Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, April 7, 1991                   TAG: 9104070051
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DIANE WINSTON THE BALTIMORE SUN
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

JEWS TODAY USING OLD AND NEW WAYS TO REMEMBER HOLOCAUST

"The grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, said he had a younger sister who was 5 when his family hid from the Nazis," recalled Greenberg, head of the National Jewish Center for Leadership and Learning. "The sister was too young to hide in the forest, so they placed her in the home of a sympathetic farmer.

"Someone informed on the farmer, and soldiers stormed his house. The girl was killed on the spot. That was 51 years ago. Her name was Clara, which means `light.'

"You may think the killers won, but her brother remembered. Now this new child will carry her name."

Now, more than 50 years since World War II - at a time when many survivors, like Ziv's grandfather, are growing old - there is a mounting urgency to safeguard the memory of the Holocaust. For eons, Jews honored the dead by recalling their good deeds and by naming their children for them. But when 6 million died in the Holocaust - the systematic Nazi extermination of European Jewry from 1933 to 1945 - the list of names was too long, the horror too raw to simply fall back on the old ways.

Today's Jews are making use of the old ways and finding new ones to remember the 6 million. In more than 100 communities nationwide, there are Holocaust monuments, memorials and research centers. There are oral history collections, survivors' groups and Holocaust studies courses. Moreover, there are yearly public commemorations.

Yom Ha'Shoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, is celebrated April 11 worldwide by those who wish to honor the heroes and martyrs of World War II. In the United States, during the federally mandated Days of Remembrance, today through April 14, thousands of commemorations will be held in schools, synagogues and civic centers.

But even as these memorials occur, questions arise: Is the memory of the Holocaust best served by costly museums now under construction in New York, Washington and Los Angeles? Are American Jews in danger of making the Holocaust the focus of their communal life?

"The Holocaust should not overshadow everything else," said Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose works recount memories of the Nazi devastation. "There is a danger of us becoming a morbid generation."

Wiesel helped focus Americans' attention on the Holocaust, as did the televised trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1963 and the Israel's Six Day War in 1967. American Jews began to see the past on a continuum with the present: Yesterday's victims were today's warriors.

By the 1970s, Holocaust studies had been introduced on campuses; Holocaust memorials had sprung up in scores of communities, and a television miniseries, "The Holocaust," had been aired.

The survivors themselves were the strongest advocates for preserving the past.

"The people who have built the centers and who have been the driving force behind them are the survivors," said Rabbi Keith Stern, president-elect of the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies. "In Dallas, it was the survivors who said, `We have a promise to keep.' "

That promise takes on the coloring of the country the survivors call home, noted Judith Miller in her recent book "One by One by One."

"Americans are far removed, morally and geographically, from the scene of the genocide," wrote Miller, a journalist for The New York Times. "While this distance has enabled many American Jews to confront the Holocaust, for many it has become an obsession. It is they who have been most enraged by the efforts to erase or alter the memory of what happened.

"They have a practical stake in keeping memory of the Holocaust alive, as a way of maintaining American support for Israel, and as a talisman in fighting discrimination against themselves and other minorities."