These stories express the Jewish community’s two highest hopes and deepest fears. The first hope is that the Jews in this new place will remain part of the chain of Jewish tradition, and the second hope is that the local population will accept them.

Where was God at Auschwitz? Sooner or later this was the question I had to ask, because the Holocaust still casts its shadow over Jewish life.

And here we come to one of the great unsolved problems in the history of the Jewish people.

For the past century, perhaps for much longer, a deep ambivalence has cast its shadow over Jewish life.