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

DATE: MONDAY, April 26, 1993                   TAG: 9304260069
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CODY LOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A SMALL LIGHT FOR SO MANY

Those who watched them being lighted Sunday afternoon, though, knew that their glow was deceptive.

Each light, they understood, represented the human spirit of 1 million Jews whose spark was extinguished by the Nazi Holocaust.

For almost eight hours Sunday, thousands of the victims' names were read outside the entrance to Temple Emanuel, home to Roanoke's congregation of Reform Jews.

As the reading ended Sunday afternoon, about 100 attended an ecumenical service of remembrance inside.

Focusing on events in the Jewish ghetto of Warsaw that was destroyed by the Nazis 50 years ago, the service included readings, comments and music.

And the candles.

Shana Oberlander, the granddaughter of survivors of the Nazi death camps, lighted a candle.

Dr. William Landau, an infantry soldier during the war, lighted a candle.

Carol Yosafat, a teacher, lighted a candle for the teachers who continued to instruct children in the ghetto even as its destruction neared.

Yosafat, who has been at Woodrow Wilson Middle School for 28 years, teaches a unit on the Holocaust coinciding with the week of remembrance for its victims.

"I warn my students that I could cry" during some lessons, she said. "I think it is important for them to understand that it is a moving experience for me as a teacher and a Jew."

Students read the "Diary of Anne Frank" and see a film called "Genocide," which includes captured Nazi film of the death camps.

It's probably a good thing that some of the horrors the film captured aren't too clear, Yosafat said. Yet the graphic descriptions are what students often cannot forget.

"Pictures of the liberation of the death camps" have a particular impact, she said - especially the scenes of British bulldozers pushing piles of bodies that must be buried in huge mass graves.

Yosafat also shows the class her husband's prayer shawl and other "Jewish things" so students who have had no contact with Judaism will understand what they are reading about.

Most of the 13- and 14-year-olds have some notion of the Holocaust's relationship to death, but they often don't connect it specifically to Jews, she said.

Despite the intensity of the subject matter, Yosafat said, parents almost never ask for their children to be excused from the unit.

She acknowledges that some of the lessons are complicated by the fact that the numbers are so huge.

"One million of anything is more than we can comprehend," she said. Six million human dead is "more than the human mind can take in."