By Abbey Wilson

Running late on Wednesday, I hurried to the Holocaust memorial on Congress Street. It was Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

An annual gathering there drew a small crowd, mainly just a few students from Hillel groups from Suffolk, Emerson College, and Simmons College, as well as their respective Hillel directors.

We all stood in a circle, reading poems and prayers, such as the Mourner’s Kaddish. We lit six candles, for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, or as it’s known in Hebrew, Shoah.

The commemoration was a solemn occasion, and the bite that had settled in the air, the fading remnants of winter, felt appropriate.

The tops of two slabs of rock that are inscribed with ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’ were covered in pebbles, something that is also done on graves in Judaism.

Though small, the gathering was important as it emphasized that although significantly smaller, the Jewish community is still very much alive and active even decades after a genocide.