While hiding from the Nazis for more than two years, Israel Sheiner came up with a creative solution to ensure that his family would be able to observe Shabbat and the Jewish holidays properly: He calculated the dates from memory and wrote a makeshift Hebrew calendar.

Finding refuge in the home of Matjas Franciszek, a Polish farmer who agreed to take Sheiner in along with his wife and four children, Sheiner used paper and ink provided by Franciszek to design an exquisite calendar that would guide them through the Hebrew years of 5703-5704 (1942-1944).

His family would pray and say psalms using books that he had also handwritten from memory.

In October 1944, Sheiner suddenly felt unsure about whether his calculation for the day of the Yom Kippur fast was accurate or off by a day. After some consideration, he made a decision: His children would fast on the day he thought was more likely to be the “real” Yom Kippur, while he would fast for two days to cover both possibilities.

“After the war, they were able to check, and it turned out that the day his family had fasted was correct,” said Michael Tal, head of artifacts at Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and memorial.

“Hiding in the home of this farmer, one of the Righteous Among the Nations, this was how the family survived and maintained its identity during this impossible time.”

Tal is the curator of a new exhibition in Yad Vashem’s synagogue that highlights some of the courageous and ingenious ways Jews were able to preserve the calendar and celebrate holidays as they endured Nazi persecution.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the challenges that Jews in the ghettos and camps faced as they struggled to continue their religious existence,” Tal said. “Connecting to the Hebrew calendar is something that connected them to their families, to their identities as human beings, and to the long history of the Jewish people. It had the power to give them strength for a moment amidst all the chaos and........

© The Times of Israel