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Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.

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Yom Hazikaron laShoah ve-laG'vurah (Hebrew: יום הזיכרון לשואה ולגבורה‎, lit. 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period. In Israel, it is a national memorial day. The first official commemorations took place in 1951, and the observance of the day was anchored in a law passed by the Knesset in 1959. It is held on the 27th of Nisan (falls in April or May), unless the 27th would be adjacent to the Jewish Sabbath, in which case the date is shifted by a day.^[1]

Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day Law (1959)

On April 8, 1959, the Knesset officially established the day when it passed the Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day Law with the purpose of instituting an annual "commemoration of the the disaster which the Nazis and their collaborators brought upon the Jewish people and the acts of heroism and revolt performed." The law was signed by the Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, and the President of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. It established that the day would be observed by a two-minute silence when all work would come to a halt throughout the country, memorial gatherings and commemorative events in public and educational institutions would be held, flags would be flown at half-mast, and programs relevant to the day would be presented on the radio and in places of entertainment. An amendment to the law in 1961 mandated that cafes, restaurants and clubs be closed on the day.^[2]^[5]

Commemoration

Israel

Date

The date is set in accordance with the Hebrew calendar, on 27 Nisan, so that it varies in regard to the Gregorian calendar. Observance of the day is moved back to the Thursday before, if 27 Nisan falls on a Friday (as in 2021), or forward a day, if 27 Nisan falls on a Sunday (to avoid adjacency with the Jewish Sabbath, as in 2024). The fixed Jewish calendar ensures 27 Nisan does not fall on Saturday.^[1]

Evening

Yom HaShoah opens in Israel at sundown^[6] in a state ceremony held in Warsaw Ghetto Square at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Authority, in Jerusalem. During the ceremony the national flag is lowered to half mast, the President and the Prime Minister both deliver speeches, Holocaust survivors light six torches symbolizing the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust and the Chief Rabbis recite prayers.^[7]

Daytime

On Yom HaShoah, ceremonies and services are held at schools, military bases and by other public and community organizations.^[8]

On the eve of Yom HaShoah and the day itself, places of public entertainment are closed by law. Israeli television airs Holocaust documentaries and Holocaust-related talk shows, and low-key songs are played on the radio. Flags on public buildings are flown at half mast. At 10:00, an air raid siren sounds throughout the country and Israelis are expected to observe two minutes^[9] of solemn reflection. Almost everyone stops what they are doing, including motorists who stop their cars in the middle of the road, standing beside their vehicles in silence as the siren is sounded

The Three Musketeers at the Kotel

The Human Need To Feel Important By Dennis Prager

If one were to draw up a list of human needs, food and shelter would be at the top. The second and third would be the need for meaning and the need to feel important. The infamous "midlife crisis" is a crisis of importance: "I thought I would be much more important at this stage in life than I am."

Among the many psycho-social crises afflicting Americans is a crisis of importance. Fewer Americans feel important than did Americans in the past. Why? What has happened?

In fact, given that work is generally regarded as one of the most ubiquitous providers of purpose, and that, prior to the Covid-19 lockdown, more Americans were working than ever before, one would think that more Americans than ever before felt important. But that wasn't so. For many, work has not provided the sense of importance people expected it to, let alone fulfilled the other great need: meaning. This is especially true for women, but first, we will address men.

Work used to provide many men with a sense of importance. It is simply a fact that being the breadwinner for a family means one is important. However, since the 1970s and the rise of feminism, women have not only become breadwinners, but they have increasingly become the primary breadwinner in a marriage or family.

That has helped couples financially, but it has also deprived a great many men of their sense of importance. When regarded by a wife and children as important, husbands/fathers felt important. Progressive America mocks the 1950s TV series "Father Knows Best." But when wives and children believed that, men felt important because they were.

The price for this, according to feminism, was paid by women, who didn't receive the accolades of breadwinning. And they set about changing it. However, contrary to the expectations of the well-educated, women becoming breadwinners has not provided most women with a sense of importance, and certainly not meaning, in life.

