Faith During the Holocaust: The Remarkable Stories Behind Five Jewish Prayer Books

Rabbi Naftali Stern's High Holiday prayer book was not produced in a printing press. It had no proofreader, no elegant binding, and no owner's name embossed in gold. All he had were scraps of paper from a cement sack, a pencil stub, and the remarkable memory of a prayer leader from the town of Satmar.

He obtained the paper in exchange for his bread rations. At the Wolfsberg forced labor camp, as Rosh Hashanah 5705 (1944) approached, such exchanges were not uncommon. Prisoners sometimes sacrificed their meager food supplies for something they considered even more precious. On those scraps of paper, purchased at the expense of his own nourishment, Rabbi Stern painstakingly wrote the Rosh Hashanah prayers from memory, concealing the handwritten pages on his body until his liberation in 1945.

After the war, Rabbi Stern rebuilt his life, established a new family, and immigrated to Israel. For 43 years, he kept his handwritten pages tucked inside the machzor he used after the war, taking them out each Rosh Hashanah to pray from them once again. Eventually, the fragile paper began to deteriorate, and he decided to entrust the pages to Yad Vashem for restoration. Parting with the machzor he had created under such desperate circumstances was deeply emotional. Tears streamed down his face as he kissed the precious pages before handing them over. In 2000, Yad Vashem published a book documenting the handwritten machzor and its extraordinary story.

Rabbi Stern's machzor was not an isolated example. Jewish history contains other remarkable accounts of prayer books, High Holiday machzorim, Haggadot, and calendars created under unimaginable conditions, often from materials obtained through extraordinary ingenuity and personal sacrifice.

A Prayer Book Written in a Soviet Prison

In 1939, Simcha Langsam fled German-controlled territory for an area under Soviet control. He was subsequently arrested and, during his transfers between prisons, met Rabbi Shmuel Nachum Eimer of Rzeszów. According to Langsam's account, published in the Strzyżów memorial book, Rabbi Eimer became a central figure among the Jewish prisoners. Gifted with an exceptional memory, he taught Mishnah and Gemara entirely by heart, helping fellow inmates maintain their connection to Torah study despite their imprisonment.

Determined to preserve Jewish prayer as well, Rabbi Eimer decided to create handwritten siddurim and a calendar for the coming years. Obtaining the necessary supplies required remarkable ingenuity. He collected paper from the wrappers of headache powders distributed by a prison nurse, while Langsam managed to obtain a pen from an investigator's desk. Ink was smuggled into their cell using pieces of cotton wool dipped into the guards' inkwells, then diluted with water. The prisoners concealed their writing materials inside a broom made from willow branches.

Working on tiny sheets measuring approximately five by seven centimeters, Rabbi Eimer carefully wrote the prayers in miniature handwriting while his companions kept watch for approaching guards. After nearly two months, the completed siddurim were distributed on Lag BaOmer. Despite their small size, they contained prayers for weekdays, Shabbat, and festivals, including the Amidah for the High Holidays and the Akdamut poem recited on Shavuot. An inscription in one surviving copy identified Zhytomyr Prison as its “place of publication,” a poignant reminder of the circumstances in which these sacred pages were created.

A High Holiday Machzor Created in Siberia

Another extraordinary machzor was written in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia. In 1944, Shlomo Ullmann and Mordechai Glick reconstructed the High Holiday prayers from memory, creating a machzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur of the year 5705. They gave it a fitting title: Seder Za'akat HaShevi — “The Order of the Captives' Cry.”

Alongside the prayers, the two men prepared a Jewish calendar. According to Yad Vashem's description of the artifact, they also decorated the pages with illustrations, hoping to bring a measure of joy and encouragement to those who would use the machzor. Even the binding reflected their circumstances: It was fashioned from cardboard taken from tobacco packaging belonging to Red Army soldiers. The machzor was later documented in a Yad Vashem exhibition devoted to the preservation of Jewish religious life and the observance of the Jewish calendar during the Holocaust.

A Siddur That Survived Auschwitz

In 1944, Reizel Berger, a Jewish woman from the Maramureș region of Romania, arrived at Auschwitz carrying a small siddur that she had managed to smuggle into the camp. The prayer book became a treasured possession among the women imprisoned alongside her. Each evening, they took turns using it to pray, drawing strength from its familiar words amid the horrors surrounding them.

Over time, the pages became worn and began falling apart. Determined to preserve the siddur, the women decided to repair it. One prisoner who worked in the kitchen secretly obtained a potato sack to use as a cover, while another embroidered a Star of David onto the fabric with coarse thread.

Berger survived the Holocaust, married a Polish Holocaust survivor, and established a home in Brooklyn. The siddur accompanied her into her new life and continued to serve her in daily prayer. In 2019, 75 years after Berger's arrival at Auschwitz, her granddaughter, Sarah Rindner, shared the story in a published article. She drew particular attention to the heavily worn pages of Tehillim, evidence of how frequently her grandmother had turned to the Psalms throughout her life. At the time the story was published, the siddur remained a cherished possession of the family.

A Passover Haggadah Written in Hiding

In Boryslav, Poland, Shemaryahu and Sarah Landau and their children survived the Holocaust while hiding in the home of Anna Kosciotko's family. They entered their hiding place following the Nazi roundup of February 1943 and remained there for approximately a year and a half.

As Passover approached, Shemaryahu dictated the Haggadah from memory to his son Elimelech, who carefully transcribed and illustrated it. The family sheltering them also made it possible for the Landaus to observe Passover as faithfully as their circumstances allowed, permitting them to prepare the oven for Passover and bake matzah using wheat ground in a coffee grinder.

Elimelech immigrated to Israel in 1945. During Israel's War of Independence, while serving in a religious military unit, he once again prepared a handwritten Haggadah, this time for his fellow soldiers. Both the Haggadah created during the family's time in hiding and a copy of the one prepared during the War of Independence eventually reached Yad Vashem, preserving the story of a family's determination to maintain its traditions across two very different periods of hardship.

The Unbreakable Bond Between Jews and Prayer

These remarkable artifacts tell stories that extend far beyond the pages on which they were written. A machzor assembled from a cement sack, a siddur produced from medicine wrappers, a prayer book covered with a potato sack, and a Haggadah written in hiding all testify to the extraordinary lengths Jews went to preserve their faith.

For the people who created and protected them, these sacred texts were not simply books. They represented continuity with generations past, a connection to Hashem, and the determination to maintain Jewish life even when everything familiar had been taken away. Under circumstances in which food, paper, and personal safety were scarce, these individuals devoted precious resources and exposed themselves to danger so they could continue praying, observing the festivals, and fulfilling the mitzvot.

Their stories remind us of the profound value of the religious freedoms and sacred books we can so easily take for granted today. What we can now open and read with little effort, they struggled to preserve through extraordinary sacrifice. Through the fragile pages that survived, their faith and determination continue to speak to future generations.