Two months after his parents and two sisters were brutally murdered in their home by Hamas terrorists during the Oct. 7 massacre at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Ariel Zohar celebrated his bar mitzvah.

The Tefillin that he placed around his arm and on his head were given to him by his Holocaust-survivor grandfather, who got it from his late father. Despite the charred home, the Tefillin stayed intact and was recovered by first responders.

“My first visit to his court lasted almost an entire night,” writes Elie Wiesel, author, Nobel Prize laureate, and famed Holocaust survivor, in his Memoirs regarding how he came to Brooklyn, sometime in the early ’60s, in order to make the acquaintance of the Rebbe, Rabbi M.M. Schneerson.

"Rebbe,’ I asked, ‘how can you believe in G‑d after Auschwitz?’ He looked at me in silence for a long moment, his hands resting on the table. Then he replied, in a soft, barely audible voice, ‘How can you not believe in G‑d after Auschwitz'?”

In a powerful essay published by The Wall Street Journal, titled “I Kept My Freedom in Hamas Captivity,” former hostage Agam Berger shares her extraordinary reflections on endurance, faith, and the meaning of Passover during her months of captivity in Gaza.

“When Hamas overran our base on October 7, many of my friends were murdered,” Berger writes. “In those harrowing moments, as I was being kidnapped, I had the freedom to choose what to say. I recited, over and over, the same verse that Jews on the threshold of death have whispered for generations: Shema Yisrael, Hashem Elokeinu, Hashem Echad — 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.'”