Jewish History For Children

During World War II, Silence Could Mean Survival…or Death Tens of thousands of Jewish children were forced into a world of shadows and secrecy. Hidden in attics, cellars, forest bunkers—or living in plain sight under false identities—they clung to life with every whispered word, every careful movement, every heartbeat measured against the threat of discovery. For these children, survival was never guaranteed. The Children in the Attic brings their hidden lives into the light. Drawing on survivor testimonies, secret diaries, and archival records, this book traces the extraordinary ...

One girl. One diary. A voice that changed the world. Anne Frank hid from soldiers during World War II, yet her courage, hope, and imagination filled the pages of her diary. Perfect for readers aged 8+, this gentle, inspiring edition introduces children to her story of resilience, empathy, and the power of speaking out — showing that even one person’s voice can make a lasting difference. What would you write if your words were your only escape? Step into the secret world of Anne Frank — the brave young girl whose diary became one of the most powerful voices in history. Meet Anne, a ...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot comes an extraordinary and gripping account of Irena Sendler—the “female Oskar Schindler”—who took staggering risks to save 2,500 children from death and deportation in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. In 1942, one...

The Kuki-Mizo are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group living in the northeast Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram, in the remote foothills of the Himalayas along the Burmese border, and the Judaizing movement that led to the formation of the B’nei Menashe started in their midst in the early 1970s. Many of the men and women interviewed in Lives of the Children of Manasia were among the founders of this movement. Their individual life stories, each fascinating in its way and some telling of experiences that our modern minds find difficult to grasp, narrate a collective drama that until now has ...

Based on a true story – A child in hiding, a mother’s resistance, a father lost in Auschwitz Mom, I No Longer Want to Be Jewish is a powerful and intimate true story of survival during the Holocaust, told through the voice of a hidden Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Europe. To survive, he must erase all traces of his identity. Protected by a non-Jewish family, he becomes someone else, silencing his past and denying who he is. At the heart of the story stands his mother—a courageous woman who joins the resistance to protect him at all costs. And in the shadows, his father disappears ...

The awe-inspiring and largely untold story of Hannah Senesh, a female paratrooper in World War II whose courage and sacrifice during a daring mission to rescue Europe’s Jews left an indelible mark on history. In the years before World War II, thousands of young Jewish men and women escaped...

From the prize-winning author of The Ottomans, a myth-busting history of Muslim–Jewish relations, tracing fourteen centuries of cooperation and conflict Today, the dominant narrative of the relationship between Jewish and Muslim peoples assumes a long history of violent hostility. In...

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker In the tradition of The Hare with Amber Eyes, this “profound…comic…[and] unconventional” (The New York Times) family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up...

Poland, 1940. Moshe and his family flee their hometown of Warsaw in a desperate bid for survival as Nazi forces advance on the city. Hiding under false identities, they hope to wait out the end of the war, which must surely be near. But nowhere is truly safe for Poland’s Jews, and soon Moshe and his brother find themselves en route to Auschwitz, from where no one returns. Separated from the rest of their family, they hold on to each other with everything they have.

A Sydney Taylor Award Notable Young Adult Book In this “luminous” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) young adult edition of the bestselling, award-winning memoir The Choice, Holocaust survivor and renowned psychologist Dr. Edith Eva Eger shares her harrowing experiences and gives readers the...

Relli, a Jewish girl in Poland, was denied a normal childhood. When Relli was just a baby, the Nazis occupied Poland and she, together with her parents, were imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, a way station before death. Her parents correctly assessed the new situation and decided to act heroically in order to save their only child. They succeeded in smuggling her out of the Ghetto and entrusted her to a Gentile Polish couple who agreed to hide her for the duration of the war under a false identity.

Gripping and inspiring, these true stories of bravery, terror, and hope chronicle nine different children's experiences during the Holocaust. These are the true-life accounts of nine Jewish boys and girls whose lives spiraled into danger and fear as the Holocaust overtook Europe. In a time of great horror, these children each found a way to make it through the nightmare of war. Their legacy of courage in the face of hatred will move you, captivate you, and ultimately, inspire you.

The “thought-provoking…must-read” (Ariana Neumann, author of When Time Stopped) memoir by a Holocaust survivor who saved an untold number of lives at Auschwitz through everyday acts of courage and kindness—in the vein of A Bookshop in Berlin and The Nazi Officer’s Wife. In March 1942...

The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her...

Jewish folklore is full of vivid stories that both entertain and teach. We have selected for you a collection of tales and stories from the Talmud and Midrash, and rewritten them to suit the needs of children of Jewish culture and any other. Along with a large helping of gentle humor, these tales entertain while being infused with the perennial Jewish struggle for survival and dignity.

At the eve of the Second World War, an estimated 1.6 million Jewish children lived in Nazi-occupied Europe. While 10,000 of them escaped to Britain in the Kindertransport, only some 500 found a new home in France. Here they attempted to begin again—but their refuge would all too soon become a trap. For the first time, Laura Hobson Faure brings to life the experiences of these children, and the Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who helped them. Drawing on survivors' testimonies as well as children's diaries, letters, drawings, songs, and poems, Who Will Rescue Us? recreates their journeys.

Beautifully and evocatively rendered, this memoir endures as an example of post-war narrative at its finest. Jankele Kuperblum was just nine years old when he returned home and found his family gone. The night before, Germans had come to his town in rural Poland and taken away all the Jews. Now...

Through meticulously researched and stirring accounts — some well known and some chronicled here in book form for the first time — Doreen Rappaport brings to light the defiance of tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II. These resisters answered the genocidal madness and unspeakable depravity that was Hitler’s Holocaust with the greatest weapons of all — courage, ingenuity, the will to survive, and the resolve to save others or to die trying.

How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of 100 Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age.

In this unforgettable and “essential feminist memoir of women’s lives” (Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love) the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Perfection unearths her mother’s hidden past in in Nazi-occupied Austria. To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the...