Rabbi Kalonymos Shapira was a Hasidic Rebbe who ran the largest yeshiva in Warsaw before World War II. During his interment in the Warsaw Ghetto, he wrote sermons that are among the very last examples of traditional Jewish scholarship ever composed in Poland, and devoted to themes of suffering and meaning in a world gone mad. In Chanukah of 1942, he realized for the first time that the Holocaust was unlike any previous persecution of the Jews; and he set about trying to respond to that calamity. His work is simultaneously more radical and more traditional than that of most post-Holocaust theologians, and his message still speaks to us today.
