The text reflects the enduring Jewish desire to live as a free people in Zion and Jerusalem. 

Jewish immigrant Samuel Cohen, living in Ottoman-ruled palestine, set Imber's words to a melody derived from a Moldavian folk song. This tune traces its roots back to a 16th-century Italian song, La Mantovana. 

The song became the rallying anthem at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel, famously sung by delegates opposing the Uganda Proposal to highlight their commitment to returning directly to Israel. 

During the Holocaust, Hatikvah provided solace and defiance. It was sung by Czech Jews entering the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944.

When the State of Israel was established, the song was embraced as the country's anthem, though it was not formally codified at that time. 

On November 10, 2004, the Knesset formally passed an amendment to the Flag and Coat-of-Arms Law, officially declaring Hatikvah as the national anthem of Israel.

𝐴𝑠 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 𝑎𝑠 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛,

𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐽𝑒𝑤𝑖𝑠ℎ 𝑠𝑜𝑢𝑙 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑠,

𝐴𝑛𝑑 𝑡𝑜𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛 𝑒𝑑𝑔𝑒𝑠, 𝑜𝑛𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑,

𝐴𝑛 𝑒𝑦𝑒 𝑔𝑎𝑧𝑒𝑠 𝑡𝑜𝑤𝑎𝑟𝑑 𝑍𝑖𝑜𝑛.

𝑂𝑢𝑟 ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑒 𝑖𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑦𝑒𝑡 𝑙𝑜𝑠𝑡,

𝑇ℎ𝑒 ℎ𝑜𝑝𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑖𝑠 𝑡𝑤𝑜-𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑠 𝑜𝑙𝑑,

𝑇𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑎 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝑒 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑙𝑎𝑛𝑑,𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝐿𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑜𝑓 𝑍𝑖𝑜𝑛, 𝐽𝑒𝑟𝑢𝑠𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑚.

On April 15, 1945, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. The surviving 60,000 prisoners had seen and suffered unbelievable horrors. But they still had hope. Five days after liberation, the Jewish prisoners held a Shabbat service in the camp. It was the first time many of them had taken part in a Jewish service in six years. With what little energy they had left, they sang Hatikvah.

She wasn’t rich, powerful, or famous—just a regular person you’d pass on the street without notice. 

Around her, the Nazis hunted Jews, and helping even one could mean prison or death. Most looked away. Frieda did not.

Her friend, Egyptian doctor Mohamed Helmy, was secretly hiding a Jewish family. When they needed a safe place for an elderly grandmother Cecilie, Frieda opened her home. 

For over a year, she hid Cecilie inside her house, sharing her own meager wartime rations so the frightened woman wouldn’t go hungry. 

Day after day, Frieda went without, living in constant terror of a knock at the door.

Then the danger intensified. In 1944, part of the family was captured. 

Under interrogation, they revealed that Dr. Helmy was hiding young Anna. Frieda didn’t hesitate—she took Anna in too.

Thanks to Frieda’s quiet courage and the doctor’s bravery, the entire family survived.

What makes her story even more remarkable: while she risked everything to save Jews, her own son was serving as a soldier in Hitler’s army. 

She knew exactly what her country was doing—and chose the opposite.

After the war, Frieda sought no praise. To her, it was simply her human duty. She rarely spoke of it. She died quietly in the early 1960s, largely unknown.

But the family never forgot. Years later, Berlin’s mayor thanked her for protecting the persecuted at the risk of her own life. 

Long after her death, Frieda was honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.

Frieda had no power, no wealth, no grand plan—only a home, a kind heart, and the courage to use them. And that was enough to save lives.

Stories like hers remind us that heroism doesn’t require greatness. It only requires ordinary people willing to do what is right.

May her memory be a blessing.

A German soldier stopped at the front of the line and stared. He knew that face. 

It was Janusz Korczak — the beloved Polish-Jewish doctor and writer whose books he had grown up reading.

The soldier quietly offered him a way out: “Step aside. Disappear. Live.”

Korczak shook his head. He took the hands of the two smallest children beside him… and kept walking toward the train.

There had been many such offers. He refused them all.

Born Henryk Goldszmit, Korczak was a renowned pediatrician, author of children’s books, and radio voice beloved across Poland. 

He could have lived a comfortable life. Instead, in 1912 he founded Dom Sierot — an extraordinary orphanage in Warsaw where children ran their own parliament, court, and newspaper. 

His one sacred rule: A child is not someone who will matter one day. A child matters now.

He lived among them for thirty years as their father.

When the Nazis sealed the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, Korczak moved the orphanage inside. Friends begged him to escape — he looked Polish, he was famous, he could pass. He refused. “I will not leave my children.”

Inside the starving ghetto, he begged for food, carried heavy sacks on his failing back, and tracked every child’s heartbreaking weight loss by candlelight. He was starving too.

