For Israeli Philosophy Professor Shalom Rosengerb, the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who had the privilege to meet Monsieur Chouchani and those who did not. 

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An enigmatic scholar, Chouchani taught many distinguished students in Europe, Israel, and South America after World War II. Besides Rosenberg, his disciples were French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and more. 

Although not much is known about Chouchani, including his real name, recent documents obtained by the National Library of Israel shed light on his genius.

Fifty notebooks handwritten by Chouchani were donated to the library by Rosenberg, who met the scholar in South America. The papers were studied, deciphered and organized by the National Library and are available to the public. 

According to archivists, the notebooks are full of ideas on Jewish thought, memory exercises, and mathematical formulas that were incredibly difficult to decipher. 

"Chouchani's notebooks are a gold mine," said Yoel Finkelman, curator at the National Libary. "His works are exceptionally challenging to decipher because he did not write orderly paragraphs. He put down parts of sentences, mathematical equations, and acronyms in which he encrypted his ideas.

"Moreover, he had his own kind of vocabulary, and only through tracking down a word as it appears throughout the rest of the text can one begin to understand its meaning."

According to Finkelman, the library worked on deciphering Choucani's works in order to "understand what he knew, how he thought and how he formulated his religious and educational views." He aso said the library considered it "of paramount importance to bring to the public's attention the story of one of the most mysterious and influential figures in twentieth-century Jewish thought."

David Lang, an archivist at the National Library, said another aspect that made the process of deciphering Chouchani's notebooks complex was how diverse his areas of expertise were. 

"The notebooks cover all subjects in Judaism – Torah, Talmud, Jewish law, Rabbinic literature, philosophy, Kabbalah, ethics, and Hassidism," he said. "He also spent a great deal of time on mathematics and physics, and Choucani's interest in the history of science is also evident."

According to Lang, Chouchani had an extraordinary photographic memory and was able to recall and cite the entire Bible, Talmud, and various Jewish texts from memory and even mastered several languages. 

Wiesel, who greatly admired his teacher, wrote that Chouchani "mastered some 30 ancient and modern languages, including Hindi and Hungarian. His French was pure, his English perfect, and his Yiddish harmonized with the accent of whatever person he was speaking with. The Vedas [Hindu religious texts] and the Zohar he could recite by heart. A wandering Jew, he felt at home in every culture."

For Rosenberg, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1935 and moved to Israel in 1963, meeting Chouchani was a dream. 

"Shalom spoke about Chouchani all the time, and so in 1967, I surprised him with a gift – a trip to Montevideo, Uruguay, to meet him," his wife, Rina said. Despite the limited amount of time they spent together, Chouchani left a tremendous impression on Rosenberg, as well as the rest of this students. 

Chouchani arrived in Uruguay after spending several years in Israel, Algeria, and France. While in Israel, he studied with renowned Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine. 

Kook called Chouchani "one of the most excellent young people… sharp, knowledgeable, complete and multi-minded."

Chouchani's comprehensive knowledge even helped him escape the horrors of the Holocaust. When arrested by Nazi officers in Paris, he claimed he was a Muslim. Doubting whether that was true, officials summoned the chief mufti of France at the time, who, after a three-hour conversation with Chouchani, declared he was "a holy Muslim." 

The Jewish scholar eventually made his way to Uruguay, where he died unexpectedly in 1968. 

"He felt that Uruguay was so far away, the war would never spread there," Rina Rosenberg said. In 1968, she and her husband participated in a Jewish teachers' seminar in the South American country, which Chouchani also attended. 

"He used to always sit in his room and teach," she said. "He never came to the dining hall, but only ate in his room. He was charismatic and impressive. Shalom told me Chouchani told him he preferred to teach women because he said their heads have not been tainted by yeshivas."

Choucani passed away during that same seminar. 

"One Saturday night he suddenly fell ill," Rosenberg recalled. "Shalom and a few others took him to a local hospital, where he died. Shalom was devastated. He thought Chouchani could have been saved, but the hospital didn't even have oxygen to give him."

