The Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge (JCOR), the Oak Ridge Unitarian Universalist Church (ORUUC) Choir and JCOR Choir, and area students will participate in the community Holocaust Remembrance Program. It will be held at the Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge from 3 to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 19.

The program will feature a candle lighting ceremony, songs, readings, prayers, and artist Yvonne Dalschen will be the closing speaker.

The city of Oak Ridge has proclaimed April 19 to be Holocaust Remembrance Day for 2026.

Dalschen is a German photographer living in Oak Ridge. She is interested in the history of places, cultural landscapes, official remembrances, and complexities of memory and nostalgia. She grew up in Germany and earned a master’s degree in comparative literature from Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich with a focus on intertextuality and war. She left Munich in 1995 for a postdoc in Australia, thinking she’d come back, but instead has been visiting twice a year ever since.

Dalschen is a German photographer living in Oak Ridge. She is interested in the history of places, cultural landscapes, official remembrances, and complexities of memory and nostalgia. She grew up in Germany and earned a master’s degree in comparative literature from Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich with a focus on intertextuality and war. She left Munich in 1995 for a postdoc in Australia, thinking she’d come back, but instead has been visiting twice a year ever since.

The ORUUC Choir has participated in the Remembrance Program for years. Their choir is currently led by Music Director Leah Disney. She holds a doctorate of music from Boston University and is a lecturer of musicology at UT. This will be her second year leading the choir for the Remembrance Program. The choir will include members of both the local Unitarian church and the Jewish Congregation.

Songs will include “Never Say – Zog Nit Keynmol,” also known as The Partisans’ Song, inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; “Mi Shebeirach,” a prayer for healing; and “Bashana Haba’ah,” a song of hope for the near future.

The legacy of Mira Kimmelman

Mira Kimmelman, a local Holocaust survivor who passed away on April 17, 2019, initiated the Holocaust Remembrance Program many years ago. She was the author of “Echoes From the Holocaust: A Memoir” (1997) and “Life beyond the Holocaust: Memories & Realities” (2005). She spent many years telling about her experiences to various community groups and classes. She was a mainstay of the Jewish and non-Jewish community throughout East Tennessee.

Following her death, a Mira Kimmelman Legacy Committee was established, which consists of her two sons, Benno and Gene Kimmelman, Oak Ridger Ronnie Bogard, and many local Holocaust educators including Julie Kinder-McMillan of Robertsville Middle School, Sheila Morton of Oak Ridge High School, and Darrell Schwartz of Roane County High School. Several on the committee are teaching fellows for the Tennessee Holocaust Commission or Facing History. The committee focuses on three aspects of keeping Mira’s legacy alive – adult education, education for youth in the schools, including the Mira Kimmelman Learning from the Holocaust Contest, and the annual Holocaust Remembrance Program.

To further adult education there is an ongoing Mira Kimmelman Holocaust Study Group held in the weeks prior to the Holocaust Remembrance Program. The class began as an interfaith class with JCOR and the ORUUC and is now offered through the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning (ORICL). It is currently led by Steve Reddick, a retired Jefferson Middle School social studies teacher, Dorothy DeVan, a retired English Language Arts teacher from Jefferson (who taught the Holocaust through literature), and Dale Rosenberg, an experienced Jewish studies educator who arrived in Oak Ridge last year as the Rebbetzin (wife of the rabbi). The study group is designed to explore the events leading up to and including the Holocaust, along with the roles of the international community, religious groups, propaganda, and to encourage personal self-reflection in response to hate and intolerance.

Breakfast Rotary Club co-sponsoring ‘Learning from the Holocaust’ contest

Exciting news this year is that the Mira Kimmelman “Learning From the Holocaust” Contest will be sponsored in partnership with the Oak Ridge Breakfast Rotary Club. The contest will become part of the portfolio of the club’s Peace and Social Justice Committee led by Marian Wildgruber. The club and the committee believe that learning from history to inform our approach to the future is important as the world has become increasingly divided and challenges to peace have impacted our daily lives. Mira is a conscience for all of us to remember the history that humanity must not repeat. D. Ray Smith and Bonnie Carroll will represent Rotary on the Legacy Committee and will participate in the ongoing development and management of the contest.

The contest features both essay and visual arts categories at the middle and high school levels. Students can win cash prizes for studying Mira’s story and sharing their knowledge and insights through either essay or art. New this year is that students must have a sponsoring teacher to facilitate the entry process. Teachers of first-place winners will be recognized with a gift of $250 for the school to purchase resources for teaching the Holocaust. In addition, all teachers who sponsor a winner will be recognized with funds for purchasing resource materials. For more information about the contest, send questions to mklegacycontest@gmail.com.

Kinder-McMillan has been teaching Holocaust content for more than 20 years at Robertsville Middle School and has been instrumental in encouraging her students to participate in the contest. Morton has been teaching a newly established Holocaust class at Oak Ridge High School. Holocaust classes are now also being offered in Roane County by long-time teacher Darrell Schwartz. This is all part of the legacy’s committee efforts to ensure that Mira’s teaching continues through the next generation.

Schwartz is currently a history teacher at Roane County High, teaching Holocaust history, U.S. history, U.S. government, civics and world history. He has taught Holocaust history for more than 15 years, and was previously awarded inSIGHT’s 2022-2023 Naftaly Award for Excellence in Teaching The Holocaust for the state of Florida. He has led two trips to Europe with students and congregations to follow the footsteps of the Holocaust as well as a trip to Israel.

Schwartz possesses Holocaust artifacts, including Jewish patches from camps and ghettos, as well as a late 19th century Holocaust Torah that was rescued from Poland during the Holocaust. He and his wife Charlene have worked on it meticulously to restore and preserve it. This year after the Holocaust Remembrance Program he will be sharing the Torah and artifacts in the lobby.

There will be yellow memorial candles for anyone attending the service to take home and light with their family after the program. The memorial candle is in memory of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The candle is modeled after a traditional Jewish memorial Yahrzeit candle that burns for 24 hours during periods of mourning and on the anniversary of the death of a loved one.

Rabbi Ahuvah Loewenthal, who will lead the closing prayers, has been serving the Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge since 2024. She will also speak about her family’s experience as Holocaust refugees from Germany.

Against a backdrop of increasing hate directed toward Jews and other minority groups, we come together for this Yom HaShoah Program as a community to remember how hate led to the Holocaust in Europe only a few decades ago and to consider what we can do and should do in these difficult times.

The U.S. Congress established a week of remembrance as the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust. Observances and remembrance activities run April 12, the Sunday before Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 14 through the following Sunday, April 19. The Days of Remembrance across the country are meant to memorialize the millions of victims of persecution and mass murder in the Holocaust, and to never forget.

If you prefer to attend the Oak Ridge remembrance virtually, the Zoom link will be available from the JCOR Facebook Page prior to the event. You may also obtain the link for the 2026 Holocaust Remembrance Program by sending an email to events@jcor.info.