Contrary to what feminism, colleges, high schools, progressive parents, and the mass media have claimed for decades, men and women do not have the same natures. Most work does not provide women with the same sense of importance or meaning it provides men. For many women, being the breadwinner is financially beneficial but not especially satisfying. Most women would still like their man to be the primary breadwinner. That's why very wealthy women so often marry even wealthier men. It is built into female nature.

In truth, though, throughout history, work was rarely seen as a primary provider of importance or meaning – for either sex. Work was little more than a necessity, and the vast majority of people would have happily abandoned their often back-breaking, drudgery-inducing work if they could afford to.

For the most part, people sought – and found – importance and meaning outside of work. This was especially true in America, where "associations" provided both importance and meaning.

Nongovernmental associations, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his brilliant analysis of American life in the early 19th century, was the key to Americans' success and happiness. These included, first and foremost, religious associations and religion in general. Most religious people feel important – to G-d, to their community, to their family.

My father was the president of our synagogue, and my mother was active in the synagogue's "sisterhood." Though both worked full time, those roles provided them with immense meaning and a sense of importance.

Add to that: Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs; book clubs; the Masons; bowling leagues; coaching Little League; volunteer charitable work; teaching Bible in Sunday school. These provided people with a sense of importance.

The key to all these associations was their being independent of government. As the government has grown, nearly all these associations have shrunk. Therefore, we have a rule: The more government intrudes in people's lives, the less important most people feel – unless they work for the government.

Yet, to progressives, the government is, or should be, almost everything in people's lives. It should take care of as many people as possible. However, at a massive price: The more one relies on the government, the more one will inevitably lack a sense of importance.

This ideal was announced at the 2012 Democratic Party Convention when the narrator of a specially-created Barack Obama campaign-theme video asserted, "Government is the only thing that we all belong to." The DNC also showed a fictional storybook ad titled "The Life of Julia." It portrayed a woman from childhood to old age, wholly dependent on the government.

Despite her having a child, there was not a man anywhere in the story, nor, apparently, was there a man in her life. The result? More and more American women have come to rely on the government, not on a husband. The results have been calamitous.

President Joe Biden repeated this theme last week: "Put trust and faith in our government," he pleaded with Americans. One could accurately say that we are replacing America's motto, "In G-d We Trust," with, "In Government We Trust."

The bigger the government, the fewer the institutions in which people can feel important. Therefore, given the deep human need to feel important, people will look elsewhere for their importance – like fighting systemic racism, heteronormativity, capitalism, patriarchy, and transphobia. And, most of all, global warming – because you cannot feel more important than when you believe you're saving the world.

Rep. Omar introduces UN Agenda 21

Anony Mee(American Thinker)

Without respect to the fact that states have the authority to regulate housing contracts, Ilhan Omar uses a viral smokescreen to begin implementing some of the worst features of Agenda 21, the leftist promise that the government will provide affordable housing for everyone. On March 11, she introduced H.R. 1847, a bill "To suspend obligations of residential renters and mortgagors to make payments during the COVID-19 emergency, and for other purposes." So far only a draft of the text is available.

Essentially, the bill says that real property tenants can stop paying their landlords. Our country was not founded on the moral code that one is not responsible for one's obligations and debts. However, these socialists would make it so.

Unsurprisingly, this bill is full of problems. It provides for a COVID suspension period ending April 2022 (Sec. 8(3)), but the landlord relief fund runs for five years (Sec. 5 (c)(1)). It seems as if it's planning to extend for up to five years a tenant's freedom from rent obligations, should the bill become law.

Under H.R. 1847, tenants may simply stop paying their rent, without restriction, for a period of one year (for now). There is no means-testing to determine if rent relief is warranted. In fact, the bill doesn't even require that the tenant notify the landlord. However, our taxpayer money will go to notify every renter in the country of this provision (Sec. 3(c)). No mention is made of notifying every landlord, yet landlords can be held responsible, to the point of forfeiting their property if they ignorantly, but in accordance with their lawful contract, pursue their tenants for rent (Sec. 4).

While tenants can just withhold money, landlords must apply for relief of unpaid rent (Sec. 5). The requirements are onerous and include freezing the rent for a period of five years regardless of the market – a provision that could cut both ways. The owner must agree to rent vacant units to HUD and other tenant-assistance grantees, even if it is apparent that the tenant cannot afford usual utilities. In some localities, landlords are on the hook for unpaid utility bills in occupied dwellings.

Potential tenants cannot be rejected for their arrest and conviction history, presumably including a history of arson, running a brothel, destroying rented housing, cooking meth at home, drug dealing, or pedophilia even if the unit is across the street from a school. Too bad, landlords, when your insurance rates triple due to this law, but your ability to charge rent is still frozen.

Applications for rent relief must include Personally Identifiable Information for any person with any ownership interest in the property, except for shareholders in a publicly-traded company; an unrestricted list of all their assets and liabilities; and comprehensive info on all rentals in which they have an interest, not just the one on the application. This, of course, is specifically designed to give the federal government a complete listing of all rental housing in America, and a basis for implementing a wealth tax.

The communism begins to sneak in in Sec. 5(e), where priority for landlord reimbursement is tiered based on income. Non-profit owners and those with the fewest assets get the highest priority.

Rental property owners get totally trashed if they own a multi-family (five or more dwelling units) structure (Sec. 7). For five years, they cannot sell or transfer their property — presumably, this includes transfers via a trust to one's heirs — without the permission of HUD, which will notify all eligible purchasers that the property is available. This is a prima facie violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.

The first right of purchase will go to non-profit or other such housing organizations, at a sale price that HUD approves. We the People…er, sorry, HUD will pay for this housing. We will also pay for operations and maintenance costs, seemingly in perpetuity (Sec. 7(f)(2)). Nothing in this draft bill prevents these guv-funded purchasers from turning around and selling the property. There's no reimbursement provision at all. Not a bad gig, but on the other hand….

New owners of multi-family facilities face life-of-the-facility-long restrictions, including no refusing housing based on criminal history or immigration status (Sec. 7(d)(4)). Hide your teenage daughters, you other tenants, because that means that these private, public, or quasi-governmental organizations must rent to MS-13 if they show up at the door. This provision also abrogates the short-term public charge requirements of immigration law for most legal immigrants — a feature of immigration statutes that pre-dates Trump, going back to 1882.

Tenants must be provided with comprehensive social services, regardless of whether they are already provided with these services in the community outside the facility (Sec. 7(d)(5)).

The coup de gras is found in Sec. 7(d)(6) "Tenants of the project shall have control of living and operating conditions…"

But here's what Omar's bill doesn't mention: H.R. 1319 – the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (i.e., $1.9 T boondoggle bill) – which Biden signed into law on March 12, contains a provision for housing assistance, essentially for every category of need, under Subtitle B Housing (sections 3201 – 3208). This assistance continues for 18 months.

What this means is that there is no need at all for Omar's little one-year bill. Her bill is a trap to get We the People to pay for everyone's housing and it's the opening gambit to bring all housing under the control of the federal government.

And there's your Agenda 21 "affordable housing for all."

Anony Mee is a retired public servant and a landlord, very grateful that the tenant pays on time.

MELANIE PHILLIPS

Jared Kushner's curious change of heart

With the Biden administration having re-empowered Palestinian aggressors against Israel, Kushner has shown that he doesn't grasp the significance of what he helped achieve with the Abraham Accords.

(March 18, 2021 / JNS) Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump, was a senior foreign-policy adviser in the Trump administration. Now an op-ed by Kushner published in The Wall Street Journal has caused jaws to drop.

Kushner was a key mover behind the Abraham Accords between Israel and the Gulf States. This agreement, brokered by Trump, was the most significant move towards peace in the Middle East for the best part of a century.

In parallel, Trump's U.S. withdrawal in May 2018 from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, coupled with the reimposition of sanctions and more severe ones later added, was gradually bringing the fanatical and genocidal Iranian regime to its knees.

Since President Joe Biden took office, however, there's been mounting alarm that his administration is re-empowering Iran, dumping on Israel and undermining the newly birthed alliance between Israel and its former foes in the Arab world.

On Iran, the Biden administration has declared its intention to rejoin the nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. This effectively gave a green light to an Iranian nuclear bomb with only a few years' delay. It also funneled billions of dollars into Iran's coffers, enabling it to ramp up its regional power grab, and pursue terrorism and wars by proxy in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq and Yemen.