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Rosenberg, who is the former chair of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has spent many years deciphering Choucani's work. He asserts that Chouchani's real name was most likely Hillel Perlman and he was born in the Belarusian town of Brisk. 

A few years ago, he was joined by his student Hodaya Har-Shefi, who wrote a thesis on Chouchani and is now writing a doctorate. 

By studying Chouchani's work, she learned that "he gave a lot of attention to the teacher-student relationship. It is also interesting to see his attitude towards the sages, how he criticized their work, but at the same time, deeply respected them."

According to the National Library, Chouchani challenged his students with difficult questions and encouraged them to improve and progress, and especially to think in unexpected ways.

"Chouchani did not want his works to be published in his lifetime," Har-Shefi continued."He also did not like students taking notes and summarizing his lessons. He had tremendous respect and caution for the written word.

"He wanted people to teach and learn the right way, and he tried to pass on these tools to his students to make sure Jewish tradition continues."

Professor Hanoch Ben-Pazi, who walked Har-Shefi through her thesis work, says Chouchani's personal experience mirrored that of European Jewswho moved to the West in the first half of the 20th century. 

"Chouchani belongs to the same group of young people from Eastern Europe who came to the West and admired the Enlightenment and the vast knowledge that was now available to them," he said. "The same thing happened to Rabbi [Joseph] Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the Lubavitcher Rebbe [Menachem Mendel Schneerson.]"

Soloveitchik, Heschel, and Schneerson were all born in Eastern Europe, but immigrated to the United States in their youth and went on to become the greatest Jewish leaders of the 20th century. 

"They all tried to preserve the Torah world, but still wanted to be part of the enlightened world," Ben-Pazi continued. "This is a complicated task. In the end, each of them had their own journey." 

Ben-Pazi has also spent a great deal of time deciphering Chouchani's works. 

"It is clear that from a historical and biographical point of view that Chochani's is a classic Jewish story," he said. "On the other hand, seeing how his teachings affected his students and where it led them, we see that his influence on Western thought, albeit indirect, is much greater than one would assume."

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The late Holocaust survivor, human-rights activist and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel became the first modern Jew to have a bust of his face sculpted into the stonework of the Washington National Cathedral's Human Rights Porch on Oct. 12, the last to be installed among four luminaries such as Mother Teresa and Rosa Parks.

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A small, invitation-only audience attended an unveiling ceremony lasting more than two hours, where Wiesel was eulogized by distinguished individuals such as former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; historian John Meacham; Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, former chairman of the US Holocaust Memorial Council; Sara Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum; Mehnaz Afridi, director of the Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith Education Center; Wai Wai Nu, founder of the Women's Peace Network; and Rabbi David Saperstein, former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.

The Very Rev. Randolph Hollerith, dean of the cathedral, said that Wiesel's bust was added because of his Jewish faith and not in spite of it.

"His global activism was rooted in and fueled by his belief in a just and merciful God," Hollerith said.

The event's last speaker was Wiesel's only child and son, Elisha Wiesel, who thanked the cathedral for the honor and for recognizing his father as an observant Jew, even introducing a blemish into the bust to address biblical concerns against graven images.

Wiesel's speech focused on his father's Judaism, as well as support for the State of Israel, which he inextricably linked. In his speech, Wiesel, 49, asked questions of his father, who died in 2016, that illuminated those beliefs less often considered by the secular world.

"Today, you are recognized for speaking out against silence, but sometimes, I see people quote your admonition against silence as an excuse to scream at others with contempt, self-righteousness and anger. You never humiliated, ridiculed or screamed," Wiesel said.

"But what's hardest for me is seeing those who read your books cry for the dead Jews, quote your protests against injustice, and then condemn in the most unforgiving terms the 6 million Jews living in Israel who refuse to ever again depend on the world to rescue them.

"No longer stateless and defenseless, these Jews, my brothers and sisters, face difficult circumstances and sometimes impossible choices. For this, they are held to a different standard than any other nation on earth by America's elite."

Wiesel, a successful businessman who has in recent years campaigned against antisemitism and anti-Zionism, spoke to JNS by phone on Tuesday about the experience, as well as current issues with antisemitism and Jewish unity.