On August 5, 1942, the soldiers came. Korczak calmly told the 192 children they were going to the countryside for fresh air. 

He had them dress in their best clothes. Each carried a small bag with a favorite book or doll.

Then the old doctor led them out — 192 children walking in calm rows behind him, holding his hands, the smallest in his arms. No crying. No panic. Just quiet dignity as they marched three miles through the ghetto to the Umschlagplatz.

At the platform, the final offer came. 

Once more, Korczak refused. He climbed into the cattle car with his children and staff.

They were murdered upon arrival at Treblinka.

He could not save their lives. He knew it. So he saved the only thing left: their dignity and their sense of not being alone.

In the darkest place on earth, Janusz Korczak gave those children the one thing the Nazis could not take — a hand to hold until the very end.

Today at Treblinka, among 17,000 stones, one bears the name: Janusz Korczak and the Children.

He had none of his own. He died with 192 of them.

May their memory be a blessing.

It began with dehumanization.

Long before Jews were murdered, they were turned into an idea: the hidden enemy, the parasite, the conspirator behind every crisis.

Europe was already full of antisemitism before the war. Economic collapse, humiliation after World War I, fear of communism, and social chaos made people search for scapegoats. The Nazis gave them one.

To Nazi propaganda, Jews were “Judeo-Bolsheviks”. Communists. Capitalists. Globalists. Rootless elites. Somehow responsible for both capitalism and communism, both weakness and domination, both decadence and revolution.

The accusation never had to make sense.

It only had to make Jews seem dangerous enough to remove.

At first, Nazi policy focused on exclusion and expulsion: push Jews out of professions, universities, citizenship, public life, and eventually Europe itself.

But then Germany conquered more territory.

Poland brought millions more Jews under Nazi control. The invasion of the Soviet Union turned propaganda into mass shootings. In Ukraine, Jews were murdered in ravines like Babyn Yar, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed in two days. Local collaborators and auxiliary police helped identify, gather, guard, and murder Jews.

This is how genocide becomes scalable: records, police, railways, bureaucrats, neighbors, and silence.

Norway shows how fast it could happen when the state already knew who the Jews were. Authorities relied on police information, synagogue membership lists, statistical records, property inventories, and “J”-stamped identity cards. Once the decision came, Norwegian police helped arrest Jews for deportation.

Hungary shows another version. For years it had antisemitic laws and was allied with Nazi Germany, but mass deportations accelerated after Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. In less than two months, about 435,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, most murdered on arrival. Warnings arrived, including the Vrba-Wetzler report; action came only after hundreds of thousands had already been sent.

And yes, people knew.

The Allies had information by 1942 that Jews were being murdered en masse at Auschwitz. By 1944, the Vrba-Wetzler report gave one of the most detailed eyewitness descriptions of the gas chambers and crematoria. The world did not lack information. It lacked urgency.

Even the Red Cross failed the Jews.

Theresienstadt was staged by the Nazis as a “model ghetto” to deceive outsiders if they didn't bother to look hard enough. In 1944, the International Committee of the Red Cross visited, saw the performance, and issued a favorable report, not even noting an issue with forcing Jews into concentration camps in the first place. Even in April 1945, after other camps were being liberated, it continued to repeat it's erroneous findings.

That failure has an ugly echo today: Jewish civilians - women, children and Holocaust survivors were taken hostage by Hamas, hidden underground, suffered international starvation, sexual abuse and torture, and denied basic humanitarian access - while the same international institutions that speak endlessly about humanitarian law could not even force a visit, while insisting on visits for the armed terrorists who took the hostages.

But "Palestinians" also played an active role during the holocaust - The grand Mufti - Haj Amin al-Husseini was  not a mere footnote.

He met Hitler, allied himself with the Nazi project, recruited tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers to the SS, spread Nazi propaganda in the Arab world, opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine, and he repeatedly lobbied Nazi and Axis officials to block Jewish escape routes to Palestine - including transports involving Jewish children.

In 1943, he intervened against proposals to transfer Jews from Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania to Palestine after thousands of Jewish children had managed to reach safety. In 1944, he objected to certificates for 900 Jewish children from Hungary, warning that they might end up in Palestine and urging that, if they had to be removed, they be sent somewhere under “active control”, such as Poland - which, in 1944, meant the machinery of Nazi extermination.

And the world around the Nazis was not innocent.

There were righteous gentiles - brave people who risked everything to hide, smuggle, forge papers, and save Jews.

But there were also governments that collaborated, police forces that obeyed, bureaucrats who made lists, neighbors who informed, and countries that closed their doors.

