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Torah Scroll in Memory
of Ilan Ramon z”l
Left to right: Avner Shalev,
Brig. Gen. Elazar Stern, Eliezer Wolferman, Debra Korman |
On 15 October, Chief Education Officer
of the IDF, Brig. Gen. Elazar Stern, entrusted Yad Vashem
with a Torah scroll written in memory of Israel’s first astronaut
Colonel Ilan Ramon, who died in the tragic destruction of the
space shuttle Columbia last year.
The scroll was donated by Mrs. Debra Korman to Col. Ramon’s widow
Rona, who endowed it to the IDF with the request that it accompany
IDF delegations on visits to Holocaust sites in Poland.
Col. Ramon’s mother and grandmother
are survivors of Auschwitz, and his grandfather and other members
of his family perished in the Holocaust. Prior to the ill-fated
shuttle mission, Ramon contacted Yad Vashem and asked to take an
artifact from the Holocaust with him on his space flight. Yad
Vashem gave him a copy of Petr Ginz’s drawing Moon Landscape,
which reflects the young artist’s vision of how the earth would
look from the moon. Ginz was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of
16.
Participants in the ceremony at Yad
Vashem included Mrs. Korman; Col. Ramon’s father, Eliezer
Wolferman; Brig. Gen. Elazar Stern; Chairman of the Yad Vashem
Directorate, Avner Shalev; and 200 IDF officers who were
participating in a preparatory seminar at Yad Vashem in advance of
their visit to Poland. During the ceremony, a procession escorted
the Torah scroll to the synagogue, where it will remain in trust
between IDF visits abroad.
Copyright ©2004 Yad Vashem The Holocaust
Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority |
