WATCH: Astronaut Records Holocaust Remembrance Message In Outer Space
(JTA) — American astronaut Andrew “Drew” Feustel didn’t let being in outer space stop him from commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Instead, Feustel recorded a video message aboard the International Space Station to honor the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
In the video released on Thursday, the NASA astronaut displayed a replica of a drawing titled “Moon Landscape” by Petr Ginz, a Czech teen with Jewish roots who was killed at Auschwitz. Feustel, who received the drawing from the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, noted that late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon had brought a replica of the very same drawing with him on board the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003.
Ramon and the rest of that crew were killed when the shuttle broke apart shortly after takeoff.
“May the memories of Petr Ginz, astronaut Ilan Ramon and the six million victims of the Holocaust always remain in our thoughts,” Feustel says in the message, before floating away inside the space station.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO