The remembrance was hosted by Campus Ministries. In the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception, the voices of the World Music Choir rang out solemn remembrance. They sang hauntingly beautiful songs of remembrance.
The event to remember Kristallnacht and the lives lost in the Holocaust comes as antisemitic sentiments have been on the rise across the country.
Crystal Sullivan is the Director of Campus Ministry at UD. She spoke briefly about a time when religious hate once drove people to violence, and how those times seem to be coming again.
“In many ways, the chasms and divisions are getting wider again,” she said.
The remembrance event is the university’s way of responding by keeping to their Catholic and Marianist values. Sullivan said that UD’s mission for the common good calls for it to reach out to diverse groups and peoples and help them tell their stories.
But there was another theme central to Wednesday night’s event: legacy, and the importance of younger generations honoring the older one.
Dr. Scott Segalewitz is the Associate Dean of the School of Engineering at UD. He spoke for his father, Ira, who is a Holocaust survivor.
Segalewitz told his father’s story which began in Poland in 1936, just three short years before Hitler would invade the country. In 1941, Ira’s family fled Poland, pushing east into Russia, then the Soviet Union. It was there, up in the frigid Ural Mountains, that Ira and his family would end up in a labor camp.
They wouldn’t make it back to Poland until 1945. By then, the community they left had been decimated by the Holocaust, including much of Ira’s family.
“There were approximately 3.4 million Jews in Poland. After the war, it’s estimated that between 40 [thousand] and 60 thousand survived,” Segalewitz said.
Ira was in attendance for the remembrance event Wednesday night, but he did not speak. Segalewitz said it is important for the next generation to begin to speak up for the survivors and carry on their legacy.
“As much as it pains me to think about it, pretty soon there won’t be any Holocaust survivors around to tell their stories,” Segalewitz said. “So it’s up to the next generations to speak for them.”
He continued, “To paraphrase one of our Jewish prayers of remembrance, ‘As long as the stories of our ancestors live, we too shall live, for they are now a part of us as we remember them.’”
