Today, April 14th, is Yom HaShoah \u2014 Holocaust Remembrance Day \u2014 but it\u2019s also my birthday on the Gregorian calendar.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n
However, I\u2019ve always loved celebrating my Hebrew birthday, the 14th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan.\n<\/p>\n
There is something about having a birthday on the eve of Passover that always excited me;\u00a0 I felt like my birthday was somehow a part of the festivities, despite the kosher for Passover birthday cake. However, a few years ago I discovered another reason that day was special. On the same calendar day that I was born, my grandfather, Henry Zinns, was fighting in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, one of the greatest acts of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.\n<\/p>\n
The Warsaw ghetto uprising began after German troops and police entered the Ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. Jewish insurgents inside the ghetto resisted these efforts. They refused to participate in mandatory gatherings and hid in underground bunkers to organize their attacks. This was the largest uprising by Jews during World War II and the first significant urban revolt against German occupation in Europe.\n<\/p>\n
I never got to meet my grandfather because he passed away before I was born. And now, since my father passed away, I can\u2019t learn more about him. But I am forever connected to Henry Zinns, and I continue his mission. Each year as I celebrate my birthday, I continue the resistance against the forces that have sought to destroy our people time and time again. Sitting at my dining room table with my two daughters and my wife \u2014 celebrating life \u2014 that is my resistance.\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tMax has a passion for stories and ideas that speak to the human condition, and spends his time plumbing the depths of Jewish tradition to find new ways of connecting with, and seeing ourselves in, our past. He loves writing, graphic design and video\/audio production. He currently serves as the Senior Manager of Jewish Education and Marketing at BeWell. He is also a student at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary and the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Judaic Studies. Most importantly, he is a husband, father, and dog-dad in New York City.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, April 14th, is Yom HaShoah \u2014 Holocaust Remembrance Day \u2014 but it\u2019s also my birthday on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[85,46,43,186598],"class_list":["post-392847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-news","tag-the-holocaust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}