Restarting this deal would be a disaster. Yet Kushner's article was a paean of praise to Biden for his approach. He wrote approvingly of the Biden team's "relationship" with Iran, and said the American offer to rejoin the deal was "a smart diplomatic move."

By the "relationship" with Iran, he presumably meant that some of the key players behind that deal, including the U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken, are now in the Biden administration.

But forming a relationship with a regime that has waged a four-decade war against America is inescapably an act of appeasement.

While officials such as Blinken pretended that the 2015 deal would bring Iran into the family of nations, its leaders recognized this as a weakness they could exploit. They understood that the Americans were so desperate to pretend they had tamed Iran that they would even present as a triumph a deal that actually green-lighted the Iranian bomb and would funnel billions into a genocidal rogue state, which America itself regarded as the greatest terrorist threat in the world.

So it was. And now the same officials are intent on repeating the same lethally craven exercise.

Although Blinken has said America won't enter negotiations or lift sanctions against Iran until it comes back into compliance, many take this with a pinch of salt from an administration that's clearly gagging to make nice with the regime once again.

Yet according to Kushner, Biden's offer to Iran called its bluff when America refused its demand to be rewarded for initiating negotiations. This, said Kushner, revealed to the Europeans that the 2015 deal was dead.

But the Europeans recognized no such thing. On the contrary, they tried to broker negotiations between America and Iran—only to get slapped down contemptuously by the regime, which repeated its demand that Washington lift sanctions first.

A "smart diplomatic move"? More like a national humiliation.

Smelling exactly the same weakness by many of the very same people, an emboldened Iran has shown its contempt for America by increasing terrorist attacks in the Middle East and stepping up its progress to a nuclear bomb.

Last year, Iran was enriching uranium to 4.5 percent, breaching the 2015 deal's limit of 3.67 percent. As soon as Biden took office, however, Tehran started enriching uranium to 20 percent, which, according to John Hannah of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, represents 90 percent of the work required to produce weapons-grade material.

The more Biden reaches out to Iran, the more Iran attacks American assets. Last month, Blinken announced that the United States would no longer designate the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen as a terrorist group, signaling that it now backed Iran against America's Saudi Arabian ally that is fighting Iran in Yemen. Two days later, the Houthis launched drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities.

Last month, Iran attacked a U.S. base in northern Iraq, killing an American contractor and wounding several other civilians. The American military wanted to respond by attacking Iranian assets in Iraq, but this was vetoed by Biden.

Instead, the United States launched an attack on Iran-backed Shi'ite militias in northern Syria, in which no Iranians were killed.

This may have been because the United States notified the Russians about their attack plans in advance and the Russians promptly tipped off the Iranians. Or it may have been because these Iran-backed militias were non-Iranian Shi'ites—meaning there weren't any Iranians there anyway. Either way, it was no more than a limp-wristed gesture.

As Abdulrahman Al-Rashed, former editor-in-chief of the Saudi newspaper Ashraq Al-Awsat, has written: "In Tehran's eyes, Biden is a pushover." In addition to Iranian attacks in Yemen and Iraq, he wrote, "Lokman Slim, Iran's most prominent and vocal opponent in Beirut, was murdered and his body was found on the sidewalk."

Appallingly, Biden is turning the United States into a laughing stock in Tehran. Yet Kushner wrote: "Thanks to his policies, America holds a strong hand."

In his article, Kushner boasted about the Abraham Accords. Yet even here, his choice of words revealed an astonishing ignorance. For while he rightly observed that this agreement had destroyed the "myth" that ending the Arab-Israel "conflict" depended upon Israel and the Palestinians resolving their differences, he went on to say: "The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel's relations with the broader Arab world."

"A real-estate dispute"? But the "conflict" was a war by the Arab world against Israel's very existence. Its presentation as a "real-estate dispute" is what's been the actual myth.

That, indeed, was the fiction promoted by the Palestinians to gull the West into believing that a Palestinian state would solve the conflict. This propaganda achievement, which has fueled the West's animus against Israel, evilly repackaged the Arab war of extermination against Israel as a Palestinian struggle for land.

