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by Marc Rosenstein
(Originally published in Galilee Diary and Ten Minutes of Torah)

Today, as the world marks the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I am thinking of my father, of blessed memory. He was among the Jews forcibly marched through the camp's entrance gate under the cynical Nazi motto: Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Makes (You) Free.

During World War II in Lithuania, the penalty for hiding Jews was death. Nonetheless, Jura’s family extended a helping hand to mine.

On Yom HaShoah, which falls on April 28, I will remember the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust – and I will be thinking about a little town in the northeast corner of Lithuania, and a white-haired man searching for a

Much ink has been spilled since the release of the Pew Research Center survey on Jewish identity in the United States.

During one of my first years as a religious school teacher, my sixth-grade students and I had the privilege of meeting a Holocaust survivor and hearing his story.

Zachor. A powerful imperative to remember. An anthem in opposition to forgetting. A symbol of the Jewish approach to history: zachor, remember, remember as if you experienced it yourself.