Beginning mid-April, Montreal’s Jewish community will be commemorating resistance to the destruction of Europe’s Jewish communities during the Holocaust and mourning the deaths of its six million Jewish victims.

The public is invited to attend the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial at the Gelber Centre adjacent to the Jewish Public Library on Sunday, April 14 at 2 pm. The Montreal Workers Circle each year recalls the heroic resistance by Jewish fighters who took up arms as the German occupiers were about to send the remaining thousands to death camps and held out against enormous odds. This is a secular event.

The main speaker is Beryl Wajsman, editor-in-chief of The Suburban. Liberal MP Anthony Housefather and Liberal MNA David Birnbaum are expected to attend. The program includes a reading of poems, in Yiddish and English, and playing of songs, with Rachel Rosenstein at the piano. As in previous years, audience members rise at the end to sing the Partisan Song, Never Say (that you have reached the very end), lyrics by Hirsh Glick, which is traditional at Holocaust memorials.

The main community event is to be held May 1, 7:30pm at the Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem Synagogue, 6519 Baily Rd., Côte Saint Luc.

It is organized by the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Museum. The date c incides with the eve of Yom Hashoah.

The program will include poems and short readings in English, French, Hebrew and Yiddish, and songs performed by a Jewish children’s choir. Survivors and their descendants will light, one by one, six candles symbolizing the six million victims.