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Of all the more than thirty heroes I researched for my new historical novel, The Rabbi’s Holocaust Heroes Museum, I was particularly intrigued by David Kaufmann and Feodora Kahn of Grand Island, Nebraska. These two cousins, born more than three decades apart, saved approximately eighty families from the madness of Nazi Germany without ever leaving Nebraska.

Their story begins in 1903 when twenty-six year old Kaufmann emigrated from his native Germany with dreams of developing a retailing career in America. A few months after arriving in New York he was hired as a clerk and window dresser at the Abraham and Strauss (A&S) department store on Fulton Street in Brooklyn. One day Kaufmann assisted a customer named Samuel Wolbach, the owner of a small two-story department store in Grand Island who was in New York City ordering merchandise for sale back home. Wolbach was so impressed with David Kaufmann that he offered him a job in Grand Island, and convinced Kaufmann that there was a quite a good future to be had in the Mid-West.

By the early 1930s David Kaufmann owned not only a chain of these five and dime stores, but also movie theatres and a bank. Throughout his years in America David Kaufmann kept up his connections with family and friends in Germany via letters and periodic visits. Feodora Levy Kahn, born in 1910, was one of the many relatives that Kaufmann visited and stayed in touch with.

By 1936 Feodora was married and acutely aware of the deteriorating political situation in Germany. She wrote to Kaufmann and asked for his sponsorship so that she and her husband (Isidor) could leave Germany for America. Kaufmann, true to his word, responded by promptly filling out and signing an Affidavit of Support.

On September 7, 1936 the Kahns arrived at Ellis Island and shortly thereafter headed to Grand Island. For the next decade Kahn actively communicated with relatives and friends in Germany and arranged for Kaufmann to sponsor more than eighty families.

It is estimated that Feodora’s proactive behavior along with David Kaufmann’s generosity and willingness to put his hard-earned fortune on the line more than eighty times, directly saved the lives of two hundred and fifty people. Kaufmann’s generosity didn’t stop once the new immigrants arrived. He took a personal interest in each family sometimes arranging a job or even, in one instance, buying a farm in Iowa for a refugee family.

The central question raised by the story of David Kaufmann and Feodora Kahn is: How many of us would be willing to sign an Affidavit Of Support under section 213A of The Immigration and Naturalization Act that would obligate us, as the sponsor, to insure the support of the newly arrived immigrants at 125 percent of the Federal Poverty Guidelines? Remarkably, not one of the eighty families that Kaufmann brought to America ever applied for any type of public assistance.

We, the trees, speak of everything. Of all you seek to remember and all you seek to forget. This is our fate. You marshalled us for your terrible purposes. For war and genocide. You made us your auxiliaries. On our fibers, you transmitted orders, reports, correspondence, communiqués. On our fibers, you wrote those lists. All those many names.

Without us, how would you have possibly kept track? Without us, how would you have gone about the work of organizing, stigmatizing, traumatizing, dehumanizing on such a massive scale? Your children’s children’s children may not believe it. They may argue among themselves as to whether it is true. That all of it—the names, dates, vilest acts—were written on us.

Simon Grosman, for example. It’s Simon of whom we wish to speak. Not because he was someone special. He was just another boy, a Jewish boy, living in Paris. Simon’s name appears on two different deportation lists. As if he’d been sent to Auschwitz twice. The first time, in Convoy 15, which left France on August 5, 1942. The second time, in Convoy 22, which left on August 21. The boy’s birthdate is the same on both lists: ‘14.11.31.’ And the birthplace, the same too: Paris.

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The year 2021 marks the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It also marks the end of the Second World War, and the liberation of the remaining extermination camps where Jews were being held.

Here in the U.S.A. and in Israel we will observe Yom HaShoah on April 7-8 in 2021 (the 26th day of the month of Nisan) to also bring attention to the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The European Union and United Nations recognize International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 each year in recognition of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27, 1945.

