EADS Provides Honor Guard for Sperling Holocaust Memorial Lecture

  • Published
  • By Tim Jones
  • Eastern Air Defense Sector
Rome, N.Y. --  New York Air National Guardsmen from the Eastern Air Defense Sector provided an honor guard Monday night for the opening ceremony of the annual Helen and Leon Sperling Holocaust Memorial Lecture.

The five-man honor guard presented the American flag during the National Anthem and posted the colors. This was followed by short ceremony involving veterans from World War II and Vietnam, who lit six candles in remembrance of the six million Jews killed in Nazi Germany's concentration camps during World War II.

Held at Utica's Jewish Community Center and sponsored by the Jewish Community Federation of the Mohawk Valley, the lecture's guest speaker was Matthew Rozell, a history teacher at Hudson Fall High School in eastern N.Y. Rozell and his students have developed a World War II oral history project that has directly led to six re-unions involving more than 200 Holocaust survivors and the U.S. Army veterans who liberated them.

The reunions grew out of a Rozell interview with a veteran who described how his tank unit encountered a train carrying 2,500 Jewish prisoners near Magdeburg, Germany in April 1945. The train was transporting the prisoners, many of them children and teenagers, from Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to another camp when the advancing Americans came upon it. The interview was posted on the oral history project's web site, sparking interest around the world and eventually leading to the re-unions between the survivors and the veterans. Rozell and his students were recognized as ABC News "Persons of the Week" in September 2009 for their work on the project.

"EADS is proud to have played a small role in honoring the Holocaust survivors, our World War II veterans who liberated them, and the memory of the Holocaust's victims," said Col. John P. Bartholf, EADS Commander. "The lecture and ceremony provide a powerful reminder to all of us serving in uniform that the mission of defending and protecting others is a noble and necessary undertaking."

The Eastern Air Defense Sector is headquartered at Griffiss Business and Technology Park in Rome. Staffed by active-duty New York Air National Guardsmen and a Canadian Forces detachment, the unit supports the North American Aerospace Defense Command's (NORAD) integrated warning and attack assessment missions and the U.S. Northern Command's (USNORTHCOM) homeland defense mission. EADS is responsible for air sovereignty and counter-air operations over the eastern United States and directs a variety of assets to defend one million square miles of land and sea.