Annual Yizkor for Six Million & Local Survivors

For hundreds of years, Jewish tradition has prescribed visits to the graves of loved ones during the Ten Days of Penitence between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

But Six Million Jews, murdered by German Nazis and their collaborators across Europe during World War II, have no gravesites. Only their ashes remained, blown with the winds over time, most with no family having survived to mourn them.

The Memorial to the Six Million at Greenwood Cemetery, which was designed, financed and built in the 1960s by a small group of Holocaust Survivors who settled in Atlanta after the war and founded Eternal Life-Hemshech, has become that gravesite.

This year’s brief community Yizkor observance takes place at 11 a.m., Sunday Sept. 28, rain or shine at The Memorial to the Six Million, Greenwood Cemetery, 1173 Cascade Circle SW, Atlanta 30311. Anyone wanting to say Kaddish for the Six Million is welcome. Rabbi Laurence Rosenthal will officiate.

Here, in a sacred memorial, rest Jewish ashes gathered from the Dachau concentration camp and bars of soap made from Jewish body fat.

At the annual Yizkor service between the holidays, descendants and the community members enter a holy space to hear the names of ancestors and to recite The Kaddish in their memory. By reading aloud the names of Holocaust victims and local survivors no longer with us, the annual Yizkor service perpetuates and blesses their memories.