Attention Olim:
Jewish Action is seeking brief (400-500 words) inspirational anecdotes
about life in Israel. Stories should focus on one aspect of Israeli life
(buses in Israel, bank tellers, etc.) They can be funny, serious,
entertaining or enlightening. Please email all submissions to
carmeln@ou.org.
Special Section: From Out of the Depths
“Like sheep to the slaughter.” To many Jews, the Holocaust represents our shameful, oppressed past. How untrue! It’s just that the true story—that of the valor, strength and spiritual tenacity of European Jewry—has not been sufficiently told.
Children born in the post-Holocaust era of the 1940s, 50s and 60s grew up knowing their parents had gone through hell on earth. Yet, from many of the survivors who either lacked the strength to believe in a benevolent God or to observe His Torah came offspring who have picked up the discarded baton and enthusiastically embraced observant Judaism. These are the stories of survivors’ sons and daughters whose struggle with faith led to consequential life choices.
Rabbi Ephraim Oshry served as the spiritual leader of the Kovno Ghetto during the Holocaust. Highly regarded as a scholar, he was presented with many questions about Jewish law amidst the hardships of ghetto life. These questions reflect the dilemmas faced by Jews in the Holocaust and serve as a historic record of how the Jews in the Kovno Ghetto were determined to live by Jewish law despite the inhuman, horrifying conditions.
This book is a memoir of the Holocaust on two levels: a personal story of suffering, and a personal struggle with God.
Writer Mindy Salazar speaks with Sarai Kashnow about the challenges of being a military spouse, the “toughest job in the military.”
In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, Chaplain (Colonel) Sanford Dresin, having just received semichah, became an Army chaplain. In Vietnam, the self-described “traveling rabbi” went from base to base, from Saigon to the Central Highlands, flying helicopters in and out of hostile areas in order to offer Jewish soldiers moral support and divrei chizuk, words of inspiration.
Avraham, a student at Yeshiva University who was about to start dating, recently became aware of a painful fact: his grandmother’s conversion to Judaism put his own Jewish status in question. Unfortunatly, the officiating Orthodox rabbi in the community, who was no longer alive, was not known to have insisted on proper conversion standards.
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