Free Republic

Eighty years after Auschwitz was liberated from the Nazis, Jews who make a pilgrimage there can eat kosher food. A mile from the concentration camp, visitors will be able to buy packaged, shelf-stable kosher meals for the first time at the Auschwitz Jewish Center — now a museum and the only surviving synagogue in Oświęcim, the Polish town renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis. The kosher concession will open in time for Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, beginning on the night of April 23. The day is marked in Poland with the March of the Living, in which thousands of...

A mikveh is a bath used for the purpose of ritual immersion to achieve ritual purity in Judaism. The traditional rules regarding the construction of a mikveh are based on those specified in regulations laid down in the Torah and in classical rabbinical literature.The text describes how a mikveh must be connected to a natural spring or well of naturally occurring water, and thus can be supplied by rivers and lakes which have natural springs as their source. A cistern filled by rainwater is also permitted to act as a mikveh’s water supply, so long as the water is never...

A rainbow is seen in the sky as the Pope Benedict XVI pays his respect to the victims of the former Birkenau Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, southern Poland May 28, 2006. Calling himself 'a son of Germany,' Pope Benedict prayed at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz on Sunday and asked why God was silent when 1.5 million victims, mostly Jews, died in this 'valley of darkness.' REUTERS/Damir Sagolj