On Holocaust Remembrance Day, a solemn honoring of the past

Sean McIntosh ’24 (left) and Anna Betar ’25 (right) prepare to speak to Holocaust survivor Moshe Baran at his home.

There are eight decades and thousands of miles separating the Pittsburgh of today from the horrors of the Holocaust, but Sean McIntosh knows there are close connections too.

Sean, who is set to graduate from Chatham University in 2024 with a major in History, is the great-grandchild of a Holocaust survivor and a volunteer at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, where he helped make a documentary interviewing survivors of the Holocaust for Yom HaShoah, the Jewish holiday also known as Holocaust Remembrance Day.

“Judaism, culturally, you need a community,” he said. “You need people around you. It’s a faith based on community, so I think the greater aspect of that is having so many survivors in one place.”

That place? Pittsburgh, where the Holocaust Center was founded in 1980 with the help of 32 Holocaust Survivors. The center moved to Chatham’s Shadyside Campus in 2021.

The new location brought it closer to the Tree of Life synagogue, which announced last year it would be renovated into a new memorial and antisemitism center following the 2018 mass shooting that occurred there. The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh is also part of the new nonprofit overseeing the renovated Tree of Life.

Yom HaShoah, observed from the evening of April 17 to the evening of April 18 this year, is the cornerstone event of the Holocaust Center.

The remembrance follows the end of Passover and is a day of grieving to remember the victims of the Nazi genocide that killed approximately 6 million Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945.

This year marks the center’s first in-person event for Yom HaShoah since 2020, when they began observations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, said Christina Sahovey ‘11, the operations manager of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.

“It’s really the heart of what we do: Holocaust survivor stories, acknowledging their families,” she said.

Christina said the Yom HaShoah observance, which in years past has drawn as many as 500 guests, is a “solemn, somber” event, like a synagogue service.

This year will see two prayers led by Rabbi Jeffrey Meyers, a survivor of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in 2018. There will also be songs, more prayers, Kadish, readings, and candle lighting by a multigenerational group of descendants of Holocaust survivors.

There will also be a performance by a quartet from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and a list of Holocaust survivors who died after settling in Pittsburgh.

Sean – who is pursuing a minor in Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Studies – said his education at Chatham has not just taught him about the holocaust, but he has learned about other genocides and the events that preceded and followed them.

“It is really eye opening,” he said. “Really, what it teaches you is, as an international community, the ways we need to respond to make sure these events don’t happen again.” He added that it’s allowed him to approach conversations about genocide in meaningful, thoughtful ways.

Some of those conversations, conducted with Holocaust survivors living in Pittsburgh, will be shown at the Holocaust Remembrance Day event on April 18 at Campbell Memorial Chapel. Free tickets are available and the event will also have a virtual stream.

Mick Stinelli is a Writer and Digital Content Specialist at Chatham University. His writing has previously appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 90.5 WESA, and he has a B.A. in Broadcast Production and Media Management from Point Park University. Mick, a native of western Pennsylvania, spends his free time watching movies and playing music.