The horrific events of October 7th reminded many people of the darkest chapter in Jewish history - the Holocaust. And indeed, for the past six months, there have been as many comparisons to the Shoah as there have been critiques of those comparisons. 

Of the roughly 130,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel today, just under 10,000 reside in Jerusalem. Many of them participate in the Jerusalem Foundation’s Café Europa, which offers a physical meeting place, a wide range of social and cultural activities - concerts, lectures, memorials, workshops - and professional help in navigating the thickets of Israeli bureaucracy. We recently spent a morning at the Café Europa branch in Jerusalem’s German Colony neighborhood, where we heard all kinds of opinions about the Holocaust comparison. But the person with the strongest feelings on the matter just so happened to also be Café Europa’s oldest member - 100-year-old Walter Bingham.

The end song is Tzair LaNetzach ("Forever Young") by Rami Kleinstein.

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