As we celebrate the merging of two people into one under the chuppah, we recognize our fractured relationship with God by breaking a glass. As we put the finishing touches on a new home, we leave some space unfinished, reminding ourselves of the destroyed house of God. As we commemorate our liberation at the Pesach […]

From an address by Rabbi Sacks marking Yom HaShoah in 2000 The Holocaust has become more than a Jewish tragedy. It has become, for the West, a defining symbol of man’s inhumanity to man. Some Jews oppose this, but they are wrong.There is a difference between Jewish and general remembrance of the Holocaust. For us, […]

On a wintry October day in 1941, the Jews of the Kovno ghetto were assembled at an Umshlagplatz (gathering place), about to be deported to their eventual death. As word spread about their inevitable fate, the following question was posed: what beracha should be recited when performing the mitzvah of “kiddush Hashem?” Surrendering your life […]

Note: Unfortunately the last few minutes of audio were not recorded. We ended by looking at a passage from Rabbi Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg, who himself had survived the horrors of the Holocaust, defending the establishment of Yom Hashoah. In a preface to one of his responsa, he provides a compelling argument for the observance of […]

We don’t necessarily have to come to terms with and understand everything that occurs; we have to realize that Hashem guides historic events. Rabbi Shalom Hammer’s Sleepless Sermon for Yom HaShoah

“We will never forget you, we will never cease to mourn you, we will not let you down.” At the end of the book of Genesis, Joseph makes one deeply poignant request. Though I die in exile, God will bring you back to the land, and when he does so, vehaalitem et atzmotai mizeh, “Carry […]

My late father (z”l) was a special man – scholarly, pious, wise. A man whose eyes spoke of understandings unfathomable to me when I was young and whose strength and full impressiveness only come into clearest focus as I myself have gotten older. Parents are always something of a mystery to their children. Those parents […]