Today, thousands of Jewish students and allies around the world will head to campus and start the academic year. 98-year-old Holocaust survivor Nate Leipciger has a message for every one of them. Watch: Comment “Am Yisrael Chai” so we can show the world just how proud we are 💙!

Henri Kagan survived the Holocaust as a child in France. This week, at 95, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Mazal Tov, Henri! 📸 École polytechnique, CC BY-SA 2.0

Three years ago today, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 hostage. Eli Sharabi spent 491 days in captivity. He came home to learn that his wife, Lianne, and his daughters, Noiya and Yahel, had been murdered. When he met Holocaust survivor Naftali Fürst at the March of the Living, Naftali held him and cried. "We didn't need to speak. We understood each other." On the road from Auschwitz to Birkenau, Holocaust survivors and survivors of October 7 found each other. Today we remember every life taken on October 7, and we stand with the survivors and families who carry that day with them. May their memories be a blessing.

85 years ago, on the eve of Yom Kippur, 33,771 Jewish women, men, and children were murdered at Babyn Yar, Kyiv, in just two days. "Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered." — Vasily Grossman, 1943 May their memory be a blessing.

Belonging isn't built by walls of stone. It's built by the people we gather inside. 💙 This Sukkot, meet the students who experienced this first hand on the road from Auschwitz to Birkenau: 🔗motl.org/when-we-march-toget…

The decision by the town council of Heidenau, in the German state of Saxony, to stop installing Stolpersteine memorial stones must be a wake-up call. Together with reports of similar attempts elsewhere in Germany, it raises a deeply troubling question: are political interests being allowed to push the memory of Nazi victims out of public life? Stolpersteine confront people with the history of Nazi persecution in the places where it happened. Preventing more of them from being laid serves political interests at the expense of historical truth. The Nazis murdered Jews and tried to erase their names, their communities and their place in history. Eighty-one years after the end of the war, elected officials in Germany have voted to prevent more of those names from appearing on the streets where the victims lived. The murders cannot be undone. Denying the victims remembrance adds another grave wrong: it continues the effort to erase them from history. Germany has a particular responsibility to confront the crimes committed against Jews and against humanity. Eighty-one years later, that responsibility calls for stronger commemoration and a determined fight against both forgetting and deliberate erasure. We call on Heidenau to reverse its decision and on Germany’s leaders and citizens to oppose every effort to hide this history.

One candle. One siddur. 800 women praying in one barrack. Judy Weissenberg Cohen was 16 when she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in June 1944. Decades later, she returned with March of the Living to share this memory: Yom Kippur in the camp, when the Nazis gave the women ten minutes to pray. "Someone lit that single candle, and silence fell over the barrack. The women all burst into tears together. Our prayer was a prayer of tears." "Even today, whenever I hear Kol Nidrei, I return to the Kol Nidrei in the barrack. That is the Kol Nidrei I remember." Judy passed away this month. Her story will remain with us. May her memory be a blessing. Wishing you all a meaningful Yom Kippur. G'mar Chatima Tova.

One year ago on Yom Kippur, Yoni Finlay was shot protecting his synagogue's doors. This year, he walked from Auschwitz to Birkenau with the March of the Living : "Hate is not abstract. It has consequences, and I am living proof." 🔗 motl.org/yoni-finlay-heaton-…

Holocaust survivor Eva Kuper, writing to students heading to campus this fall: "Antisemitism is not only a Jewish problem; it is an assault on truth, human dignity and the values education is meant to defend." Read her full letter: motl.org/holocaust-survivor-…

She survived Auschwitz, today she turns 88. Happy Birthday to the amazing Tova Friedman 💙! 📸 Kineret Rifkind