Jacques Fein always wanted payback.
The Holocaust survivor used that phrase often as an adult. But he did not say it in the vengeful, vindictive sense.
What Fein meant was different.
“For all the people who saved him and his sister and allowed them to have a life, he felt like it was his duty to give back to society, and he called it ‘payback,’” his daughter Rachel Burrows said.
Fein was indebted to the community decades after being adopted by an American couple from the French orphanage where he and his sister lived after their parents were murdered in Auschwitz.
So, in the mid-1980s, he began work on what would eventually become the Howard County Yom Hashoah Committee, and is now known as the Howard County Holocaust Remembrance Committee.
Today, the committee works with schools, neighborhoods, nonprofits and more, and is a place of belonging for Burrows, who works hard to live up to the high standard that her father set for community service.
“It is really meaningful to me to serve on the committee, and I feel like I’m doing a small piece of the work that he would do with the importance of keeping the tradition alive,” Burrows told Baltimore Jewish Times. “I really believe that you have to start small sometimes, and then it grows and it becomes cumulative. I feel like I’m taking steps to do things that he would be proud of or that he would do if he were still with us. But there’s always more.”
The 2026 edition of the Yom Hashoah Commemoration will take place in April at the Oakland Mills Interfaith Center. While the organization began as a group that organized observances of Yom Hashoah, but has since evolved into much more than that. The committee is made up of volunteers who have different focuses, whether that be working as a liaison with the Howard County Public Schools or working to place stones that memorialize the atrocities in Europe around Lake Kittamaqundi in Columbia.
Much of the work they do is centered around educating young people, as there aren’t that many actual survivors left.
“A central piece of our mission is to engage and connect with the younger generation. It’s beautiful that the Holocaust Remembrance Committee is made up of people from different congregations and somewhat different ages, but it tends to be an older group,” Burrows said. “And obviously survivors continue to pass away, and we want to bring in younger people all over the Howard County community, not just the Jewish people.”
The committee also plans community events and organizes Holocaust remembrance sessions year round, not just during Yom Hashoah. They started an essay contest for local students that has since grown to include poetry, art and more.
All in all, they have grown quite a bit since their early days when the committee was just Fein and a few other dedicated Jews.
Judee Iliff is Fein’s second wife, and step-mother to Burrows. She remembers that, in the mid 1980s, her husband used to travel to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to meet with a group of survivors who were children during the Holocaust. She said that that helped spur his decision to create a group here. When Randy Gartner became involved in 1994, he said that Fein’s energy was infectious.
“This guy was so energetic, and I think it was he and maybe one or two others, they worked their tails off to make sure that Yom Hashoah was observed and was meaningful,” Gartner said.
Burrows said that she does her best to emulate her father’s example, which is no easy task. Today, the work that she and others put in goes a long way to furthering the memory of those lost to the atrocities committed by the Nazis, which includes Burrows’ grandparents. Howard County may not have as many Jews as Baltimore and D.C., but the Jews who reside there are doing all they can to make sure that what happened in the 1930s and 1940s never happens again.
“My dad was larger than life to me in some ways, and now that he’s gone, I tend to see things differently. I reflect more and I wish more deeply that I could have conversations with him that I didn’t have,” she said. “I feel like I’m doing a small piece of the work that he would do [towards] the importance of keeping the tradition and the memories alive in our town.”
