“And Every Single One Was Someone”This week we commemorate Yom HaShoah.I met Ilan Greenfield 46 years ago at a month-long Jewish retreat. An Israeli, Ilan is the son of the founders of Gefen Publishing House, specializing in English-language books of Jewish and Israeli interest. Ilan is now the CEO and Gefen has offices in Jerusalem and New York.Gefen, which was founded in 1981, publishes about 40 titles a year. One of its books is titled “And Every Single One Was Someone”. It has no plot and is very difficult to read because the lettering is tiny. Even those with extraordinary vision will need reading glasses.There is only one word in this book: “Jew”. It is printed in a 5.5 font. To give you a sense of the size of the word, here it is in 8 point font: “Jew”My computer does not allow for smaller print.“Jew” is printed six million times, [...]

What Might Have Been: Staggering Numbers This week we commemorate Yom HaShoah. Yesterday, I wrote of the devastation perpetrated on the Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. While it is impossible to imagine the impact of the horror on every individual and family, it is worthwhile to contemplate what the population of our people would likely have been had the Holocaust not occurred. These are my calculations. You may want to read them slowly as it takes a bit of concentration to assimilate the figures. In 1939, the world's population was just over 2 billion. The Jewish population was 16,728,000.* At the time, Jews represented nearly .8 % of the world population. This was before the beginning of the Final Solution—the systematic murder of the Jews in Europe. After the Holocaust, in mid-1945, about 11 million Jews remained. Today, in 2024, the world population is just over [...]

Today is Yom HaShoah: Holocaust Memorial Day The era of the Holocaust began in 1933 when Adolph Hitler and his Nazi party came to power. Over the ensuing years, Jews were violently persecuted. The “Final Solution” inaugurated the systematic and organized murder of Europe’s Jews, beginning in 1941 and ending in 1945. By the end of the war, six million of our people were murdered by the Nazis, their allies and collaborators. Before the war in 1939, Europe’s Jewish population was nearly ten million. Sixty percent of the Jews of Europe died. In Poland, with the largest pre-war Jewish population of approximately 3.3 million, some 3 million, or 90% of Jews, were murdered. Russia, the second largest Jewish population of just over 3 million, lost over a million Jews. Other smaller Jewish communities such as Greece (77,00) and Lithuania (168,000) witnessed the murder of some 90% of their Jewish [...]