Ellie’s mom, Julia Helfman, died on her 95th birthday, December 24, 2025.

This was the first Yizkor service Ellie feels obligated to attend. She said, “I’m now a member of a club I was not eager to join.”

Ellie related that her parents regularly took their five kids to shul on Shabbat and festival mornings. On Yizkor days, Julia insisted that the kids remain in the service: “You all know we have relatives or friends who have no one to remember them or to recite kaddish for them.

“Also, people leaving and returning can be disturbing for everyone, especially for those who cannot leave because of the loss they are mourning.”

During the first five or so years of my serving this shul community, there was a phrase I heard regularly — “We used to …” “We used to…” applied to SO many things: USY, attendance at weekday minyan, volunteering, and, yes, Yizkor services.

Did we used to care more about formal rituals of memorializing? Has the need to work or to oversee the kids or to — I don’t know what! — overwhelmed communal observances of personal loss?

So many things are no longer as they used to be. Not in any part of our lives. The changes in synagogue life have been most striking for me. Today’s service, for example.

We’re doing Yizkor on the penultimate day of Pesach rather than on the final day as expected. Over the past few years, attendance has been sparse at best on the diaspora “extra days” of chag, festival. Last summer, our ritual committee discussed the issue and voted to offer a learning session instead of those extra days’ services.

Remembrance has no right or wrong time — it’s hard to schedule memories.

Even so, Pesach is a prime time for memory: Pesach is a family-togetherness magnet; the empty space or spaces at the table speak volumes. How many times during your seder did you say or hear “It’s not as good as Nana’s,” or “This is even better than Aunt Bea made it!”

Or, remember when Zayde would read EVERY SINGLE WORD of the Hebrew! Or the first Pesach when the kids got to tell the story their own way. Or when the baby — now 12 — crawled under the sideboard … wearing an all-white outfit! (Well, it had been all-white!) Or ….

More than the other three times a year of formalized Yizkor services — Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shavuot — Pesach is special: We’ve so recently shared a sacred table, eaten foods that refresh decades-old flavors, we‘ve played the games, sung the songs, told the stories, done the shtick, maybe even discussed the underlying or extrapolated messages of Pesach and how they might relate to today. (Somehow, they ALWAYS seem to relate!)

We bring all those collective memories with us to shul today, perhaps to trade with others like baseball cards, perhaps to remember privately or to think them to those not here any more.

Ellie’s mother Julia had an adage she etched on her family’s memory wall: “If you’d attend the funeral, go to the wedding (or b.mitzva or…).”

When you go to a funeral, you hear memories. When you attend a simcha, you help make memories.

Shabbat shalom! שבת שלום

Yizkor is traditionally recited on Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, the final day of both Pesach and Shavuot. Please note that since this year the second day of Shavuot is Shabbat, we will hold the usually-scheduled services for both days, including Yizkor on that second day.