This is an archive of prayers composed for, or relevant to, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is an international memorial day on 27 January, the day of the liberation of the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp. The day memorializes the unfathomable horror of the Nazi regime and its collaborators that resulted in the deaths of approximately seventeen million people including the genocide of six million Jews and a quarter million or more Roma. The Nazi atrocities include the killing of nine million Russians (including prisoners of war), 1.8 million Poles, over three-hundred thousands Serbs, a quarter million or more disabled persons, an undetermined number of political prisoners including seventy-thousand so-called asocials (LGBT persons), and nearly two thousand Jehova’s Witnesses. The day was designated by the United Nations General Assembly resolution 60/7 on 1 November 2005 during the 42nd plenary session. The resolution came after a special session was held earlier that year on 24 January 2005 during which the United Nations General Assembly marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the end of the Holocaust. See here, for other Holocaust Memorial Days. If you have composed a prayer or prayer-poem for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, please share it here. Filter resources by Collaborator Name Filter resources by Tag Filter resources by Category Filter resources by Language Filter resources by Date Range
This is the prayer which Rabbi Dr. Leo Baeck had disseminated to Jewish communities throughout Germany to recite on Yom Kippur, 10 October 1935. The German text here is as found in the archival notes of Helmut Grünewald, Ein Judenjunge durfte kein Deutscher sein (Bristol, 1998), pp. 20-21 in the collection of the Leo Baeck Institute. The English translation is as published by Dr. Michael Meyer in Rabbi Leo Baeck: Living a Religious Imperative in Troubled Times (2020), pp. 106-107. . . .
An untitled prayer on behalf of German Jewry under Nazi oppression disseminated in Bombay, likely after Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938). . . .
This prayer for victory and deliverance in the war against Nazi Germany, simply titled “War Prayer,” appears in the Prayer Book of Jewish Members of H.M. Forces (Office of the Chief Rabbi 1940), pp. 16-17. Sections of the prayer were adapted from the prayer on the declaration of war by Rabbi Hertz in 1914 at the outset of World War I. In the preface to the payer book, Rabbi Joseph H. Hertz specifically mentions this prayer, among others, as having been newly revised for this publication. The initial version of the prayer, likely to have been written by Rabbi Hertz, was published by the Office of the Chief Rabbi for a 17 Tammuz service in July 1938. A revision was disseminated after Kristallnacht (9-10 November 1938). This is the third version of the prayer. . . .
There’s a lot of controversy over Yom haShoah as a date. One of the key issues is this: traditionally, the ways Jews mourn communal tragedies is through establishing a fast day. It’s forbidden to fast during the month of Nisan. It’s hard to pick any specific date to commemorate a tragedy as enormous as the Shoah, but one which seems appropriate to me would be 16 Marḥeshvan, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the November Pogrom. This piyyut is a seliḥah for Kristallnacht, to be recited on 16 Marḥeshvan (or 15 Marḥeshvan on years like 5782 where the sixteenth falls on a Thursday). . . .
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