Every year one and the same day (after the Jewish calendar) the Jewish community of Dnepropetrovsk gathers in the locality of botanic garden - the place of shooting city Jews by Nazis in 1941. Here now stands a monument executed in a traditional Jewish style - as a reminder to everybody: Holocaust is the tragedy to have touched on everybody irrespective of his nationality and place of residence. The most important (and most difficult) here is to preserve memory about Catastrophe for our future generations. That's why so many children come here every year - from the "Or Avner" Jewish school, Jewish kindergartens, from kheder and makhon. Listening to stories of their grandfathers and grandmothers' about those terrible times children perceive their pain, their feelings.
Children brought up in a revived Jewish community at times fail to understand that far from always Jews have lived as they do now, that there have been hard and horrible times of prosecutions, pogroms and killings. The more valuable for them will be today's life devoid of all this. There is only memory, memory about what has happened. And there are tears in the eyes of not only the old but of the young as well. To all appearances, this is the unity of generations our wise men speak about, the unity of our common roots, common memory. |