Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Syracuse University will hold its 35th annual Remembrance Week next week from Oct. 20 to Oct. 26. This year’s programming commemorates the 36th anniversary of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland on Dec. 21, 1988.

Over the course of the week, the 35 Remembrance Scholars and two Lockerbie Scholars for the 2024-25 academic year will participate in a series of events and activities to remember and celebrate the 270 people, including 35 SU students and 11 Lockerbie residents, who died in the bombing and subsequent plane crash.

This fall, SU announced it will not select two Lockerbie Scholars for the 2025-26 academic year. The change will not impact the scheduled programming for the upcoming week.

This year’s Remembrance Week schedule is below:

Sunday, Oct. 20

At 4 p.m., Hendricks Chapel will host a performance of “Each Moment Radiant,” a newly-commissioned orchestral piece, as part of SU’s Malmgren Concert Series. The piece was composed by composer Kurt Erickson and poet Brian Turner to commemorate the attack.

Following the concert series, the National Veterans Resource Center will host “Healing Trauma Through Poetry and Music” at 5:30 p.m. in the Daniel and Gayle D’Aniello Building. The discussion, led by Erickson and Turner, will cover the creative process behind “Each Moment Radiant” and the pair’s other works.

The Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholars will hold their annual candlelight vigil memorializing the 270 victims at 7 p.m. at SU’s Place of Remembrance in front of the Hall of Languages.

Wednesday, Oct. 23

The annual, 35-minute “Sitting in Solidarity” ceremony will occur at 2 p.m. on Shaw Quadrangle. Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholars will sit in silence for the duration of the event.

Thursday, Oct. 24

At 7 p.m., Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholars will participate in the “Act Forward Symposium” to share research posters for their plans to educate and benefit the community. The event will be held outside Gifford Auditorium in Huntington Beard Crouse Hall.

Directly afterward, a Celebration of Life will be held in Gifford Auditorium at 8 p.m. The gathering will feature poetry, art, music and dancing with current scholars and families of the victims.

Friday, Oct. 25

At 10 a.m., SU’s Pan Am 103 archivist Vanessa St. Oegger-Menn will moderate a panel titled “In The Aftermath: Documenting and Researching Victim Support Groups” in Bird Library’s Peter Graham Scholarly Commons. The panel will focus on the importance of the collection and preservation of records in the aftermath of tragedies.

Panelists will include Jelena Watkins, co-director of the Centre for Collective Trauma in the United Kingdom and member of the Archiving Disaster Support Group Records project team, and Ezra Rudolph, research associate for Contemporary and Cultural History at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

The discussion will also be accessible via Zoom. Attendees must register beforehand.

At 2:03 p.m., SU will hold its annual Rose-Laying Ceremony to commemorate the victims of the bombing. The ceremony also honors 2002-03 Lockerbie Scholar Andrew McClune, who died after falling from a seventh-floor window of Sadler Hall in 2002.

The week will conclude with a 3 p.m. convocation ceremony to celebrate the current Remembrance and Lockerbie Scholars. The event will be held at Hendricks, followed by a reception in the Strasser Legacy Room in Eggers Hall.

All week

Throughout the week, Hendricks will display the Remembrance Quilt that 1998-99 Remembrance Scholars, members of the Hendricks Chapel Quilters and other contributors created to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the disaster.

The 35 empty seats will remain on the Quad throughout the week to symbolize the 35 SU students who died in the bombing.
SU’s Hall of Languages, Hendricks and the JMA Wireless Dome will be lit up in blue for the duration of the Week.

The university will also display 270 blue and white flags, one for each victim, on the grass between the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Schine Student Center.

Published on October 16, 2024 at 10:54 pm

Contact Duncan: digreen@syr.edu