Each year, we commemorate the victims of the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day), which begins this Sunday evening.

Since last year’s commemoration, the world has lost two giants — UJA’s Ernie Michel and Elie Wiesel. Both endured the unimaginable horror of Auschwitz and both made it their life’s work to tell their stories again and again, reliving what they experienced with extraordinary eloquence so that others, especially younger generations, might learn and carry their memories forward.

These losses remind us that the immediate connection to living survivors is fleeting, making it all the more pressing that we transmit their stories while we still can.

For this reason, UJA-Federation — together with our partner, Selfhelp Community Services — supports Witness Theater, a groundbreaking program we brought to New York five years ago, originally begun in Israel by JDC (another UJA partner). Witness Theater connects teens with survivors in profoundly moving ways. First, the teens spend time with survivors, who open up and share their stories. Eventually, the teens reenact the survivors’ stories before an audience. It’s a cathartic experience for survivors and a life-changing lesson for teens, as they are essentially imprinted with the survivors’ memories. What was once one person’s story, frozen in time, finds a new voice and links one generation to the next.

Read, for example, the New York Times coverage of Jacqueline Kimmelstiel, 89, whose story will be reenacted by Dalia Katz, 16, a student at SAR High School, this Sunday evening.

As we approach Yom HaShoah, it’s also particularly appropriate to spotlight the 50,000 Holocaust survivors still living in New York. Tragically, about half of these men and women live in poverty. The youngest survivors are in their mid-70s and 80s, and the terrible trials they suffered in their earlier years — like malnutrition — show dire effects in older age. Many have little family and meager resources to draw on. We are their safety net. We are the difference between aging in fear and aging with dignity.

To address this devastating reality, UJA-Federation established our Community Initiative for Holocaust Survivors in 2004, which today provides services to more than 16,000 Holocaust survivors each year, through numerous nonprofit partners in New York and Israel. But the heartbreaking truth is that, as a community, we are not doing nearly enough for our remaining survivors. And no group is more deserving of communal support.

For Elie and Ernie, for Jacqueline and the tens of thousands who still live, and for the six million murdered — we honor what they endured by telling their stories. What was the darkest chapter in modern history must never be forgotten. But beyond remembrance, we must continue to support critical, life-enhancing services for the survivors we’re still blessed to have in our midst. We have the sacred obligation to care for them as we would our own family.

After all, they are.

Shabbat shalom