Sher­man Jacob­son came to The Nation­al Jew­ish Cen­ter for Learn­ing and Lead­er­ship (CLAL) with the con­cept of sto­ries from the Shoah that could be read each Shab­bat and on hol­i­days, ​“so that as we cel­e­brate life today, we would remem­ber yes­ter­day.” It would be a sup­ple­ment to the Sid­dur. Wise­ly, Rab­bi Hirschfield nar­rowed the choice of sto­ries (which had to be gleaned from hun­dreds of tes­ti­monies) to ones of hope, ref­er­enc­ing that the ​“rab­bis of two thou­sand years ago …assigned remem­ber­ing Jew­ish tragedies to three weeks in the sum­mer and cel­e­brat­ed Jew­ish life through­out the year.” The book begins with Gen­e­sis and con­cludes with Deuteron­o­my. The list of read­ings includes the tra­di­tion­al title plus a themed title (Bere’shit/​Creativity; Noah/​Survival, etc.). There is a sep­a­rate sto­ry for each Shab­bat. The result is a slen­der vol­ume of sto­ries that teach about ​“life, ethics, decen­cy and love.” While there is still heart­break­ing mate­r­i­al here, so too are there moments of good­ness, con­sid­er­a­tion, and even mir­a­cle. For instance, after a man who can­not play a vio­lin is beat­en to death for his ​“crime,” the next can­di­date is a vio­lin­ist but, par­a­lyzed with fear, he can­not play. At the last moment he begins to play ​“The Blue Danube,” a waltz that cap­ti­vates the SS offi­cer who beats out the rhythm with his baton. The mir­a­cle is that this is a piece the vio­lin­ist didn’t even know and had nev­er played before. Not all the sto­ries are so hap­py but one that espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ed me is about a Jew­ish boy from the Lublin ghet­to who start­ed walk­ing back to Krakow, where his father and broth­er are, at ten to twen­ty miles a day. He would stop each night at a farmer’s house, knock on the door and say in Pol­ish, ​“May Jesus be blessed, and they would answer, ​‘Amen’.” Although there was a gen­er­ous reward for report­ing a Jew, which he obvi­ous­ly was, each one of them fed him, let him sleep over and gave him some bread for the road. One time one of the farm­ers dis­ap­peared and the boy thought that this was the end. Instead, he came back with a jar of mon­ey and said to him ​“Krakow is still far away, buy your­self a tick­et and get your­self home.” Who knows how wide­ly this book will be adopt­ed, but it is a good idea and a worth­while collection.