Around 15 students and members of Hillel at UCI participated in an annual walk for Yom HaShoah, Israel’s internationally recognized Holocaust Remembrance Day, on April 14. The event began at 12:30 p.m., where participants began their walk around Aldrich Park at the Student Center Starbucks.
Participants wore white, held Israeli flags and signs reading “NEVER FORGET NEVER AGAIN!” and “TODAY WE REMEMBER.” The event corresponds with the Hebrew calendar, and was created to remember the lives lost to the Holocaust as well as to commemorate the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The uprising happened on April 19, 1943, at the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, where German troops invaded to deport Jewish inhabitants. These efforts were resisted by local residents, resulting in “the largest uprising by Jews during World War II.”
After meeting at the Student Center Starbucks, participants began walking towards the Humanities Center in silence. The group then headed towards Aldrich Park after passing McGaugh and Rowland Halls, where they continued walking silently until they stopped under a tree at the park and formed a circle to share their experiences and thoughts about Yom HaShoah.
“Just thinking about the perseverance of our community and I’ll say that we call today Yom HaShoah, but also Yom HaShoah V’ha-g’vurah, with Vha-gvurah meaning strength,” Rabbi and UCI Lecturer Daniel Levine said in the circle. “It’s not just a day of reflecting on sadness, but it’s also a day of, in some way, being thankful and projecting a little bit the fact that we didn’t come out feeble and sad.”
According to Temple Bethel, Yom HaShoah V’ha-g’vurah is the official and Hebrew name for Holocaust Remembrance Day, and also translates to Heroism Day. The intention behind the full name is to emphasize Jewish resistance against the Nazi’s during the Holocaust.
Others talked about their family members who experienced the Holocaust and how they tried to find more information about them.
“I’m trying to look for stuff, trying to see what they left behind, but most is lost and it’s really hard to know that half of your family went through the worst but you don’t really know what exactly happened,” a participant shared in the circle.
After members shared their thoughts on Yom HaShoah and the Holocaust, the group followed a prayer led by Rabbi Levine and sang together.
“The prayer was the Mourner’s Kaddish,” a UCI Hillel member, who requested anonymity, said to New University. “It’s a prayer you do to remember the dead and for Yom HaShoah, which is national Holocaust Remembrance Day. The idea is to remember the 6 million Jews that died during the Holocaust and to mourn their deaths.”
After the prayer, the group headed towards the flagpoles and back to the Starbucks at the Student Center.
While walking, the group passed by the UCI Muslim Student Union’s Anti-Zionism Week wall, where a booth and walls of paintings and drawings were erected in front of Langson Library and Gateway Center. A person yelled, “Israel is a settler-colonial project, and killed over 400,000 Muslims,” to the passing participants of the Yom HaShoah walk.
When asked what Yom HaShoah means to them, the anonymous UCI Hillel member shared how a part of their family’s history on their dad’s side was lost because of the Holocaust.
“There is family history that is completely erased that I will never know, because not everybody from my grandpa’s side of the family and on my dad’s side made it to America and made it successfully out of the Holocaust,” the member said. “So there’s a large amount of family history there.”
UCI Hillel will be hosting Israel Week starting April 20, with more information about their planned events on their Instagram page.
Skylar Paxton is the 2025-2026 Editor in Chief. She can be reached at paxtons@uci.edu.
