May 5th is observed around the world as Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tallahassee's Temple Israel was the site for the local community service marking the occasion.
Yom HaShoah is the Hebrew term for the observance that recalls the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis during World War II. But the Pacific Theatre also had horrors of its own. Award winning writer and speaker Roslyn Franken told her Temple Israel audience about her parents and how they turned even the worst times into chances to help others.
"And they are role models for all of us that somehow, even through these dark times, you have to persevere. And if this makes us fight even more for the light; the light to take over the darkness."
Franken's mother narrowly escaped death multiple times while being held in Nazi prison camps. Her father was forced to mine coal as a prisoner of war in Japan. He was underground in a mine just outside Nagasaki when that city was destroyed by the Americans' atomic bomb. That fact alone saved his life. Franken's talk was arranged by the Holocaust Education Resource Council.
