The sight of six ordinary Jews praying for a Chanukah miracle of their own is something extraordinary
How many concentration camp inmates braved the fear and despair of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, Dachau and Belzec to keep mitzvos? There’s no way that we’ll ever know, but we’ve all heard accounts of those who risked everything to light Shabbos candles or blow the shofar. Those stories of spiritual defiance have a power that’s hard to overestimate.
But just imagine if footage were to surface in some German archive that captures those acts of courage? Imagine the resonance of a film showing how those starved Jews lit up their hell on earth with faith, in the weeks before they went to their deaths.
Well, we now have something approximating to that. Because although the SS didn’t document the spiritual lives of their prey, their Palestinian heirs did.
If you’re like me, you weren’t sure at first that the clip released last week of the October 7 captives lighting the menorah in their underground prison was authentic.
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