Resolve and Optimism Between Yom Hashoah and Israel’s National Holidays

British teens placed pictures of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp. Photo: JRoots

JNS.org – When I was debating whether to join a command course in the army, my late grandmother Esther told me, “In Auschwitz, we didn’t volunteer. We always tried to hide in the back.”

This advice was the expression of an extreme life experience, the days of hell in the Auschwitz concentration camp. But it also characterizes Jews throughout the generations...