When was yom kippur 1944

But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing his praises. New York: Hill and Wang, , p. What I find most striking about this passage is the faith it communicates: starving men debate as if their life or death depended on the outcome. Elie Wiesel tells his readers that he did not fast that Yom Kippur.

In part, he did not do so because his father—knowing that his son needed every morsel of food—forbade him from doing so. But he did not fast for another reason. It was not an act of denial, but an act of faith.

Indeed, Wiesel has never stopped thinking of God, never stopped questioning God. This week Elie Wiesel turned During the Holocaust, with depravations and constant fear of Nazi terror, it was dangerous but not completely impossible to resist. In addition to armed resistance, there were a number of ways Jews were able to engage in unarmed defiance. One of these ways was through spiritual resistance; maintaining humanity and dignity in the face of Nazi attempts to dehumanise and degrade them.

Religious activities and services were forbidden in the majority of ghettos and camps, yet many Jews prayed and held ceremonies in secret. On Rosh Hashanah in , Rabbi Naftali Stern, a Hungarian Jewish inmate of the Wolfsberg camp wrote out the entire Rosh Hashanah service from memory with just a pencil stub on scraps torn from bags of cement. A group of them, led by a cantor from Manhattan, conducted a special religious service at the city of Aachen.

For the first time since the advent of Hitler, the exterminator of millions of Jews, a public Jewish service was being held and broadcast live to the United States by NBC. Artillery shells exploded in the distance as the Jewish GIs prayed. The synagogue in Aachen was among the hundreds destroyed on Kristallnacht in -- when the Nazis unleashed a fury against Jewish houses of worship. And now, although the synagogue was a ruin and many of Aachen's Jewish citizens had perished in the Holocaust, the words of the Jewish New Year service were heard.

Words addressed to the Lord: "For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. They stood in a cluster of soldiers, their tallises [prayer shawls] draped over their shoulders.