The Klausenberger Rebbe, the leader of a Hasidic Jewish community in Poland, was separated from his wife and 11 children upon arrival in Auschwitz Birkenau. Left alone in the world, the Rebbe sat in the barrack, and for the first time in his life, he cried. He had never cried before, but on that first Saturday morning in the barrack in Auschwitz, he cried to G-d: “Why has everything been taken from me?”

The Holocaust is a breaking point in the relationship between humanity and the Divine. How can one continue to believe in a Righteous G-d who cares about the Children of Israel, the Jewish people, in the darkness that follows this horror?

After hours of the Rebbe’s crying, a man walked into the barrack. He brought bread with jam so that the Rebbe would have something to eat that was somehow kosher. With this act of kindness to give him strength, the Rebbe found he could carry on. This was an act of G-d, he thought, taking and giving.

The Rebbe held onto that belief. He was sent with the other men in his barrack to forced labour – pulling concrete and stones up a hill. One day, halfway up the hill, the Rebbe fell. All the men knew that if he did not get up, he would be beaten to death. The men around him began to wonder where they would bury him. But the Rebbe got up.

As they continued up the hill, one of the men asked the Rebbe, “Will you still say, ‘You chose us from all the people’?” The Rebbe answered, “Maybe I did not say that with intent until today, but now, I will say it with even more intent. If I was not a Jew, maybe I would be that Nazi officer.”

……..

On Yom Kippur, three months after liberation, the Klausenberger Rebbe expressed the anger and grief that encompassed everyone who had passed through the darkness.

“Ashamnu – Did we sin? Bagadnu – Were we unfaithful?… Were we, G-d forbid, unfaithful to G-d and fail to remain loyal to him? Gazalnu – did we steal? From whom did we steal in Auschwitz and Mühldorf? … Maradnu – We rebelled? Against whom? We rebelled against you, Master of the Universe?…  This Vidui (confession) was not written for us.” He closed his machzor [holiday prayer book].

“But,” he thundered anew, “we are guilty of sins that are not written in the machzor… How many times did many of us pray, ‘Master of the Universe, I have no more strength, take my soul so I will not have to recite Modeh Ani (morning prayer) anymore’?… We must ask the Almighty to restore our faith and trust in Him. ‘Trust in G-d forever.’… Pour your hearts out to Him.” (Yom Kippur 1945 Fährenwald DP Camp, Germany)

The Rebbe knew that somehow, they must rebuild Jewish life, even in the aftermath of the horror of the Holocaust. Perhaps most especially in its aftermath.

On the evening of that same Yom Kippur, the Rebbe had sat in his room in the Displaced Persons (DP) camp, getting ready for his first Day of Atonement as a free man. A knock on his door took him away from his thoughts.

A girl stood outside his door crying. “Why are you crying?” the Rebbe asked her. “What is wrong?”

“It is the evening of Yom Kippur and my parents are dead,” she told him. “Who will bless me before the fast? What do I do? My father used to bless me before the fast began until he was killed by them….”

The Rebbe put his hand on her head and blessed her. The girl left the Rebbe’s room, and within minutes a queue of children stood outside his room waiting for their blessing. Later in his life, the Rebbe said, “I had 11 children who were killed in the gas chambers, but in the DP camp, I had, within one day, 80 children.”

……..

On that same Yom Kippur, General Eisenhower, the leader of the American forces in Europe, came to visit the DP camp. He wanted to see what was being done to restore Jewish life. Everyone from the DP camp gathered to listen. A long table was set up for the dignitaries. The American delegation agreed that the Rebbe could speak first, but they had conditions: he could not mention G-d; he could not talk about the Holocaust, only about the return to life; and he must speak briefly.

The delegation came to the DP camp and took their places at the long table. As the Rebbe walked over to greet General Eisenhower, he picked up a Tallit (a prayer shawl). He said the blessing for wearing the Tallit, mentioning G-d in the process. The first rule broken.

The Rebbe turned to the people. That they had all been saved, he told them, that they had been through the Shoah and saved by G-d, that they were still alive, meant there was a purpose and a mission in this world. It meant that they had a purpose in living. The people listening wept, feeling for the first time that they could cry. There was nothing left to say.

In spite of his having broken every rule the Americans set for him, the Rebbe’s speech moved the General. “What can I do for you?” the General asked. The Rebbe replied, “Today is Yom Kippur. In four days, we will start Sukkot. Could you get for us the four species (the four plants necessary for the rituals of Sukkot)? That is all we need now.” The General had the four species flown out from Rome to the DP camp.

……..

The Rebbe went on to visit other DP camps, collecting the broken people and bringing them back to life with conversation, with tears, and with the conviction that there is a point to living. With the certainty that there is a purpose in restoring the emuna (belief) in G-d.

The Holocaust was indeed a breaking point in the relationship between humanity and the Divine. There were many who asked the question, how can one continue to believe in a Righteous G-d in the darkness that follows this horror? Some lost their faith in the Almighty and found they could not get it back. In the midst of the questions, the Klausenberger Rebbe’s ability to believe and bring hope and life back to his community was a light in the darkness.

As we confront violence, injustice, and both personal and global crises — in new forms and old —many of us are again asking how we reconcile belief in goodness or a higher purpose with the suffering that exists in the world. The resilience shown by the Klausenberger Rebbe serves as a powerful reminder that even in the darkest times, it is possible to find hope, rebuild communities, and sustain faith. The Rebbe’s example challenges us to consider how we, too, can strive to find hope and believe in a better future.