This was the delusion that enabled the Palestinians to play the West for suckers by holding out for a land-based compromise to which they had no intention of agreeing.

It was this myth that was shattered by the Abraham Accords. At a stroke, the Palestinian cause became irrelevant, and the Palestinians' principal weapon in their diplomatic war against Israel was rendered useless.

Yet Biden has now brought the Palestinians back in from the cold. He has re-established diplomatic relations and restored their funding, turning a blind eye to the ways in which that money helps promote terrorism against Israel.

He has thus re-empowered the Palestinian aggressors against Israel and undermined one of the signal achievements of the Abraham Accords. Kushner has shown that he doesn't even understand the significance of what he himself helped achieve.

Although his article praised Trump for the breakthrough in Israel's relationship with the Arab world, he was effectively praising himself. Attempting to bathe his opinions about Iran in the reflected glory of the Abraham Accords, his op-ed can only be read as a shallow, unprincipled and disloyal job application to the Biden administration.

The threat posed by the Iranian regime, both to the world and the suffering people of Iran, can only be removed if the regime is removed. Frighteningly, Biden has reversed the progress being made to that end.

Instead, he has strengthened Tehran and enfeebled America. And now, Jared Kushner has become his cheerleader. What a betrayal.

Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for "The Times of London," her personal and political memoir, "Guardian Angel," has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, "The Legacy." Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.

Yad Vashem online exhibit emphasizes the power of family DEBORAH FINEBLUM JNS

Six of the Bernstein siblings taken in Ylakiai, Lithuania, February 1933. Top row, from left: Arye-Leib, Ida and Benzion; bottom row, from left: Rivka, Menachem and Hinda. They were all murdered in the Holocaust except for Ida, who immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) on Feb. 5, 1933, taking this photo with her. Credit: Yad Vashem.

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Six of the Bernstein siblings taken in Ylakiai, Lithuania, February 1933. Top row, from left: Arye-Leib, Ida and Benzion; bottom row, from left: Rivka, Menachem and Hinda. They were all murdered in the Holocaust except for Ida, who immigrated to Eretz Israel (Mandatory Palestine) on Feb. 5, 1933, taking this photo with her. Credit: Yad Vashem.

"The Onset of Mass Murder: The Fate of Jewish Families in 1941" reveals a dozen never-before-published stories of those caught in the web of the Nazis' "Operation Barbarossa," an organized rout of the Jewish communities in Soviet-controlled countries. BY DEBORAH FINEBLUM

(April 2, 2021 / JNS) The world will mark Yom Hashoah—Holocaust Memorial Day—on April 7-8 with particular attention on the 80th anniversary of a campaign against the Jews of Eastern Europe that was nothing short of mass murder. This deadly Nazi plot would put the close and loving Jewish family to the most painful of tests.

The tensile and enduring strength of the Jewish family is on full view in a new online exhibition from Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem called "The Onset of Mass Murder: The Fate of Jewish Families in 1941."

Timed to release the week of Yom Hashoah, the exhibition reveals a dozen never-before-published stories of Jewish families caught in the web of the Nazis' "Operation Barbarossa," an organized rout of the Jewish communities in Soviet-controlled countries beginning that summer. Carried out by Einsatzgruppen SS mobile killing units teamed up with local authorities and citizens, "Barbarossa" cut a bloody swath across the Soviet-controlled lands of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Eastern Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Four years later, only the third of Europe's Jewish population who survived were left to tell their story of a love stronger than hate, stronger even than death itself.

"Too often, the Holocaust is taught as one madman in Berlin while the cooperation of the so-called 'conquered' nations of the Third Reich is ignored," says Steven Katz, director emeritus of the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies at Boston University, who also holds the school's Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish Holocaust Studies. "These countries may have responded a little differently from each other, but one thing they all had in common: They all wanted to get rid of their Jews."

One has only to look at pictures of German soldiers looking on while the locals did the killing to grasp the idea, points out Katz. "The Germans gave the locals the freedom to express their own anti-Semitism in the most deadly way."

By the end of 1943, more than 1.5 million Jews from the region—representing one-fifth of the 6 million Jews who perished during the years of the Holocaust—had been murdered.

