The Nazi regime did not only rob Jews of their property and freedom. It also stripped them of the most basic ability to orient themselves in time. In ghettos, camps and hiding places, order disappeared: There were no calendars, no weekly rhythm, and sometimes no certainty at all as to when Shabbat or a holiday fell. Yet amid this chaos, Jews tried to regain a foothold by counting the days, creating improvised calendars and marking Jewish holidays, even when they could not know for certain whether their calculations were correct.
Hitler Scroll and a secret sukkah in Auschwitz
A new exhibition at Yad Vashem now sheds light on this extraordinary determination. The items and testimonies on display reveal how, for many Jews, clinging to tradition was not only a religious act, but a way to preserve identity, humanity and a connection to the chain of generations. The knowledge that the people of Israel had faced destruction in the past and survived gave meaning and hope even in the darkest moments.
Among the most striking exhibits is the "Hitler Scroll," a seven-chapter scroll written in 1944 by Prosper Hassine, a scribe and teacher from Casablanca, as a kind of parallel to the Scroll of Esther. Alongside it are testimonies about Jews who risked their lives to fulfill the commandment of dwelling in a sukkah, including the moving account of Holocaust survivor David Yisrael, who described how a rabbi secretly built a sukkah in the Auschwitz camp.
Calendars on cement sacks and prayer books from memory
The exhibition is divided into sections according to the holidays of the Jewish year. At the entrance, visitors encounter a display case containing a tallit, tefillin and a calendar, everyday objects that during the Holocaust took on real existential significance. Among the central exhibits are calendars created under impossible conditions: on faded scraps of paper, on cement sack packaging, in faint pencil markings and even engraved on metal. Through them, prisoners tried to know when Shabbat fell, when to fast and when a holiday arrived.
The section devoted to Passover features a Haggadah written and illustrated by the young Elimelech Landau, based on a version dictated to him from memory by his father while the family was in hiding in Boryslaw, Poland. In the section dealing with the High Holidays, the exhibition presents the prayer book "Cry of Captivity," written entirely from memory by Mordechai Glick and Shlomo Ullman in a POW camp in Siberia. Its cover was made from cardboard taken from the packaging of Red Army soldiers' tobacco packets. Beside it is a shofar that was blown in the Theresienstadt Ghetto.
Halachic questions in real time
Interactive screens have been placed alongside groups of items, allowing visitors to delve deeper into the human story behind each object, watch personal testimonies and encounter halachic questions that were asked in real time: Was it permitted to build a sukkah from boards stolen from the Germans? How could Yom Kippur be observed in a labor camp? Was it possible to pray without a Torah scroll?
"The effort to hold on to time during the Holocaust was an act of resistance and of preserving humanity," said Michael Tal, director of Yad Vashem's Artifacts Department. "From the items and testimonies, we learn about the creative and courageous ways in which Jews, not necessarily only those who defined themselves as religious, acted in order to preserve the holidays and the cycle of the year even under the most extreme conditions. In this way, Jewish tradition continued to exist, even at the heart of the darkness."
