“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'?”

As we usher in the holiday of Passover, the time of our freedom, we also reflect on the meaning of freedom in our own daily lives.

Passover is the festival of freedom from slavery. But it seems surprising to celebrate freedom by eating Matzah and not eating bread! Even more so, only forty nine days after leaving Egypt, the Jewish people received the Torah which includes both many positive Mitzvot and prohibitions. Aren't restrictions the exact opposite of freedom?

In the early seventies, the Jewish Federation of North America decided to launch a campaign. They sought to institute that at every Seder table there should be an empty chair to bring into the Jewish consciousness the awareness that - if not for the holocaust and the loss of our 6 million - there would have been another Jew sitting in that seat.