Remembrance, hope and a note of warning at Long Grove Holocaust garden

The suburbs today are be an ocean away in space and decades away in time from the Holocaust, but for many worshippers at Congregation Beth Judea in Long Grove, the connections remain strong.

A message of hope for future generations, along with a note of caution about the present, was sent Sunday as the congregation celebrated its renovated Holocaust memorial garden.

Noticing it needed sprucing up, the congregation's men's club first discussed renovating the garden in 2017 The revamped space has a new water feature, new lighting, new plantings and a perpetually burning lamp known as a ner tamid.

"It will give people a place to be contemplative and to sit and remember the Holocaust and to remember those that have died," said Arlington Heights resident Ira Sender, who, along with wife Bonnie, helped make the garden possible with their financial generosity.

Sender's grandfather Sam Rosenbaum and his mother, Ilsa Rosenbaum Sender, escaped from Germany in the late 1930s.

"On Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass, when Nazis carried out a pogrom against Jews in 1938), my grandfather had a store. And they broke all the windows and broke everything inside the store," he said.

Sam was sent for a period of time to a concentration camp.

Congregation member and Buffalo Grove resident Debra Green's father, Harry Stern, escaped Germany in 1937. Her mother, Hilda Pender Stern, along with her parents, Max and Bertha Pender, tried to escape as well, but their ship was forbidden to land in Cuba and the United States. Sent back to Europe, they were interned in the Westerbork and Theresienstadt concentration camps. Both her grandmother and mother survived. Her grandfather died in Auschwitz.

Green said she thinks a lot about her family's history, especially in the light of current events.

"There is clearly a rise of antisemitism. Overt antisemitism," she said.

Senior Rabbi Morris Zimbalist spoke about the "senseless hatred" that led to the deaths of millions of Jews.

"Senseless hatred is on the rise in our country, and we have to do everything that we can to promote more senseless kindness than hatred," he said. "There is no reason to preach hate, to model hate. The Nazis did that. Hitler did that. We need to make sure that that does not happen again."

Dignitaries attending Sunday's event included congressman Brad Schneider, a trustee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.