The Pilschik family in Zilupe, Latvia in 1930s. Credit: Yad Vashem.

The grisly routine, repeated over and over around the region, consisted of rounding up a community's Jews, taking them to a spot on the outskirts of town or the local Jewish cemetery, and forcing them to strip and surrender their valuables before gunning them down. They were then shoved into one of thousands of mass graves, many of which historians say have yet to be discovered. The most famous of these killing sprees was Babi Yar near Kiev on erev Yom Kippur of 1941, where 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were massacred.

"We want to show their faces, give their names, remember them as human beings, as part of our Jewish family," says exhibition curator Yona Kobo. "To go back and trace the beginning of mass murder as Nazi policy, to see all the professors, teachers, doctors they killed—and so many babies—many of them murdered by their neighbors.

"Of all the exhibitions I've worked on, this had been the hardest," she adds. "I kept seeing my own grandchildren who are so cute and thinking if they lived in those days people would look at them and think they were scum and had no right to live."

Giving them names

In 1933, young Ida Bernstein's family encouraged her to leave their home in Ylakiai, Lithuania, for the hard-scrabble existence of pre-state Palestine. "My mother went with their full support," says her son Yitzchak Lev. "She was so attached to her family, and she knew how much they worried about her being so far away."

The last postcard that Eta, Jacob and Hinda Bernstein sent to Ida Lev (Bernstein) in Tel Aviv from Ylakiai, Lithuania, May 9, 1941. Credit: Yad Vashem.

Indeed, a postcard written on May 9, 1941—one side in the Yiddish of her parents, Eta and Jacob, and the other in Hebrew by her sister, Hinda—echoes these feelings. "Dear Ida, we are very worried about you," her father wrote. "For God's sake, write often, we are waiting for good news from you. Mother doesn't sleep and mentions you all the time."

"My mother knew how much her family looked forward to joining her here in Israel as soon as the war was over," says Lev. But two months after sending the postcard, that dream died as her parents and four of their seven children were killed with Ylakiai's other 300 Jews. By August 1941, not a single Jew was left in town. Since two more of her siblings were murdered elsewhere during the war, his mother was the only one of the family to survive.

The Bernsteins are among the dozen families featured in the exhibition—families whose stories and photos bring this terrible time and place to life. Those left to tell the tale typically fell into one of three groups, Kobo points out: Jews exiled to such far-flung Soviet outposts as Siberia or Kazakhstan, those who hid with groups of partisans in the forests and others—many of them children—taken in by non-Jews.

In such situations, untold thousands did the hardest thing any parent could ever do: Giving over their beloved child to strangers, entrusting them to people who, though they may feed and care for them, would not raise them in the time-honored ways of their forebearers.

Halina Tenenbaum of Lvov at the children's home in Zabrze, Poland, after the war. She immigrated to the Jewish state, where she changed her name to Ilana Ben-Israel. Credit: Yad Vashem.

Halina Tenenbaum of Lvov, Poland (now Ukraine) was an only child who was born into wealth; her father, Jonasz, was a lawyer and professional violinist. She was 13 in the summer of 1942 when her father dropped her off at the home of a Christian friend. Within the year, he'd been part of a roundup of Lvov Jews and taken to the notorious Janowska concentration camp, where he was killed. Her mother, Stephania, survived hiding with other Jews in a movie theater until one month before liberation, when someone turned them. They were among the last Jews of Lvov to be killed. But their sacrifice paid off: Their child survived. At war's end, Halina immigrated to an Israeli kibbutz, where she lived out her years as Ilana.

Fanny Knesbach (later Stang), Vienna, 1937. Credit: Yad Vashem.

And, in the case of the Knesbach family of Vienna, there is a poignant moment in 1939 where Fanny, whose parents Osias and Jetti, in an effort to get her out of harm's way sent her to England after she'd finished her medical studies. Seeing them receding into the distance as the train took her away from home—and towards safety—she wrote, "I stuck my head out … I wanted to keep the imprint of my parents' faces. For a few yards, they kept up with my window while the train was still moving at a walking pace.

