and a U.S. congressman —
packed into Temple Ramat Zion in Northridge on April 7 for an
interdenominational observance titled “Remembering the Past,
Securing the Future.” Ori Rabinovitch, a fourth-grader at
Harkham Hillel Hebrew Academy, remembers how h