L’DOR V’DOR — FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
לדור ודור A TISHA B’AV MEMORIAL On Tisha B’Av, we sit with the sorrow of the Jewish people. We mourn the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, the exile of our ancestors, and the calamities that have befallen our people across the generations. The words of Eicha ask us to remember a city once full of people, now sitting alone. In our own time, those ancient words became true again in the Jewish towns of Europe. Homes were emptied. Synagogues were silenced. Families were torn apart. Entire communities were destroyed. My four grandparents came to the United States between 1900 and 1917. For many years, I believed that because they had escaped Europe, my family had not been directly touched by the Holocaust. But they had left family behind. Through years of research, their names returned to us—first twenty, then sixty, then more than two hundred. Today, on Tisha B’Av, we remember 278 men, women, and children from these families who were murdered in the Shoah. They came from Biržai, Ši...