Yom Hashoah at Maccabi
Once again, the #justlikeyou Yom Hashoah campaign will be running this year, reminding Maccabi AJAX players that #justlikeyou there were many people their age who loved their sport but were deprived that right because of the Holocaust.
This week Maccabi Victoria and the Melbourne Holocaust Museum (MHM) are commemorating Yom Hashoah with their annual #justlikeyou initiative.
The #justlikeyou Yom Hashoah commemorations have been running for eight years. The campaign reminds Maccabi AJAX players that #justlikeyou there were many people their age who loved their sport but were deprived that right because of the Holocaust.
This Saturday, April 22, before the AJAX Football Club game at Princes Park there will be a ceremony to honour the victims of the Holocaust and to commemorate Yom Hashoah. There will be 14 Holocaust survivors in attendance for the ceremony.
The initiative is endorsed by Australian Olympian Jemima Montag who is a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors Richard and Judith Montag and will be standing alongside the survivors this weekend.
Board director at the MHM and #justlikeyou organiser Mel Raleigh told The AJN, “As each year passes and and there are fewer voices to tell their stories we are extremely privileged to stand with so many Melbourne Holocaust survivors and commemorate Yom Hashoah.”
“Some of these survivors were thrown out of their sporting clubs in their home towns because they were Jewish. It’s an honour to have them stand with the Jewish players of the AJAX FC and commemorate.”
Co-president of the MHM Sue Hampel said, “MHM is proud to support this important initiative that perpetuates the memory of those Jewish sporting heroes who perished during the Holocaust.”
Meanwhile in Sydney this week close to 2000 people attended the two major Yom Hashoah commemoration events, with famed author Thomas Keneally, 87, the keynote speaker at the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies communal commemoration event.
Keneally, who won the 1982 Booker Prize for Schindler’s Ark, told the enthralled audience about how Poldek Pfefferberg convinced him to write the book, which Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was later based on.
Pfefferberg was a Polish immigrant whose life was saved by Oskar Schindler and with whom Keneally had a chance meeting while in Los Angeles.
“The Pfefferbergs are responsible for making me write Schindler when I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing,” Keneally said.
In the audience was Yvonne Korn, whose parents, grandmother, great-uncle and aunt were saved by Schindler. She, along with several of her family members, took to the stage to honour Keneally for telling Schindler’s story.
The Maccabi/MHM ceremony will take place between 1.30-2pm on Oval 1, Princes Park, Dover Street, Caulfield South, just prior to the Jackas’ match versus Old Trinity.
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