Q: How do you feel about your father being honored in such a way, being the first modern Jew in the cathedral?

"It's a profound measure of respect, right? For me, the cathedral was presented to me as a multi-faith institution. I know that that's not 100% right because it is primarily Episcopalian. But the thing that ultimately really moved me was that it's an American institution, and my father was a passionately loyal and fervent citizen.

"I could tell you about some of the conversations I've had with him; you might be surprised what positions he took on some things, but he was such a proud American. You have to remember, this country offered him citizenship when nobody else had.

"When he arrived, he was still on a journalist visa, and he had been in a very bad traffic accident, and I think he was worried he'd missed the opportunity to renew his visa. He went to the customs office, and they said, 'You know, you don't have to renew your visa. You could become a citizen.'

"Now, imagine that happening in this day and age. But that was a very powerful moment for my father. He really treasured being an American. So to have him enshrined in such a powerful American institution is quite meaningful."

Q: Most people in your place would have probably spoken about what your father witnessed and his accomplishments, but you chose to ask questions of your father and society, which was a very interesting take, and then also linked your father's work closer to the Israel issue, when some people keep them separate for such an occasion. Why did you decide to do that?

"I wanted to provide some balance. You know, one of the things that I was most worried about is this concept that others will tell the story of my father and who he was. But I know what was most important to my father – because he told me regularly – and that was to be a good Jew. And for him, being a good Jew, that was the ultimate thing to unpack. There were so many pieces to that.

"For him to be a good Jew meant to be an observant Jew. For him to be a good Jew meant to be someone connected to Israel and to the Jewish people and to Jews all around the world, whatever their needs are. And for him to be a good Jew meant to be a good person and to be an activist, and to stand up for other people and to broadcast the values that he derived from his faith. You know, my sense was that we're at a time in American history where my father is mostly remembered only for the third.

"I think that my father is remembered for his accomplishments on the diplomatic stage, for having been a human-rights activist. And it's really only those who knew him or who read him closely or listened to his lectures, that acknowledge what a profound part of my father's identity was wrapped up in being a Jew with all that it meant – the Zionism, the Yiddishkeit, all of it.

"Had every other speaker gotten up there and talked about my father as a Jew, I would have balanced it out by talking about my father as a global human-rights activist. But I had a sense that the way that the program was being constructed was very much going to be about my father as a universalist, and thus I felt it was to me to inject that particular."

Q: I understand that you're spending a large part of your time now trying to get politics out of the discussion of antisemitism, is that correct?

"I don't know that you can get politics out of the discussion. I think it's more a question of recognizing that it exists across all parts of the political arena."

Q: Do you think today's polarization is the worst you've seen?

"Yes, but I'm older than I was, so I probably notice things more. I'm more sensitized to it. I mean, I'm sure that there were very tough times for us during my lifetime that I just didn't appreciate as keenly. But yeah, it feels very bad now. And I think it may feel particularly bad because we're at risk to losing so many of our own people.

"You look at some of the polls and it's clear that we're not doing a great job with our next generation of American Jewry, getting them to understand very basic things.

"Forget the Holocaust-education piece – the fact that so many Americans don't know what Auschwitz was. But with words to Jewish identity among Jews, these polls come out that suggest that there are too many Jews out there who would agree with the statement that Israel should not exist, who would agree with the statement that Israel is guilty of genocide. So it somehow feels worse to me now in that we've even lost the plot a little bit with some of our own people."

Q: Are you worried about this embrace, especially among some Democrats and a lot of young progressives, of calling Israel an apartheid state?

"Of course, I'm worried, and it's such a shame because I think if you look at Jewish activism over the past century in this country, so much of it has been aligned with progressive ideals. And the thought that causes that we agree with – whether it's the importance of voting rights, whether it's the importance of gender or equality, or for the LGBTQ community to not feel persecuted – whatever the issue is Jews have, by and large, been on the right side of these things.

"And then to discover that within these communities, this hate can take hold. I think there's really two parts of it – one is that there are definitely conscious actors out there looking to seed lies and hatred among people that are very impressionable and very passionate.

