Category: Memoir

Letters From Gaza

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Crisis, Family, Grief, Heroism, Israel, Jewish Identity, Language, Leadership, Memoir, Mourning, Nationalism, October 7, Politics, Redemption, Religion, War, ZionismLeave a comment

Sergeant Itay Amar was nineteen when he fell in combat in the southern Gaza Strip in June 2024, along with seven of his peers. After receiving his locked iPhone among his belongings, his mother, Lorin, tried to open it, insisting he must have left some kind of message behind. “He left one . . . I know my son. That’s what he was like his whole life, keeping me posted. It couldn’t be that he’d go in and not leave anything behind. It wouldn’t be grandiose, maybe just one sentence, but it would be there.”

Eventually Lorin got into the phone, and found a short last note: “Stay happy for me.” The words comforted her and the rest of Itay’s family and were engraved on his tombstone.

Like most armies, the IDF does not require soldiers to write letters of farewell to their families before entering combat. Still, these letters are written, on scraps of paper, unsent emails, or Google documents.

In 2024, copywriter Shlomo Kavas and journalist Racheli Palant-Rozen decided to collect and preserve these notes, working with researchers to contact each fallen soldier’s family. The result was If You’re Reading These Words, a book of forty-nine letters presented largely unedited, with notes explaining the context of each letter: inside jokes, family legends, quotations from songs, poems, and the Bible. Each letter is introduced with a brief biography of the soldier, a record of how they fell in combat, and an artist’s sketch of their face in blue and white. President Isaac Herzog wrote the Foreword, and interspersed throughout are essays by a wide range of Israeli public figures, from freed hostage Emily Damari and Fauda creator Avi Issacharoff to spiritual influencer Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi and singer-songwriter Eviatar Banai, offering their own kind of running narrative of tragedy and hope.

The book was first published in Hebrew in 2025 and was an immediate bestseller. Comedian and journalist Hanoch Daum called it “one of the most important war books ever published in Israel.”

For the full review see The Jewish Review of Books.

Children of the Book

On By SarahIn Book Review, Children, Children's Literature, Classics, Corona, Covid-19, Crisis, Eishet Chayil, Family, Feminism, Gender, Hebrew, Israel, Jewish Holidays, Jewish Identity, Marriage, Memoir, Motherhood, Parenting, Religion, Western CivilizationLeave a comment

“Books, even works of genius, are not incandescent orbs that exist independently in some kind of ether. For books to have enduring value, they must be read by people. For those readers to exist, they must be born and raised.”

Was a pleasure to review Ilana Kurshan’s fantastic new book for the Summer issue of Tradition, now available online.

The Rabbi Who Chose Trans Orthodoxy

On By SarahIn Aliyah, Chabad, Children, Ethics, Family, Feminism, Film, Gender, Hassidut, Israel, Jerusalem, Jewish Identity, Kabbalah, Marriage, Memoir, Morality, Parenting, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Review3 Comments

“Shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, Rabbi Yaakov Smith, a father of six and an emissary of the Chabad Hasidic movement in the Old City of Jerusalem, hosted a Shabbat dinner. As the guests were leaving, one took Smith aside and said something that would reverberate with his host: “That was an amazing act you performed. Whatever is wrong, take care of yourself.” Fast forward thirty years and Yaakov has become Yiscah Smith, a transgender person who still lives and teaches in Jerusalem. Smith’s transformation is the subject of the documentary I Was Not Born a Mistake, created by the Israeli filmmakers Rachel Rusinek and Eyal Ben-Moshe. The film premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival this past Hanukkah and made its U.S. debut in January.:

Read the full review at First Things.

A Family Treasure: The Siddur That Survived Auschwitz

On By SarahIn Family, Holocaust, Jewish Identity, Memoir, Prayer, Psalms, ReligionLeave a comment

lasting-impressions-rindner-siddur-holocaust-auschwitz

My young daughter was playing in my mother’s living room and approached me holding a battered prayer book she found on the shelf. When I realized what it was, I gasped. I hadn’t thought of it in years, but the siddur is a family treasure. My grandmother, Raizel Berger, a native of the Maramures region of Romania, was sent to Auschwitz along with her family in 1944. She managed to smuggle a small siddur into the camp by hiding it in her stocking garter. The young women in her bunker, mostly Chasidic Jews from Romania and Hungary, took turns praying from it each night. One of the girls worked in the kitchen and snuck out a potato sack to use as a cover for the siddur, onto which she used a rough yarn to beautifully embroider a Star of David in the center. The pages of the siddur are delicate with age, but the section of Tehillim (Psalms) is particularly worn from repeated use.

After the war, my grandmother married my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor from Poland. They moved to the United States and had four daughters in quick succession. The siddur continued to be used on a daily basis in their brownstone home in Brooklyn. Each holiday, my grandparents lit dozens of Yizkor candles for their many murdered family members. But their resilience to transition into loving parents and industrious new immigrants almost immediately after surviving such horrors still baffles the mind. So too the siddur, once hidden in the bowels of a dark dungeon and used by inmates of the most horrific and debased place on earth, transitioned to use for mundane, though still holy, daily prayers. In unsentimental fashion typical of Jews of my grandparents’ type, the siddur was not treated as a talisman. At some point, someone even scrawled a phone number on the inside cover…

For the full essay please see the Winter 2019/2020 edition of Jewish Action Magazine.