ABMF
Why are your Jewish friends eating cheesecake, staying up all night studying, and celebrating a holiday most people have never heard of? This is Shavuot: an important holiday on the Jewish calendar.
Shavuot is not simply a religious celebration. It is a story about what comes AFTER freedom.
Passover tells the story of liberation from slavery in Egypt. Shavuot asks the next question: What kind of society do we build once we are free?
According to Jewish tradition, Shavuot commemorates the moment the Jewish people stood at Mount Sinai and received the Torah — not only as a religious text, but as a moral framework centered on justice, responsibility, memory, learning, and human dignity.
At a time when misinformation spreads faster than wisdom, when antisemitism is rising globally, and when history increasingly competes with algorithms, the themes of Shavuot feel extraordinarily relevant.
Jewish tradition teaches that revelation did not happen only once at Sinai. It continues every time a person chooses to listen, learn, question, teach, and carry wisdom forward.
And perhaps that is what civilization ultimately depends on: not only freedom, but what human beings choose to do with it.
Happy Shavuot to those who celebrate!
05/20/2026
Today, Rachel Miller turns 93 ♥️
At 9 years old, she was alone on a farm in the French countryside when she learned that her family had been deported to Auschwitz.
Before that, she was just a little girl in Paris who loved Saturday nights filled with music, family, and singing. Then came the yellow stars. The hiding. The new name she was forced to memorize so nobody would know she was Jewish. The loss of nearly everyone she loved.
Rachel survived because strangers hid her.
Because someone chose courage over silence.
Because she kept going.
After the war, she arrived in America alone at just 11 years old, carrying grief far too heavy for a child. Yet somehow, she rebuilt a life filled with love, music, family, and hope.
Today we celebrate not only Rachel’s birthday, but the extraordinary strength of a generation that endured the unimaginable and still chose humanity.
Happy 93rd birthday, Rachel.
Your story is a reminder that memory is not passive — it is a responsibility.
05/14/2026
With Shavuot approaching next week, this cheesecake recipe carries more than sweetness. Like the longstanding tradition of eating dairy foods on the holiday, it is also about memory, family, and continuity.
Some recipes survive because they are delicious. Others survive because they carry the voices of the people who made them, the tables around which they were shared, and the generations determined not to let those memories disappear.
Holocaust survivor Ruth Webber shared her cheesecake recipe in memory of her mother, Malka “Molly” Muschkies, a dessert prepared with care and close attention to detail. Molly would always bake the cheesecake in a simple 9-by-13 pan, allowing it to cool completely before cutting it neatly into individual squares to serve family and guests.
She knew the cheesecake was ready by the gentle “jiggle” of the pan and the slight golden color on top, small kitchen instincts passed down through experience and tradition.
Ruth’s recipe is featured in “Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors.”
Photo:
05/13/2026
Another Auschwitz survivor is gone.
Albrecht Weinberg died this yesterday at 101.
He survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, death marches, forced labor, and the murder of nearly his entire family.
And yet, after everything, he chose not silence, but testimony.
For decades, he stood in classrooms and before crowds across Germany, telling young people exactly where hatred, antisemitism, dehumanization, and indifference can lead. Even at 101 years old, he was still speaking out.
Soon, there will be no Holocaust survivors left to tell these stories firsthand.
What remains will be our willingness to listen. To remember. To teach. To refuse distortion and denial when it appears before us.
May his memory be a blessing… and a responsibility. 🕯️
Holocaust survivor
• Auschwitz
• Never Forget
• Holocaust education
• Antisemitism
• Bergen-Belsen
• WWII history
• Jewish history
• Survivor testimony
• Memory matters
• Human dignity
• Holocaust remembrance
• Against hate
• Jewish lives
• Education against hate
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