Rabbi Joshua Lief

WHEELING — Residents of the Ohio Valley are invited to join congregants at Temple Shalom in Wheeling at 7 p.m. Wednesday for their annual Yom HaShoah service, a memorial for those affected by the Holocaust.

The service will remember those who died, those who survived and all who rose up to fight back against the evil of the Holocaust, said Rabbi Joshua Lief of Temple Shalom.

“We hope our friends and neighbors will stand with us,” Lief said, “because the lessons of our past still speak to us in the present.”

Lief has said that Yom HaShoah is not just a remembrance for those in the Jewish faith, but a cautionary tale of the cost of toxic hatred in the world, as well as the equal cost of when good people do nothing.

Many people of varied backgrounds will be remembered during the service. Along with the 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis, others such as political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexual men, Blacks, habitual criminals, people called “asocials,” people with disabilities, Romani people, Polish people, Soviet prisoners of war and Soviet officers were killed as well.

The service will include the lighting of candles in memory of others, those who perished, those who lived on and those who helped liberate concentration camps in World War II.

This service is a way, Lief said, to remind those in the present that the horrors of the past cannot happen again.

“The horrors of the Holocaust haven’t changed over the past eight decades, but there are fewer and fewer people left each year who were there to tell us what they saw with their own eyes,” Lief said. “That is why it becomes even more important for us, the living, to retell their stories, to read their names, and to remember their painful suffering, their brave perseverance, and their heroic acts of resistance.”