Students, faculty and staff gathered at Chapel Thursday morning for a service recognizing the Jewish High Holy Days...
Sophomore Amy Dworkin, president of Elon Hillel, and freshman Lauren Goodelman started the service by explaining the High Holy Days, which begin with Rosh Hashana and end with Yom Kippur. Then Yolanda Hairston, program director of North Carolina Hillel for the Triad, introduced a traditional Jewish prayer put to music by saying she hoped “the melody itself invokes a spirit in you.”
Assistant chaplain Kate Colussy-Estes read aloud “A Prayer for the Days of Awe,” by Elie Wiesel. In the prayer, published in the New York Times in Oct. 1997, Wiesel asks where God was during the Holocaust:
“Where were you, God of kindness, in Auschwitz? What was going on in heaven, at the celestial tribunal, while your children were marked for humiliation, isolation and death only because they were Jewish?”
After reading the prayer, Colussy-Estes said that many people saw the 9/11 attacks as a symbol that the end was near. “The world still turns and life continues,” she said. “I hope our healing has already begun. So we look to the example of the High Holy Days.”