"And then I think that there is a fair amount of ignorance. We've gotten intellectually lazy as a country, and Israel-Palestine is hard, so who wants to sit there and do the work to understand the truth of what it means that Israel has had to fight defensive wars."

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Q: You just told me that it's impossible to get this issue depoliticized, so how do we move on? What are your suggestions for attacking antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment?

"I think we have to do what we've been doing all along, which is to call it out when we see it. But we also have to not give up and cede territory. You know, it might be so tempting, particularly on the more progressive side of politics to say, "This feels like a betrayal. You know what? We're not going to engage in these causes anymore." But I think that's a mistake, and I think that the credibility that we earn, rightfully, by being there for the most important causes in this country will over time show our allies as opposed to telling them that our values truly are in sync.

"So that's why I very much believe that we can't cede the progressive territory. Those of us who believe in some of these very important causes need to continue standing up for them and do so as Zionists. And we don't need to hit them over the head with it, but people need to understand that we're not going to be excluded from any part of the political sphere where we feel we want to operate."

Q: Antisemitism has been around for thousands of years and in every culture, whether people lived besides Jews or not. I'm assuming the problem of totally getting rid of antisemitism is not possible. How else could we approach the issue if we cannot totally eradicate it?

"There are all sorts of spheres in which one can operate. In the political sphere—what I said earlier—we have to be true to our values and show up for the causes we believe in, and ultimately, our allies will see that we're showing, not telling.

"But I also think it's true in the personal sphere. And you know, it's interesting, voices as diverse as the Chabad-Lubavitch movement and [former New York Times editor and columnist] Bari Weiss speak about this, how important it is to be prosemitic. The best way to be anti-antisemitic is to be prosemitic. And that means if you're raising a family, raise them a little bit more Jewish than you otherwise might. If you aren't keeping Shabbat dinner, keep Shabbat dinner. If you haven't been to shul in a long time, go to shul. Talk about Israel at the dinner table. Connect to a family member in Israel or schedule a trip once COVID allows.

"I think that there is a lot of truth in that the best way to fight against the darkness is to just be the light. And there's so much in our tradition and in our peoplehood to appreciate and explore, that I think once people get started a little bit down that path it becomes an easier path to travel."

Q: Do you think that it's possible to eradicate it? What's your end goal?

"There's a commentary that says, "Esau hates Jacob." And it's just the way it is. I don't know if you can ever fully erase it. But I don't know that we need to fully erase it. We need to erase it enough that it doesn't prevent us from living the lives that we want to lead and, thank God, we have a State of Israel now where the Jewish people have a point of security that we haven't had in 2,000 years. So I think the expectation that we're going to eliminate it completely is too idealistic."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Washington National Cathedral, the massive Episcopal house of worship that prides itself on being an unfinished work-in-progress whose stones and stained glass tell the story of the 20th and 21st centuries, is unveiling its newest addition: a carving of iconic author, human rights campaigner, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

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The carving completes a quartet of heads of prominent figures sprouting from the four corners of an alcove known as the Human Rights Porch, joining Mother Teresa, Rosa Parks, and Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a young Episcopal theologian and civil rights crusader who was shot to death in Alabama in 1965, giving his life to protect a 17-year-old Black woman.

"This is the space where we celebrate human aspiration," cathedral spokesman Kevin Eckstrom said.

Wiesel, who died in 2016, was the author of 57 books including "Night," which is based on his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. He became an outspoken advocate for human rights causes around the world, helped found the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

The Rev. Randy Hollerith, the cathedral's dean, chose Wiesel for the alcove's final corner, calling him "the living embodiment of resilience in the face of hatred." Wiesel's inclusion is particularly important as the number of living Holocaust survivors dwindles, he added.

"We have to make sure that we keep that reality in front of people," Hollerith said. "Those who stood for human rights and human dignity ought to be part of this sacred space."

Artist Chas Fagan, who created all the sculptures in the Human Rights Porch, worked off photos and videos provided by Wiesel's family to fashion a clay image of Wiesel's head that cathedral stone carver Sean Callahan and head stonemason Joe Alonso used to make a plaster model. Then Callahan, using specialized calibration equipment, painstakingly carved the image into a small slab of rock that has been sticking out of the wall for years awaiting a fourth face.

