Yom HaShoah Commemorations 2020/5780 on ZOOM

Outgoing Hillel President Annette Waters (’20) reads “Everyone Has a Name” during the ceremony.

Like everywhere across the United States and even in Israel, the COVID-19 crisis profoundly reshaped the ways in which communities and organizations marked this year’s Yom HaShoah. Instead of large public gatherings, open-air readings of the names of the victims, and in-person testimonies by the last survivors, the commemorative practices went on-line. Together with the Temple of the High Country and Appalachian State University’s Hillel, Students Supporting Israel, and AEPi chapters, the Center held a commemoration in the form of a ZOOM meeting on the evening of April 20. Some two dozen members of the campus and Jewish communities in and beyond North Carolina signed in. Participants read names of European Jews murdered by the Germans during the Shoah, recited the Mourner’s Kaddish, and sang the Hatikvah. In light of the growing antisemitism, the Center was committed to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in ways that are safe for everyone.