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In October 1942, SS guards at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp violently disbanded a rehearsal of a secret Jewish choir led by conductor Rosebery d'Arguto. Many in the group did not live to see morning, and those who survived were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only one of its members survived the Holocaust. Yet their story survives, thanks to Aleksander Kulisiewicz. An amateur musician, he was not Jewish, but became friends with d'Arguto in Sachsenhausen. D'Arguto tasked him with a mission: to save the musical heritage of the victims of the Nazi camps.

Jews and Roma died side by side in the Holocaust, yet the world did not recognize their destruction equally. In the years and decades following the war, the Jewish experience of genocide increasingly occupied the attention of legal experts, scholars, educators, curators, and politicians, while the genocide of Europe's Roma went largely ignored. Rain of Ash is the untold story of how Roma turned to Jewish institutions, funding sources, and professional networks as they sought to gain recognition and compensation for their wartime suffering.

Since Revolutionary times, Jews have served in the United States armed forces and fought bravely in America's wars. Jews first arrived in the New World in 1654, seeking religious freedom. Since the beginning of American nationhood, Jewish volunteers and conscripts fought in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, on both sides of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, in both World Wars, and in the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars.

"Judaism is often called the religion of reason. It is this, but it is also the religion of the soul. It recognises the value of that mystic insight, those indefinable intuitions which, taking up the task at the point where the mind impotently abandons it, carries us straight into the presence of the King."

One hot, humid day in July 1944, the Gestapo abducted 15-year-old Henry and his mother, forcing them onto cramped cattle cars in the Łódź Polish Ghetto. Like so many Jews before them, they had been selected to disappear–they were being sent to Auschwitz.

In this biography of Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, physician, and religious thinker, Alberto Manguel examines the question of his universal appeal. Moses ben Maimon, or Maimonides (1138–1204), was born in Córdoba, Spain. The gifted son of a judge and mathematician, Maimonides fled Córdoba with his family when he was thirteen due to Almohad persecution of all non-Islamic faiths. Forced into a long exile, the family spent a decade in Spain before settling in Morocco. From there, Maimonides traveled to Palestine and Egypt, where he died at Saladin’s court.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

Diciassette mesi nascosti sottoterra: l'avventura di quarantasei ebrei nel diario di un ragazzo che sfuggì ai nazisti. Nei primi mesi del 1943 l'ombra della liquidazione incombeva sul ghetto di Drohobycz, una cittadina polacca ai piedi dei Carpazi. Gli ebrei scampati a due anni di occupazione nazista sapevano di essere condannati e cercarono di nascondersi in attesa dell'Armata rossa. Alcuni di loro, raccolti attorno alle famiglie Mayer e Schwartz, spesero le ultime risorse per costruire un bunker sotto una villa.

Das berührende Memoir und die einzigartige Biographie einer Shoah-Überlebenden, die sich bis heute gegen das Vergessen engagiert. Als junges Mädchen läuft sie unbeschwert durch die staubigen Gassen des kleinen ungarischen Dorfes, in dem sie mit ihrer Familie lebt. Bis sie eines Tages nach Auschwitz deportiert wird. Edith Bruck, eine der letzten Überlebenden der Shoah, blickt zurück auf ihre eigene Geschichte.

This state-of-the-art account gives listeners the tools to understand why antisemitism is such a controversial subject. It acquaints listeners with the ambiguities inherent in the historical relationship between Jews and Christians and shows these ambiguities in play in the unfolding relationship between Jews and Canadians of other religions and ethnicities. It examines present relationships in light of history and considers particularly the influence of antisemitism on the social, religious, and political history of the Canadian Jewish community.

Between 1917 and 1921, twenty years before the Holocaust began, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish pogroms across the Ukraine. Lisa grew up transfixed by her grandmother Channa’s stories about her family being forced to flee their hometown of Stavishche, as armies and bandit groups raided village after village, killing Jewish residents.

After his father died, Leon Wieseltier began to observe the traditional year-long period of mourning, going to the synagogue three times a day to recite the prayer known as the mourner's Kaddish. Struck by the profound, yet unexpected power of this practice and the poverty of his knowledge about it, Leon began to study the history and meaning of this ancient ritual.

Three young Jewish sisters from Leipzig, Germany huddle together in the cold darkness of night waiting for their smugglers to rescue them and bring them to freedom in Belgium. Their mother, in a state of shock following Kristallnacht, is left behind, sedated in a psychiatric hospital. November 1938 begins the four year ordeal of the seven member Kroch family who endure unfathomable conditions in their fight for survival: imprisonment in French internment camps, hiding in a tiny tool shed, and adapting to the deplorable conditions of a Nazi prison.

The titan is Habib Elghanian—a self-made industrialist and the foremost Jew of his time in Iran, whom the Islamic theocracy targeted as the first civilian executed during the 1979 revolution. With Iran continuing to generate front-page news, his previously untold story is painfully relevant, shedding light on that country's persistent economic, political and social problems.

During the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of diggers, prospectors, merchants, and dealers extracted and shipped over 50 million carats of diamonds from South Africa to London. The primary supplier to the world, South Africa's diamond fields became one of the formative sites of modern capitalist production. At each stage of the diamond's route through the British empire and beyond—from Cape Town to London, from Amsterdam to New York City—carbon gems were primarily mined, processed, appraised, and sold by Jews.

In ways visible and invisible to their fellow recruits and conscripts, the experience of Jews was distinct from that of other soldiers who served in Lincoln's armies. Adam D. Mendelsohn draws for the first time upon the vast database of verified listings of Jewish soldiers serving in the Civil War collected by The Shapell Roster, as well as letters, diaries, and newspapers, to examine the collective experience of Jewish soldiers and to recover their voices and stories.

In the Bible Elijah is a zealous prophet, attacking idolatry and injustice, championing God. He performs miracles, restoring life and calling down fire. When his earthly life ends, he vanishes in a whirlwind, carried off to heaven in a fiery chariot. Was this a spectacular death, or did Elijah escape death entirely? The latter view prevailed. Though residing in heaven, Elijah revisits earth—to help, rescue, enlighten, and eventually herald the Messiah.

In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish-language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it.

Today there are two seemingly mutually exclusive notions of what “the Jews” are: either a religion or a nation/ethnicity. In this provocative book, based on his decades of study of the history of the Jews, Daniel Boyarin lays out the problematic aspects of this binary opposition and offers the outlines of a different—and very old—answer to the question of the identity of a diaspora nation. He aims to drive a wedge between the “nation” and the “state,” only very recently conjoined, and recover a robust sense of nationalism that does not involve sovereignty.

Judy Weissenberg is the mischievous and lively youngest child growing up in a large family in Debrecen, Hungary. But as the Nazis rise to power in Europe and anti-Jewish laws tear her family and community apart, Judy’s joyful youth becomes marred by fear and the hushed whispers of the...