(Times of Israel) Building a clandestine sukkah; putting on phylacteries; seeking rabbinic counsel. Despite the risk of immediate death if caught, spiritual resistance — large and small — ran strong among religious Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.
Yet, for more than 70 years, the ways in which so many men and women fought to practice their faith under such dire circumstances has gone largely untold — an omission particularly felt during tours of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“Holocaust history has to a large extent has been about what occurred to the Jews. When focusing on the individual devastated by genocide, by default it becomes a perpetrator history. When you talk about what happened to the victim, the human story gets sublimated,” said Dr. Henri Lustiger-Thaler, chief curator of the Amud Aish Memorial Museum in Brooklyn, New York, and professor of social science at Ramapo College in New Jersey.
