This is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Jeff Jacoby tells a story of Faith in the depths of Hell. (Hat tip: aFriend.)

In October 1941, “one of the respected members of the community” asked Rabbi Oshry if he could commit suicide.� His wife and children had been seized by the Nazis, and he knew that their murder was imminent.� He feared that the Nazis would force him to watch as his family was killed, and the prospect of witnessing their deaths was a horror he couldn’t bear to face.� He begged for permission to take his own life and avoid seeing his loved ones die.
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Later that month, the head of another household came to Rabbi Oshry “with tears of anguish on his face.”� His children were starving to death and he was desperate to find food for them.� His query was about a bit of property that had been left behind by the family in the next apartment.� The entire family had been butchered a few days earlier, and there were no surviving relatives.� Under Jewish law, could he take what remained of their belongings and sell them to raise cash for food?
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Next to such questions, answers seem almost superfluous.� (The rabbi did not permit the suicide; he allowed the neighbors’ property to be taken.)� What is stunning is that men and women in the throes of such hideous suffering and brutality were still concerned about adhering to Jewish law.� In the lowest depths of the Nazi hell, in a place of terror and savagery that most of us cannot fathom, here were human beings who refused to relinquish their faith — who refused even to violate a religious precept without first asking if it was allowed.