Even Britain, while fighting Hitler, arrested thousands of German and Austrian “enemy aliens”, including Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis, and shipped many of them to Australia on the HMT Dunera - alongside actual German and Italian POWs and Nazi sympathizers. Jews who escaped Nazi persecution were treated as enemy aliens together with the very people they had escaped from.

That is the uncomfortable lesson.

The Holocaust was carried out by Nazi Germany.

But it was made easier by a world that had already learned to treat Jews as a problem.

And that is why today’s language matters.

When Jews are again described as the hidden power behind everything - colonialism, capitalism, war, media, money, white supremacy, genocide - we should recognize the pattern.

Societies that blame Jews are usually confessing their own decay.

When Europe tried this before and blamed Jews for capitalism, communism, war, poverty, humiliation, and social collapse.

It did not save Europe.

It made Europe poorer, crueler, and morally disfigured.

Now the same disease is back with updated vocabulary: colonialism, whiteness, genocide, media, money, power.

When Israeli civilians and Jews are treated as legitimate targets, when hostages posters are ripped off poles, when Jewish safety concerns are mocked as propaganda, when terrorist murder is excused as “resistance”, when campuses and streets decide Jews are uniquely guilty - it is 1938, and 1939 comes next.

When Alexander Pechersky, known to family and friends as “Sashko”, an affectionate Georgian diminutive, stepped off the transport from Minsk in September 1943, he had already survived typhus, multiple escape attempts from prisoner-of-war camps, & 3 prior concentration camps. A Red Army lieutenant & a Jew, he had concealed his officer rank from the Nazis, which saved his life, as officers were separated and shot immediately. He arrived at Sobibor with the sharpened alertness of a man who had learned to read danger quickly.

The unusual designation “Sonderlager Sobibor” (Special Camp Sobibor), rather than a standard concentration-camp label, immediately signalled to him that this place was different. Sobibor had operated since May 1942 as one of three secret extermination camps established under Heinrich Himmler’s personal oversight as part of Operation Reinhard, alongside Belzec and Treblinka. 

Built in a remote, marshy forest near the Bug River on the border with occupied Belarus and surrounded by dense woods, swamps & minefields, the site was chosen to make escape almost impossible. The camp was divided into 3 main areas separated by electric fences and deep ditches: a forward zone with SS administration & Ukrainian guard barracks; a central zone containing prisoner barracks & workshops and a sealed inner section with the gas chambers & cremation pyres, hidden from the rest of the camp. 

Historians estimate that between 167,000 & 250,000 people were murdered there, arriving from Poland, the Netherlands (more than 34,000 Dutch Jews), France, Germany, Austria, Slovakia & the Soviet Union.

Transports arrived almost daily. As each one pulled in, SS officers called out for specific trades such as tailors, cobblers & carpenters. Those who stepped forward sometimes secured a temporary place in the workforce. Most did not. 

Prisoners were told they had come for labour & needed disinfection before continuing. The process was deceptively orderly: music played, staff appeared calm & friendly. Victims were ordered to undress, their heads were shaved (the hair collected and sent to Germany) and they were led to gas chambers disguised as bathhouses. Gustav Wagner, the deputy commandant, was known to walk alongside the lines in a white coat, handing lollipops to children & urging them to stay healthy. In reality, they entered gas chambers where up to 2,000–3,000 people were murdered  in about 3 hours. 

On peak days the camp operated for 14–16 hours and murdered as many as 14,000. Without a dedicated crematorium, bodies were burned on open-air pyres built from railway tracks & fuelled with wood from the surrounding forest. The smoke and smell were visible and noticeable from long distances. 

The screaming inside the gas chambers lasted roughly 15 minutes. To mask it, the Nazis kept hundreds of geese nearby; their honking drowned out the sounds of people dying.

A Polish-Jewish underground already existed in the camp when Pechersky arrived, organised by Leon Feldhendler, the son of a rabbi. Feldhendler had survived nearly a year at Sobibor, working in the provisions barracks & witnessing failed escapes and relentless killing. 

Deep distrust existed between different Jewish groups (Polish Jews did not fully trust the German & Dutch Jews), but Pechersky, as an outsider with no factional ties, helped unite them. 

Feldhendler recognised that Pechersky’s military experience offered the resistance something new. He persuaded him to take command and shared all he knew. Pechersky insisted from the outset that everybody must escape or nobody would: those left behind would face certain Nazi reprisals.

Continuous communication was essential, yet any unusual gathering would attract immediate attention.

Born in 1933 into a highly educated French Jewish family, she was the daughter of a prominent lawyer who served as an officer in the French army. Her early years were filled with park outings, picture books, and the deep certainty that she was a cherished child of the French Republic.

That certainty shattered in 1940 with the German occupation of Paris. Her father was taken as a prisoner of war, and antisemitic laws stripped Francine and her mother of their rights and security.