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On Thursday the 13th of May 1948, the day before Israel declared its independence, seven brave women fell defending the village of Kfar Etzion. They were Holocaust survivors, and they were the sole survivors of their families. They were Last of Kin.

The previous morning, Wednesday the 12th, only two days before the declaration of the Jewish State and the end of the British Mandate, the Arab League had attacked the four Jewish villages in Gush Etzion. By the end of that day the Gush was split in two, and hardly any ammunition was left in any of the villages.

On Thursday, the Jewish villages fell one by one. Kfar Etzion was the last one standing. The Jewish men and women of the village were outnumbered and outgunned. By nightfall, the last radio communication went out: “The Queen has fallen, Kfar Etzion fell in the battle.” Of the brave men and women defending Kfar Etzion, only four survived the battle.

Out of 127 Jewish men and women who died defending Gush Etzion, ten were Last of Kin, the sole survivors of their families from the Holocaust: three men and seven women. One of these women was Ester Drisiger Koyfman. Ester was twenty-four years old when she died.

Ester’s life and death are a microcosm of the journey that many Jews had to take from the quiet pre-war world through the camps and the hardships and suffering of the Holocaust, from having to create one’s own new path after the war through the struggle to reach the promised land, culminating in their willingness to lay down their lives to defend the right of Jews to live in that land. Today, on the eve of Israel’s 76th Day of Independence, I would like to share her story with you.

Ester was born on the 6th of November 1923 in Mielec, Poland to Bluma and Moshe Drisinger. At the age of six, she was sent to live with her aunt and uncle, the Hershkovitz family, in Uściszów. Although Ester’s aunt and uncle were Hasidic, she went to a Polish school. Once she completed her studies she worked with her uncle.

When the Nazis came to Uściszów, Ester was deported to Chrzanów labor camp in upper Silesia. Through the months and years of the war, she was transferred from camp to camp. Upon her liberation, Ester discovered that she was the last of her kin – no one else from her entire family had survived. Her parents and aunt and uncle were all sent to the camp that was established right next to their village of Uściszów: the Auschwitz complex.

Ester found herself alone in the world. She found community in the Ichud kibbutz training group in Ostrowiec and decided she wanted to make her way to Israel. Together with the Ichud, she moved to the American-controlled zone of Germany. They made their way to Bergen Belsen, now a Displaced Persons (DP) camp.

Ester and her friends did not plan to stay at the DP camp for long, though. It was merely a stop on their way to the land of Israel. They planned to cross the border to Belgium but had no legal papers to allow them to cross. When they tried to sneak across the border, Ester and her comrades were caught and sentenced to several months at the Hamburg prison. Once again, this group of Holocaust Survivors found themselves imprisoned.

Upon their release they moved to Landsberg DP camp. In the spring of 1946, they made their way to Italy. In Italy, Ester parted ways with Ichud. She chose instead to join the Ayala group, part of the religious Zionist Bnei Akiva movement.

On the 2nd of August 1946, Ester and her Ayala comrades boarded the ship Operation Boatswain (כ”ג יורדי הסירה) organized by the Mossad Le’Aliyah Bet who were attempting to bring immigrants into the land of Israel illegally. The ship set sail with 790 Jewish Holocaust refugees.

After several rough months at sea, as the ship reached the waters near Cyprus, a British Air patrol discovered them. The patrol called for naval reinforcement to stop the ship from entering the waters of Israel. The British Navy seized the ship and towed it to the Port of Haifa in Israel. The refuges on board were informed they would be deported to a detention camp in Cyprus. The refugees, Ester among them, went on a hunger strike in protest, but it was of no use. They were forcibly taken off the ship and transferred to Cyprus. For a second time after the Holocaust, Ester was imprisoned.

In early 1947, Ester was released and permitted to enter the land of Israel. She joined Kfar Etzion, the first settlement in Gush Etzion. Ester integrated well into the life in the village. In December 1947, she married Zalman Koyfman, a resident of Kfar Etzion.

Settled village life was not to last, however. According to the UN partition decision of 29 November 1947, Gush Etzion was not to be part of the Jewish state that was about to be established. Within days, the surrounding Arab villages launched attacks on the Gush and blocked the access roads between the Gush and Jerusalem. Gush Etzion was under siege.

Like all the adult members in Gush Etzion, Ester served as part of the Etzion Battalion in the Haganah (which would later become the IDF). She participated in the guarding of the village during the siege. On the 12th of May 1947, the Arab Legion, led by the Jordanian army, launched their attack on the Gush.

Ester was among the fighters responsible for providing first aid. On the second day of the attack, Ester and her comrades sheltered in a German monastery in the village. The Legion’s forces had entered the village but could not extract Ester and her comrades from the shelter. They blew up the entire monastery, killing all the people sheltering there.

The following day, on the 14th of May 1948, the State of Israel declared its independence, and the British Mandate ended.

The bodies of all the fallen remained in their place of death, in the Gush that was occupied by the Jordanians. In a special military operation in 1949, their remains were brought to Jerusalem and laid to rest in a joint grave on Mount Herzel.

Ester may have been the Last of her Kin, but we will ensure that she will not be forgotten.

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