First Stone Painting Remembrance Week event honors the humanity of Pan Am Flight 103 victims
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Emily Saad, a 2023 Remembrance Scholar, painted the logo of the Beatles on a stone Monday morning. As she painted, she reflected on the life of Stephen John Boland, the victim of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing that she’s representing for Syracuse University’s Remembrance Week.
“His favorite band was the Beatles, and his favorite song was ‘Hey Jude’,” Saad said. “He had this sick collage on his bedroom wall of different pictures of them and his favorite things. He went to London to study abroad specifically because of the Beatles.”
Saad joined other Remembrance Scholars, Lockerbie Scholars and community members Monday morning at the Shaw Quadrangle for a Remembrance Stone Painting event. The stones will be placed on SU’s Wall of Remembrance during the Rose-Laying Ceremony on Friday.
Motolani Oladitan, another Remembrance Scholar, said the stone painting was a way to engage community members in Remembrance Events alongside scholars. She said she values Remembrance Week as a way to let the victims’ legacy live on and doesn’t want the events to be disrupted because of last year’s findings of antisemitic materials in the archives of two victims.
“What happened was very unfortunate, but Remembrance, and the importance of it, shouldn’t be colored by those events,” Oladitan said. “Trying to get everything back to regular programming is super important because at the end of the day, it is our duty to keep their memories.”
Along with the Syracuse students being represented this week, SU also honors people from Lockerbie, Scotland, by selecting two students to attend SU for a year.
Tristan Woolley and Joshua Halliday, this year’s Lockerbie Scholars, said community events like Monday’s stone painting are important to bring awareness to the bombing and let students outside of Remembrance have their contributions displayed in the Rose-Laying Ceremony.
Halliday said his stone’s painting of the Scottish flag showed his love for his country.
“I want to represent not only my pride for my country but also to remember the Lockerbie 11 who I’m representing this year,” Halliday said.
Woolley said he was looking forward to Friday’s Rose-Laying Ceremony as a way to pay respects to the lives lost. Though it will be hard, it will touch people deeply, he said.
Alexander Zhiltsov | Contributing Photographer
Katarina Sako, a Remembrance Scholar and committee member for the Remembrance program’s community engagement, said she painted a depiction of the Tundergarth Church in Lockerbie, Scotland, for her stone painting.
The house beside the church is a memorial for the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 that also holds information about the bombing, she said. Sako also said the Remembrance Scholars volunteered their time to come and participate in stone painting — there was no requirement to come.
Remembrance Scholars will place the painted stones on top of the Wall of Remembrance during the Rose-Laying Ceremony on Friday, in addition to roses that honor the terrorist attack’s victims. Lockerbie Scholar Andrew McClune, who died while at SU in 2002, will also be honored.
Each Remembrance Scholar will also have the chance to speak about the student they represent at the ceremony, Halliday said.
“When we all lay our roses, I’m gonna lay this one for him,” Saad said of representing Boland.
Disclaimer: Dominic Chiappone is a Remembrance Scholar and also works as an assistant news editor for The Daily Orange. He did not have any influence on the editorial content of this story.
