The Holocaust Remembrance Coalition commemorated the Holocaust Monday during a 24-hour vigil on Library Mall by reading the names of the 6 million Jews who perished during the Holocaust. The reading of the names, conducted by students and volunteers, began at 11 a.m. with a brief ceremony and will continue through Tuesday.
The readings were conducted in front of Hillel, 611 Langdon St., last year, however the HRC felt the vigil would be more effective in Library Mall this year.
It really is best to have it here just because you get so much more traffic coming through—students and passersby who will not know anything about what's going on,\ said Maggie Wunnenberg, a UW-Madison graduate student and HRC coordinator. ""The opportunities for education are a lot more open.""
Students sit in a wooden cage surrounded in barbed wire and posters with pictures from the Holocaust for 15-minute time slots. Alongside the wooden cage are also tables highlighting the genocide currently taking place in Sudan and Darfur.
UW-Madison junior Shana Kass said she feels it is important to have other genocide displays alongside the Holocaust.
""What happened 40 years ago that we all look down upon is actually happening right now and a lot of people don't recognize that and don't take it seriously enough,"" Kass said.
Rabbi Andrea Steinberger, who ran the ceremony, emphasized how understanding the history of genocide allows students to take a stance against it.
""It's important for students to learn about history and not to distance themselves from it and not to say, ‘I don't relate because it wasn't my people or it wasn't when I was alive,'"" Steinberger said. ""It's not just remembering something that happened 50 years ago; it's important to learn about it so that we can continue to be active citizens and not just of a local place but of the world and understand it as crimes of humanity.""
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