" 'Don't cry, Fannerle, we rejoice that you are leaving!' and tears were streaming down Mama's cheeks. 'B'shanah haba'ah b'Yerushalayim!' Papa shouted above the hissing steam. 'Next year in Jerusalem!' The train was gaining on them. … I held my handkerchief out of the window at arm's length and caught a last glimpse of them. Two tiny figures. Then tears blinded me completely. … I may never see them again! 'Never, Never' went the mocking rhythm of the train."

Sadly, Fanny's fears proved to be well-founded. Her parents, trying to escape to Israel with other Jews, were murdered by the Germans when their ship was stranded in Yugoslavia.

The Jewish woman takes charge

With so many men taken to work in forced labor camps, much of the family life-and-death decision-making fell squarely on the women.

"It was a time when the job of the women became enlarged, they had to be the ones to keep their families alive and ensure that Judaism would continue," says Rebbetzin Esther Farbstein, an Israeli historian who founded and directs the Center for Holocaust Studies at Michlalah–Jerusalem College and is author of Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust.

"Where did their hope and strength come from in such a horrible place? How did they do it?" she asks. By keeping their traditions as best they could, she says—by lighting threads on Friday nights and saying the candle-lighting blessing over them, by fasting on Tisha B'Av even when they knew they didn't have to. "And by keeping pictures of their past in their minds and envisioning meeting their loved ones again and going home together when all this was over."

It was a trial by fire that forged strong women, enriching those who survived with knowledge well beyond the generations of Jewish women before them, empowering them to teach and transmit Jewish tradition to their children and communities.

Memorial to those murdered by the Germans in 1941 in the village of Zasavica, Yugoslavia, today Serbia. The Veterans of the Yugoslav Partisans' Organization established the monument in 1967. In 2001, the Yugoslav Jewish Congregation and the Community of Survivors from Vienna added a stone to the memorial, engraved with a Star of David. Photo courtesy of Davor Salom.

This doesn't surprise historian Katz. "All the jokes made about Jewish mothers don't recognize the truth," he says. "The Jewish mother has made the survival of the Jewish people possible. In fact, more than anything, since the destruction of the Second Temple—when we had no temple and no state anymore—the rabbis knew the Jewish home would be the key to our survival."

Tragically, there were times when family love and loyalty actually cost lives. The exhibition features the invitation and group photo for the wedding of Zalman Jershov and Luba Pilschik on Dec. 26, 1937. Four years later, all the Jews of their hometown of Zilupe, Latvia, including many in the photo, were ordered into the market square. From there, they were taken out of town and shot by members of the local home-guard militia.

On the way to the killing fields, Zalman, with his wife and two small sons, was recognized by a local policeman with whom he'd served in the Latvian army who offered to pull him out of line and save his life. A member of the militia reported that Zalman refused, saying he would remain with his family and the others, including his brother Yisrael and his family. Within minutes of that fateful decision, they were all dead.

The wedding of Zalman Jershov and Luba in Pilschik, Zilupe, Latvia, on Dec. 26, 1937. Credit: Yad Vashem.

" 'Stay together,' my mother said. We wanted to stay together, like everyone else," Nobel Prize-winning author and human-rights advocate Elie Wiesel wrote in All Rivers Run to the Sea. "Family unity is one of our important traditions … and this was the essential thing—families would remain together. And we believed it. So it was that the strength of our family tie, which had contributed to the survival of our people for centuries, became a tool in the exterminator's hands."

But 80 years later, the Jewish family lives on.

"When I think of the power of family," says curator Kobo, "I can't help but remember my mother, who survived the Holocaust and told me before she died that the proudest moment of her life had been when I joined the Israel Defense Forces. 'Now we're not powerless anymore,' she said. 'And my daughter is one of the soldiers protecting us.' "

Yad Vashem online exhibit emphasizes the power of family on today Yom HaShoah day April 8th (Nisson 27th usualy

The world will mark Yom Hashoah—Holocaust Memorial Day—on April 7-8 with particular attention on the 80th anniversary of a campaign against the Jews of Eastern Europe that was nothing short of mass murder. This deadly Nazi plot would put the close and loving Jewish family to the most painful of tests.