SU and the Remembrance Program need to work harder to move forward
On Oct. 21st, 2022, the Remembrance Scholars, Syracuse University community members and people from near and far with a connection to the Lockerbie bombing will stand together at the Place of Remembrance. This Rose-Laying Ceremony happens every year, as the 35 SU students representing the 35 victims that studied abroad through the university share statements about Remembrance and the victims they represent.
As a Remembrance Scholar, I had been solemnly preparing for this event and the rest of Remembrance Week. I was eager to remember, memorialize and honor these students, who were so much like me but this view of Remembrance has been irrevocably changed by the antisemitic material found in the archives of Jason and Eric Coker.
I am frustrated and ashamed by how the program and SU have handled this situation. They have consistently downplayed and overlooked the impact that these antisemitic findings have on the future of Remembrance. While most of the Remembrance cohort has come together and worked to change that narrative, we have been limited in the avenues we can do that. At the Rose-Laying Ceremony on Oct. 16th, Jason and Eric Coker will still be memorialized and we won’t be allowed to share the statement that so many of us worked together to write. This event does more than just remember the 270 victims of Pan Am Flight 103. It explicitly memorializes and implicitly honors the 35 SU victims, naming them, speaking about them and laying flowers for them.
It is wrong and unjust for Jewish victims to be memorialized in the same way as antisemites. For the son of a Holocaust survivor to be memorialized in the same way as a man who sought out and bought a Bat Mitzvah card, underlined the word “Torah,” and drew a swastika next to it. For the president of her temple’s youth group to be memorialized in the same way as a man who claimed the “Israelites” burned Christmas cards for Chanukah, a holiday already about Jewish people finding light in the wake of oppression.
There are those who claim that recognizing and denouncing this antisemitism takes the focus away from the other victims. However, by failing to address this antisemitism, they are refusing to recognize how overlooking this hate ignores the Jewishness of many of the victims.
The scholars have been encouraged to view those we represent as students, just like us, as victims we are carrying on the memory of. I have struggled intensely to find a way that I can represent Miriam Luby Wolfe at the Rose-Laying Ceremony. I know if I was in her place, I would be horrified to be memorialized in the same way as students who had shared such violently antisemitic views. I fear that not allowing our statement to be read at the Rose-Laying Ceremony will be representative of greater issues and lack of support from the university as we work together after Remembrance Week to re-envision and reimagine how we should remember. I believe that this decision puts Jewish students and other marginalized students in an incredibly difficult position, one that we should not have to be in.
I am so proud of all of my fellow scholars who have stood up to challenge the antisemitism and hate we have uncovered. But I know there is so much more work to be done. I hope that SU and the Remembrance program will make a greater effort to work with the scholars to act forward in determining what the program will look like in the future.
If you are also experiencing complicated or intense emotions because of the antisemitic material found in Jason and Eric Coker’s archival materials, I encourage you to join the Remembrance cohort on Thursday at 3:00 p.m. in the Noble Room in Hendricks Chapel. We will be providing a space for individual creative reflection in a collective and guided environment. This will include the opportunity to write letters to the scholars about your own thoughts and perspectives on how we can act forward. This is designed to be the first step in opening up a campus-wide dialogue.
Taylor Stover, 22-23 Remembrance Scholar