Yom HaShoah Ceremony set for April 12

After Passover ends, Yom HaShoah, the International Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust, will be fast approaching. On April 12, at 11 a.m. in Greenwood Cemetery, community members will have the unique opportunity to hear from survivors at the Memorial to the Six Million, one of the first Holocaust memorials in the United States, which has held the annual event since its founding.

“We think this is the first actual three-dimensional walkthrough memorial,” said Karen Edlin of Eternal Life Hemshech, the organization responsible for the memorial’s upkeep. “April 25, 1965, it was dedicated, and that was their first Yom HaShoah program, and we have done it every year since. The only year we did not have one was 2021.”

She also noted that many people who see it from the outside don’t realize it is in fact a walk-able space, intentionally designed by survivor and architect Benjamin Hirsch (z’l) to invoke a sense of narrowing from each of the four entrances.

“To have something like this, like the Holocaust memorial – the first one, arguably, in the country – in Atlanta, speaks volumes of the relationship between the South, Judaism, and the complexities of identities,” said David Mitchell, president of the Atlanta Preservation Center.

Though not Jewish himself, Mitchell has attended more events in the Jewish community since he became involved with the restoration of the memorial in 2024. While Landmark Preservation out of Savannah handled most of the restoration, the Atlanta Preservation Center housed the Memorial’s plaques, which were cleaned there one by one.

The memorial also had its 60-year-old gas lines leading to the eternal flame and the memorial’s iconic six pillars replaced with new copper piping and also had an automatic igniter to light the torches at the pillars’ top installed.

“I think it speaks volumes that the preservation of something that acknowledges the murder of six million people creates love and affection between people of different faiths and backgrounds,” said Mitchell. “It exemplifies why its preservation and why its existence matters more now than ever.”

“For obvious reasons, the survivors put it in the cemetery,” said Edlin, speaking of the location. “There was a lot of discussion, ‘let’s put it in the Jewish Community Center, let’s put it in the synagogue,’ but they said, ‘Atlanta’s going to grow, they’re going to move the community center,’ which they did, it used to be on Peachtree Street. They felt like a cemetery would be forever.”

However, though Eternal Life Hemshech has worked hard on the memorial’s upkeep, the surrounding cemetery has had significant issues.

“There is a point of recognizing when this may no longer be what you should be doing or want to do, and then politely and professionally transitioning,” said Mitchell. “And I think Greenwood is in that state of transition.”

“It affects the memorial and it also affects me personally,” said Edlin. “My parents are buried there, my actual grandmother was dug up in Łódź, Poland, and my mother brought her to Greenwood. When my mother did this, I didn’t really understand. I said, ‘what do you mean you’re going to dig your mother up?’ She died when my mother was five years old. She hardly remembered her and it was before the war. She said, ‘who’s going to take care of the grave. There’s no family left, there’s nobody there, there’s nobody in Łódź, Poland.’ And then I went to Łódź, Poland and I understood.”

As for the event itself on April 12, there will be a powerful opportunity for community members to better understand that sense themselves.

“For this Yom HaShoah, we’re going to be doing the same thing we did last year – since we are getting very close to not having any more survivor speakers – we’ll be having around seven or eight survivor speakers. There’ll be more survivors in the audience, some of them choose not to speak,” said Edlin. “We used to have dedicated speakers and then we moved on and we would have a (single) survivor tell their personal story. But we recognize that we are getting to the tail end of the survivors. It’s so important to hear it directly from a survivor because, first of all, we’re in 2026. We’re getting close – we’re not there yet – but we’re getting close to ‘wow, WWII was close to 100 years ago.’ To someone who is a teenager, 20-year-old, 30-year-old, that’s ancient history.

“Being raised in the 80s, I’m part of that generation where WWII has this very significant thing, and the Holocaust is a big part of that,” said Mitchell. “What happened there, how these people were murdered, all these things is kind of a defined component. This isn’t political, this is something that happened, and we should not forget.”

“I think it just serves as a reminder when hate does arrive,” said Edlin. “It can happen anywhere at any time.”