FRED SKOLNIK

The landmark IEncyclopaedia JudaicaI, lauded as the standard work on Judaism since first appearing in the early 1970s, has been extensively revised and expanded for this long-awaited new edition. Nothing compromised, included are more than 22,000 signed entries on Jewish life, culture, history and religion, written by Israeli, American and European subject specialists. Expanding the scope and relevance of this invaluable set are more than 2,500 brand-new entries, many focusing on gender issues and New World geographic areas of the United States, Canada and Latin America. Even more clarity ...

A sweeping story of one womans grit across war, exile, and rebirth, this novel tracks an entire people through the century that remade them. Its a spotlight on the cost of survivaland the scale of what endures.From a crowded Sabbath table in Bialystok to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the fires of resistance, one family fights to stay human as the world turns to ash.Bialystok, once noisy with markets, arguments, and Sabbath songs, narrows to a cellar, a factory floor, then barbed wire. The Lefkovitz familypatriarch Nachum, fierce Fraida, brilliant Emma and her beloved Yoelare swept from prosperity into the tightening fist of Nazi rule. Synagogues burn. Hospitals are raided. Children vanish into transports to the east. Every rumor is worse than the last, and every choice could mean life or instant death.Inside the ghetto, hunger, terror, and betrayal grind people down. Yet Emma runs messages, smuggles weapons, hides the pregnant and the hunted. As deportations to extermination camps accelerate, she and the underground weigh an impossible question: walk quietly toward the trains, or turn the ghetto itself into a battlefield.Told with unflinching honesty and searing intimacy, A Woman of Valor follows the Lefkovitzes from ghetto liquidation and trains packed with the dying, to forests where partisans strike back and, later, the fragile rebirth of survivors in Israel. Readers who were gripped by the emotional force of The Tattooist of Auschwitz will be unable to look away from this familys shattering, unforgettable journey.