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By Jennifer McIntosh | Apr 25, 2011 – 1:07 PM

Jewish community remembers with new glass memorial

Nepean resident honours victims of holocaust with artwork

This year a new glass memorial will light the way to honour the millions who suffered and died during the Holocaust.
Nepean resident and glass artist, Oded Ravek said he was honoured to be selected to make a glass memorial candle holder for the event.

The Jewish Federation of Ottawa holds Yom HaShoah, a Holocaust commemoration at the Jewish Community Centre every year. At the end of the ceremony, survivors are selected to light candles, honouring those whose lives were lost.

“The old candelabra we had was made of iron and was quite bulky,” Mina Cohn, chair of the JFO’s Shoah committee, said. “Our survivors are getting older and it was cumbersome for them to be able to light it, so we looked at having a new one constructed.”

Cohn said the committee interviewed six artists before they selected Ravek.

Now, the piece is all but completed and will be moved to the Jewish Community Centre just before the May 1 ceremony.

“We are very pleased with it,” Cohn said.

Ravek and his wife Pamela are co-owners of OR DESIGN glassworks which offers one-of-a-kind, custom stained-glass artwork using doors, windows, cabinets and mirrors. They also create a variety of colourful kiln-made pieces with fused glass.

But for Ravek this was more than just a commission.

Ravek’s parents live in Israel and were both survivors, so the topic hits close to home.

He remembers one trip to the Butchart Gardens in Victoria.

“It was a great day and the sun was shining and the flowers were so beautiful, but then we came upon some smoke stacks that reminded my mother of Auschwitz and she started crying,” Ravek said. “My sister and I had a good childhood, but we could sometimes sense our parents’ sadness.”

Like the numbered tattoos on their arms, Ravek said that the horrific memories have left a life-long scar on his parents.

Ravek said he wished that his parents could have made the trip from Israel for the ceremony, but at their age they worried about the travel.

One of Pamela and Oded’s daughters, Ariela was the first in Ottawa to take part in a “twinning” program offered by the Holocaust Centre of Toronto in which the young person’s Bar or Bat Mitzvah also honours one of the 1.5 million Jewish children under the age of 16 who were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Ariela’s Bat Mitzvah twin was Livia (Libusha) Jozefovicova, her grandmother’s cousin.

To remember those who were lost and those who suffered, the theme of this year’s commemoration is “Righteous Among Nations,” to honour those non-Jewish families who offered shelter or aid and risked their own lives.

Cohn said the committee meets monthly to discuss the commemoration and Holocaust Education Week. Workshops and speakers are already planned for the community at large during the education week in November.

“The candle will be lit by survivors who were rescued in some way,” she said.

The speaker at this year’s event will be Ada Wynston.

Winston was just six years old when she and 231 Dutch Jewish children were rescued by the Dutch underground and hidden by Dutch Reformed Christian families for three years.

Wynston’s mother and 72 members of her extended family were murdered.

With his design, Ravek hopes to remember and honour them.

The memorial candle holder sits on a 61 by 122 centimeter table, which is black with subtle flames and has the Hebrew word “zachor” which means remember.

On the table, there are six, 2.5-centimeter panels with flames and barbed wire on their side to showcase the pain and suffering.

“I had a friend tell me that he had trouble saying it was gorgeous because of what it represented, but that he couldn’t think of any other word,” Ravek said.

Ravek has had the same concept in his head since he was approached by the Shoah committee in January.

The flames are red in the base and then fade to clear glass. There is also barbed wire

along the edges — something Ravek said he used to show the torture and what the prisoners would see surrounding them in the camps.

“That was done with a little pain on his part because the barbed wire was hand formed,” Pamela said.

Ravek said the transitional flames represent pain and agony but when he designed the clear parts he said he was thinking about the souls of the children and their parents who died innocently just because they were Jewish.

Yom HaShoah will take place at the Joseph and Rose Ages Family Building 21 Naldony Sachs Private on May 1 at 7 p.m.