In 1942, while trying to cross into the unoccupied zone, eight-year-old Francine and her mother were arrested. They endured a series of French internment camps — including Poitiers and Drancy — before their deportation in May 1944 to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

Bergen-Belsen was a place of utter neglect, swollen with prisoners evacuated from camps in the East. Francine and her mother were held in the Sternlager (“Star Camp”), intended for potential exchange hostages. They kept their own clothes rather than striped uniforms, but starvation, freezing barracks, and a deadly typhus epidemic defined their existence. 

Amid this horror, Francine’s mother performed a quiet act of psychological defiance. She carried two tiny pieces of chocolate, carefully wrapped. She showed one to her daughter and said: “Keep this in your mind, but do not ask for it. We will save it for the day when you completely collapse and have no strength left.” That hidden scrap became Francine’s anchor — a promise of a future beyond the wire.

In early 1945, a pregnant woman named Hélène arrived in their barracks. The women shielded her during roll calls. When labor began on the filthy wooden planks, Francine’s mother turned to her young daughter and asked if it was time to give up the chocolate so the mother could find the strength to deliver her child. Francine immediately agreed. The precious piece was given to Hélène, who gave birth to a fragile baby girl. 

As the British approached in April 1945, the SS loaded Francine, her mother, and others onto a train that wandered Germany for nearly two weeks — the infamous “Lost Transport.” Soviet forces liberated them near Tröbitz. Francine and her mother survived; her father endured his POW camp. The family reunited in Paris.

Rebuilding life was profoundly difficult. The world did not want to hear their stories. Francine studied, married, raised a family, and kept her memories largely private for decades while mourning lost friends.

In the late 1960s, seeing growing historical denial and indifference, she understood the unique power of a child survivor’s voice. She broke her silence and became one of France’s most respected witnesses and educators. She authored Une petite fille privilégiée (“A Privileged Little Girl”), a poignant account of the camps through a child’s eyes, and spoke tirelessly in schools and at memorial sites. 

Decades later, during one of her lectures, a woman approached from the audience. It was the baby born on those wooden planks in Bergen-Belsen — now grown. She pulled a small piece of chocolate from her pocket and handed it to Francine, completing a circle of extraordinary grace.

Francine Christophe’s life reminds us that even in a system engineered to annihilate the human spirit, small acts of generosity and moral courage can echo across generations. She transformed unimaginable suffering into a lifelong mission of remembrance and education — proving that kindness, preserved in the heart, outlives evil.

We remember Francine today because her story affirms: humanity endures when we choose to share our last crumb of hope.

1942.  Rivesaltes camp, southern France. A dusty holding pen for Jews rounded up across Vichy France — filthy huts, despair, and nine trains bound for Auschwitz.

Mary Elmes refused to let the children board them.

Born in 1908 in Cork, Ireland, she was a brilliant scholar — gold medal at Trinity College Dublin, scholarships in London and Geneva. A glittering academic future awaited. She walked away from it all.

In 1937, she went to the Spanish Civil War, running feeding stations and children’s hospitals under Franco’s bombs. When half a million refugees fled into France, Mary followed. She worked with the Quakers, feeding and schooling tens of thousands of refugee children.

Then France fell. The Vichy regime began handing Jews to the Nazis — even the children.

Ignoring orders to stay within the law, Mary acted. She hid Jewish children in the boot of her car and drove them straight past the guards to safe houses, convents, hotels, and Quaker homes she had quietly prepared. She forged papers and used her Irish neutrality to stay when others were expelled.

Between August and October 1942, Mary and her colleagues rescued an estimated 427 children from Rivesaltes — children who would otherwise have perished in Auschwitz.

The Gestapo arrested her in 1943, suspecting her of helping Jews. She spent six months in prison, including the notorious Fresnes prison near Paris. Released, her family begged her to return to safety in Ireland. She refused — and went straight back to her work.

When asked later about her time in Gestapo custody, she simply said: “Oh, we all had to suffer some inconveniences in those days.”

After the war, she married a Frenchman, raised two children, and never spoke of her deeds. She turned down France’s Legion of Honour, wanting no attention. She lived quietly until her death in 2002 at age 93.

For decades, almost no one knew her story — until one of the children she saved, Ronald Friend (a toddler at the time), spent years tracking her down. 

In 2013, thanks to him, Mary Elmes was named Righteous Among the Nations — the only Irish person ever to receive this honour.

Mary could have lived a safe, celebrated life as a scholar. Instead, she ran toward danger and stood between children and death. A neutral Irishwoman who owed these Jewish children nothing risked everything — and asked for nothing in return.

Hundreds of people alive today, and their descendants, exist because one woman from Cork kept driving past those guards.

Mary Elmes.

Remember her name.