The new display at Yad Vashem's active synagogue, which opened on January 1, shows how Jews made extraordinary efforts to keep track of time and observe the High Holy Days, festivals, and Shabbat while they were in hiding, in ghettos, and in death camps.
In this synagogue at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, artifacts and testimonies lining the walls reveal how Jews courageously and ingeniously preserved the calendar and celebrated the holy days during the Holocaust, even as the Nazis sought to erase their faith and traditions.
Synagogues, the heart of the Jewish community, were ransacked and destroyed during the Holocaust, leaving Jews to keep track of the Jewish calendar on their own. They often did so at great risk and with improvised techniques that were not always accurate.
Faded, handwritten Jewish calendars used by prisoners in concentration camps and forced-labor camps are featured in the exhibit. The exhibit covers the various holy days, each with an interactive screen that explains about the items, offers insightful background, and shares compelling witness testimonies relevant to each day.
“The effort to hold on to time during the war was, in itself, an act of preserving humanity,” said Michael Tal, the director of the Artifacts Department at Yad Vashem.
“In these artifacts and testimonies, we see the many inventive and courageous ways Jews marked the Hebrew calendar and celebrated the holy days, even when they were completely disconnected and stuck in a timeline of work, deportations, and death forced upon them by the Nazis. From secretly observing Shabbat to finding ways to celebrate Passover, Rosh Hashanah, and other holy days, these stories show how Jewish life and tradition endured.”
The items on display include a Haggadah written and illustrated by a young Elimelech Landau, according to a text that his father, Shmaryahu, dictated from memory while their family was in hiding in Borysław, Poland. The Landau family survived the war while hiding with a Polish family.
The exhibition also features artifacts used on the high holidays
Another part of the exhibition features artifacts used in celebrating the High Holy Days. A prayer book, The Cry of Captivity, was written from memory by Mordecai Glick and Shlomo Ullman at a POW camp in Siberia. Its binding was made of cardboard used in the packaging of tobacco packets that were sent to Red Army soldiers.
The shofar that was sounded in the Theresienstadt ghetto has been preserved. Prayers for Rosh Hashanah written by Naftali Stern while at a forced-labor camp with the stub of a pencil on pieces of a cement bag, which he acquired in exchange for valuable bread rations, are displayed.
The Scroll of Hitler, a seven-chapter scroll written by Prosper Hassine, a scribe and teacher in Casablanca in 1944 as a parallel to the Scroll of Esther, related the events of the Holocaust, including the rise of Hitler to power, the occupation of Europe, and the murder of the Jews and the plunder of their property.
A Purim grogger (noisemaker) that Kalmen Micenmacher made for his son Marcel while he was in a French transit camp, before he and his wife were murdered in Auschwitz, is displayed.
There are also testimonies from Yad Vashem’s archives about Jews who risked their lives to carry out the mitzvah of sitting in a sukkah. One of them is the remarkable story told by David Yizraeli about a rabbi who stole wood from wooden bunks and clandestinely built a sukkah in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.