Allan Appel photo
At Friday's ceremony at Chapel Haven.
Roughly 100 people across the generations gathered — with memorial candles, prayers, and hopes — at Chapel Haven Schleifer Center (CHSC), the residential campus for people with disabilities, in order to “Flick the Switch.”
They did so out on Whalley Avenue Friday to mark the United Nations-recognized International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
And so, on your various travels Monday evening, you may see yellow lights illuminating city halls in New Haven, Milford, North Haven, Orange, and Guilford; Katz’s Deli in Woodbridge; and the Blackstone Library in Branford, and about 20 other locations around town and in the Greater New Haven area.
“Flick the Switch,” or lighting up yellow for Holocaust remembrance — yellow was the color of the badge Nazis forced Jews to wear between 1939 and 1945 as a prelude to the ghettos and gas chambers — is the local effort, now in its second year in New Haven.
It’s organized largely by a volunteer Holocaust survivor community participating in a program originally created in New York State in 2022 to light up bridges, other landmarks, and significant buildings that included Grand Central, Penn Station, and Niagara Falls, to shine a spotlight on the lessons of the Holocaust.
This year in New Haven it will feature 24 locations, said Fay Sheppard, a second-generation survivor, who with Doris Zelensky are the chief organizers, along with CHSC.
Yellow lights will shine at, in addition to the places mentioned above, some six synagogues, Union Station, the Towers senior living development, the Wells Fargo Advisors offices at Long Wharf, the Temple Street Garage, the LAZ parking facilities, and Canal Dock.
The mayor with Fay Sheppard and memorial candle whose Hebrew word means "remember."
“Next year,” said Sheppard gamely of the all-volunteer effort, “we’re going for the bridges.”
The young people from the newly formed CHSC’s Judaism Club starred at the proceedings on Friday with a rendition of the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, which means “the hope,” sung poignantly in Hebrew.
“City Hall is one of the many sites to participate in Flick the Switch,” said Mayor Justin Elicker, who was among many selectmen and other officials present on Friday from participating towns. “And we’re proud of the Jewish community in New Haven who stand not only against anti-Semitism but who reject hate in all its forms in New Haven.”
Another of the speakers, Harriet Schleifer, whose son David has been living productively at CHSC since 2006, said Jan. 27 has been chosen because that’s the date Russian armies liberated Auschwitz, and it’s symbolic of the liberation of all the camps in the Nazis’ network of death factories.
As honorary chair of the CHSC Board and other posts including, most recently, leading the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, she said her two top priorities are deeply connected. Those passions are speaking up on behalf of people who lost most of their families in the Holocaust and also on behalf of people with disabilities.
Even before they targeted Jews, communists, socialists, gay people, and Roma, the Nazis had initiated a eugenics-based eliminationist campaign against people with disabilities.
“The needs we have here at CHSC are universal needs,” said Schleifer. “Today we also commemorate those who survived and we also have eyes for all those in the community, all made in the image of God.”
CHSC Judaism Club member Debbie Margolis (right) and mom Michelle Gavens.
Sheppard gripped her audience by concluding with the unique story of how Denmark’s King Christian X responded to Nazi pressure to turn over Danish Jews to the Nazis. Both the King and the majority of the Danish people stood by their Jewish citizens and were instrumental in saving almost all of them from Nazi persecution and death.
“They all stood together then, as we stand together today,” Sheppard added.