An estimated 60 people attended the shul’s Yellow Candle event on Sunday, May 5, a memorial to Yom Ha Shoah and The Six Million. The event has been growing steadily since Chuck Simon introduced our shul to the project several years ago. Each shul family received a yellow candle with the name of a child affixed to the container. In past years, the event was held on Zoom, each family lighting the candle at home. This year, the program was hybrid, with two special events held live at the shul, and visible at home on Zoom. We met in Andrew Levin Park at 7 for a ceremony to bury names provided by the Yellow Candle Project but unassigned to a candle. Burial provided a resting place for those children lost in the Holocaust. Prayers and a mournful solo by Susan Schrott accompanied the burial, led by Veronica Kaliski, who commented that working with the names of the children was an emotional experience for her. She is head of the Tikkun Olam group that had added a name to each candle and saw that the candles were distributed to every shul family. Veronica Kaliski and Tom Byrne donated a plaque to mark the burial area. At 7:30, the program continued in the sanctuary. Following prayers and remarks by Rabbi Gadi and representatives from three other synagogues — Temple Adas Israel of Sag Harbor, the Jewish Center of the Moriches, and North Fork Reform Synagogue — those gathered in the sanctuary lit candles. In the quiet that followed, Leah Friedman, presented a dramatic reading of a play she had written about a Holocaust experience in her family.

Photos by Tom Byrne and Sara Bloom