During an early April visit to the cathedral by The Associated Press, Callahan was putting the finishing touches on the carving about 10 feet (3 meters) above the floor.

"We're about 95% of the way there," said Callahan, who also did the other three faces. "But this last 5% takes forever because there's a lot of precise detail work."

He was able to complete the job about twice as quickly as the previous ones because the cathedral was closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, meaning he didn't have to work around sermons and other events.

Before it was permanently etched into stone, the image of Wiesel was approved by his widow, Marion. The Holocaust Museum and the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity will partner with the cathedral for a series of events and programs later in the year.

Conceived in the 1990s, the Human Rights Porch also includes small statues of former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Óscar Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 and was later canonized as a saint by Pope Francis, in 2018.

Wiesel's addition highlights Washington National's unusual nature as a living canvas — unlike other Gothic cathedrals which are, by definition, somewhat frozen in time.

Alongside traditional figures like the Apostles St. Paul and St. Peter, there are dozens of modern features: a carving of Helen Keller, who is buried there; a statue of Martin Luther King Jr., who delivered his final Sunday sermon at the cathedral in 1968 before his assassination in Memphis; and a stained glass window dedicated to scientific achievements that includes a piece of moon rock.

Another modern, and whimsical, touch is the so-called businessman or yuppie gargoyle, depicting a Gothic creature with sideburns and holding a briefcase.

"One of the wonderful things about having a 20th-century cathedral," Hollerith said, "is that you can have 20th-century iconography in it."

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The world will mark Yom Hashoah – Holocaust Memorial Day – on April 7-8 with particular attention on the 80th anniversary of the Nazi campaign to eradicate the Jews of Eastern Europe – a genocide that put Jewish families to the most painful of tests.

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The tensile and enduring strength of the Jewish family is now on full view in a new online exhibition at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum 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 one-third of Europe's Jewish population who survived remained 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, notes Katz. "The Germans gave the locals the freedom to express their own antisemitism in the most deadly way," he said.

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 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 have yet to be discovered, according to some historians. The most famous of these killing sprees was Babi Yar near Kiev on Yom Kippur eve in 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," said 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 was the hardest," she added. "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," said her son, Yitzchak Lev. "She was so attached to her family, and she knew how much they worried about her being so far away."

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," said Lev. But two months after sending the postcard, that dream died as her parents and four of their seven children were murdered along 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, 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 murdered. Her mother, Stephania, survived hiding with other Jews in a movie theater until one month before liberation, when someone turned them in. They were among the last Jews of Lvov to be murdered. 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.

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," said Esther Farbstein, an Israeli historian who founded and directs the Center for Holocaust Studies at Michlalah – Jerusalem College and is the 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 asked. By keeping their traditions as best they could, she said – 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," said Farbstein.

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.

This doesn't surprise Steven Katz, the historian. "All the jokes made about Jewish mothers don't recognize the truth," he said. "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.

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"'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," said 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.'"

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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An international commission headed by Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel concluded in 2004 that between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews were killed in Romania and areas it controlled during the war, as an ally of Nazi Germany.

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Romania has only recently started to come to terms with its role in the extermination of Jews, admitting for the first time in 2003 that it had taken part.

The new museum, in coordination with the Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, aims to promote Romanian Jewish history, culture, and traditions and highlight Romanian Jews' contribution to the modernization of Romanian society.

"The Romanian state demonstrates consistency in meeting the goal aimed at recovering the memory of the Holocaust, strengthening the education about the Holocaust and combating anti-Semitism," Iohannis said in comments to members of the Wiesel Institute and local Jewish community leaders.

The museum will be located in an 8,000 square meter (8,600 square foot), eight-story building erected on the central Calea Victoriei avenue in 1943-1946 by international tire producer Banloc-Goodrich for its employees.

Romania switched sides in the war in 1944 as the Soviet Red Army swept down into the Balkans. The Communist regime which then took power did little to uncover the killings of Jews.

Romania was home to 750,000 Jews before the war, but only 8,000-10,000 remain today.

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