Despite the devastation the Holocaust wrought upon the Jewish people, Rabbi Israel Becker of the Orthodox congregation Chofetz Chayim says that inspiration can be found in the catastrophe. A son of Holocaust survivors, Rabbi Becker challenged students gathered at Hillel to think about how the dwindling number of living survivors would want future generations to remember their stories. Relating several stories in which Jewish faith persisted amidst unprecedented destruction, Becker said that the survival of the Jewish people is a testament to the strength and tenacity of the Jewish community, which was able to emerge from the Holocaust as a veritable force in culture and politics. Particularly powerful in its expression of Jewish faith was the story of an underground synagogue found at the Theriesenstadt concentration camp, which had walls inscripted with the words, “and in spite of all this, we have not forgotten Your name.” He also related a story in which the faith of the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was shaken by an incident in which a fellow concentration camp inmate was found lending other inmates a prayer book in exchange for bread rations. When Wiesenthal expressed his outrage at the man’s behavior, a rabbi pointed out the incredible commitment to Judaism demonstrated by the inmates’ willingness to give up their rations for the sake of a prayer book. Becker added that Hitler himself affirmed the Jews’ contribution to society by writing in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that “I free humanity from the shackles of the soul; from the degrading suffering caused by the false vision called conscience and ethics. The Jews have inflicted two wounds on mankind: circumcision on its body and conscience on its soul.” From this quote, Rabbi Becker concluded that “the Nazis showed us in technicolor what a world without Torah is.”