Emek Sholom Holocaust Memorial

On November 6, 1955, the New American Jewish Club, a group of immigrants and survivors of the Nazi purge of European Jewry, gathered here to unveil the three center sections of a Holocaust memorial, one of the first such memorials in North America. These new citizens of the USA, having settled in Richmond, Virginia, placed here the names of 200 family members who perished in the Holocaust, whose final resting places are forever unknown. On November 7, 1999, two flanking panels were dedicated by new members of the Richmond Jewish community, memorializing their family members who perished in the Holocaust. The Holocaust, perpetrated by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, was the systematic plan of genocide which claimed six million Jewish men, women and children along with millions of other innocent lives. In order to teach the tolerance which must be learned from this nightmare, a memorial service is held at this site each year near the anniversary of The Night of Pogroms, Kristallnacht, the beginning of government sanctioned, mass, open violence against the Jews, November 9-10, 1938.

Virginia · United States