When you don't have a menorah ...

(JNS) -So you don't have a menorah. And you don't have access to supplies that would enable you to create a reasonable facsimile of one. This was the position my mother, Rachel, was in when she was 15 years old.

A great miracle had occurred four months earlier - Rachel had been selected to leave Auschwitz for a slave labor camp. After two-and-a-half months in the shadows of the gas chambers and crematoria, she was sent to Christianstadt, a Frauenarbeitslager (women's work camp). Three weeks later, another miracle: An SS officer chose her to work in the kitchen - a privileged post of war.

Given...