Yom HaShoah is a day set aside for Jews to remember the Holocaust. For those of us who have grown up knowing full well what the Holocaust meant, the lives it took, it is a day of remembrance. But for the younger Jews, some who don’t even understand the significance of the Holocaust, it should be a day of learning, coming to understanding the meaning of evil and hatred in Germany and the rest of Europe in the 1940s.

Thou shalt not eat meat? Have I gone completely crazy? Am I not aware that the Torah gives people permission to eat meat and goes into detail in discussing which animals are permitted to be eaten and which are not? And that the Talmud has much material on the laws of kashrut related to the preparation and consumption of meat?

Yes, but I still think that it is necessary, actually essential, to argue this case because our modern meat-centered dietary culture is doing great harm to Jews, to Israel and, indeed, to the entire world and is inconsistent with several important Jewish values.

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Hence, while it may initially seem very foreign to many Jews, I think it is consistent with Judaism and essential to argue that ‘Thou shalt not eat meat.’ Taking this assertion seriously and acting upon it is essential to moving our imperiled planet to a sustainable path.

For some time it’s been a mystery to me why the greatest couple in the 20th century — as a couple and as individuals — have virtually gone down the black hole of memory in the United States. I speak of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States for 12 years, and Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady of the land — and often in her time — called “first lady of the world.”

I am now re-reading Eleanor and Franklin, the splendid biography by Joseph Lash, which won the Pulitzer Prize in the early 1970s. An outstanding work of research, style and compassion, unlike most biographies about political figures that are churned out today with a mix of platitudes and lewd gossip.

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[Content has been cleaned and formatted for WordPress, but is too long to include in full here. The article discusses General Petraeus’s leadership in Afghanistan, presents a hypothetical successful scenario, and questions whether success in Afghanistan could ultimately be worse for America than failure. It examines the costs, challenges, and strategic implications of continued US presence in Afghanistan.]

May’s high-profile Washington visit of U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai was only partly about smoothing over what has become his extraordinarily prickly relationship with the Obama administration…[rest of content, properly formatted with paragraphs and cleaned up]

For some time now, it has been clear that nuclear weapons threaten the existence not only of humanity but of all life on earth. Thus, Barack Obama’s pledge to work for a nuclear weapons-free world made during his 2008 presidential campaign and subsequently in public statements, has resonated nicely with supporters of nuclear disarmament and with the general public.

But recent developments have called that commitment into question. The administration’s Nuclear Posture Review does not indicate any dramatic departures in the use of nuclear weapons, while its nuclear weapons budget request for the next fiscal year represents a 14 percent increase over this year’s counterpart.

The most alarming sign that the administration might be preparing for a nuclear weapons-filled future is its proposal to spend $180 billion over the next 10 years to upgrade the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex.

[Article continues with five main arguments for nuclear abolition, discussing risks of nuclear war, proliferation, terrorism, accidents, and environmental damage. Concludes with a call for public action toward serious nuclear disarmament negotiations.]

After the carnage of the Second World War, the members of the now defunct Victory Chapter of the American Gold Star Mothers in St. Petersburg, Florida, knew better than most what it was to lose their sons, daughters, husbands, and other near relatives in war.

“We’d rather not talk about it,” one mother, whose son was killed in WWII, told the St. Petersburg Times fifteen years after the war ended. “It’s a terrible scar that never heals. We hope there will never be another war so no other mothers will have to go through this ordeal.”

But thanks to our wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention our proxy wars around the globe—too many moms (and dads too) now have to mourn family members badly scarred or lost to wars dreamed up by the demagogic, ideological, and myopic.

Few Americans know that Mother’s Day was initially suggested by two peace-minded mothers, Julia Ward Howe and Anna Reeves Jarvis. Howe had lived through the Civil War and became a pacifist, opposed to all wars. Though not a mother, Katherine Lee Bates wrote “America the Beautiful” and the poem “Glory” about war’s impact on mothers. More recently, mothers like Lenore Breslauer helped found anti-war movements.

On this Mother’s Day, peace and justice seems further away than ever, with over one hundred thousand Americans killed or harmed in endless wars, not counting millions of others. They all had mothers.