“In eternal memory to the men, women and children of Yaltushkow who perished at the hands of the Nazis in the summer of 1942.” This is the memorial message carved on the pillar marking the landsmanschaft of the First Yaltushkow Benevolent Society in Queens, N.Y.

Now, like my father-in-law, the other members of this landsmanschaft lie with their spouses in Queens, N.Y., among the enormous silent congregations of similar landsmenschaften.

My father-in-law and his immediate family escaped this massacre, because they had the foresight to leave Ukraine after World War I. Like so many others, they settled in the Lower East Side of New York and went into the garment trade. Like so many others, their children went to university, settled in the suburbs and never spoke Yiddish. Their grandchildren studied Hebrew, visited Israel, went to university, etc.

The families who remained in Russia disappeared into the maw of the Nazi machine on that summer day in 1942, leaving no traces but a few pictures and postcards in Russian or Yiddish. Plowed under. Lost. Gone.

Judaism, wisely, has designated days on which all the horrors of the past 2,500 years can be memorialized: Tisha b’Av, observed the week of this paper’s publication, and Holocaust Remembrance Day. Tisha b’Av, however, has the longest history and the greatest resonance on the religious calendar. Without these days, we might be overwhelmed by the sorrows and horrors of the past, hearing continuously millions of murdered Jews cry out from their graves.

The most powerful observance of Tisha b’Av for me was spent in Israel. We began the evening by walking the entire circumference of the Second Temple walls, now marked by only a few rocks, then circling to encounter remnants of the Second Temple leading up to the Kotel. In the plaza, dozens of small groups sat on the ground and, illuminated by candles, chanted the book of Eicha, Lamentations. We were mourning the destruction of the first Temple in 586 BCE, the second Temple in 70 CE, Crusader pogroms, Chemielnicki’s hordes in Poland and the final conflagration that erased European Jewry.

A great moan of woe arose from hundreds of throats. Yet we were sitting in front of a remnant of the Second Temple period in a Jewish state. That “solitary city” hummed all around us with life: not everyone was in mourning – people went to work in the morning, cars and trucks filled the streets, the markets were open, and those who hurried to synagogue for morning services went about their business by the afternoon.

So on one hand we imagined the not-so-distant screams of Jews lined up on a river bank to be shot by the SS, or the confused noise of battle as the Roman Legion broke into the upper city, putting it and its inhabitants to torch and sword, or pleas of mothers as Cossacks raped and murdered. On the other hand, all around us were reminders that we as a people had survived all this and once again were living in the homeland from which we had been driven 2,000 years ago.

What did the residents of Yaltushkow feel as they faced their deaths? We catch a glimpse of what it may have been like from a film or from the stories of survivors. Sitting in the Burnt House in the Old City we can, perhaps, imagine the final terror of that young girl whose arm bone was found clutching the stair railing.

Despite what Eicha argues, today we know not to blame the victim. Israel’s king made a lot of bad choices, leading to the Babylonian attack, and Jewish resistance to Rome to the final conflagration in Jerusalem. But the deaths of Jews down the centuries were fanned by hatred, anti-Semitic church teachings, nationalism turned xenophobic, economic motives and sheer blood lust.

It’s vital to have a day on which to mourn, a day to channel the sorrow that must rise anew when we consider the millions dead. Nothing would harm us more than to become consumed with endless anger.