The auditorium at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago will be named after Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, as part of an effort to honor “civil rights and social justice leaders whose significant contributions to society have advanced justice and equality in America,” the Obama Foundation has announced.

In 2009, Obama and Wiesel, accompanied by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, visited the Buchenwald concentration camp, where Wiesel was imprisoned during the final months of the war. The two men shared a warm relationship, the foundation said.

Construction of the center, located in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, began in August 2021.                                                                                                           — Chicago Architecture Center photo

What you are looking at is not a typical blimp. Israel is testing a humongous inflatable missile detection system that will hover at high altitudes and detect long-range threats. “It will be a significant component in strengthening our capabilities to defend the country’s borders against a variety of threats,” said Amikam Norkin, an Israeli Air Force commander.                                                                                                             The Forward photo

Can you tell your Abrahams from your Absaloms? Can you read the word of God and know who is being addressed? Well, then you might have a chance to ace the impossibly difficult excerpt The Shofar offers here, taken from this year’s Chidon — the Old Testament knowledge contest organized by the World Zionist Organization and the American Zionist Movement to challenge even the mightiest Torah scholar.

“It’s not an easy test,” says Shanni Alon, who coordinates the Chidon HaTanakh, which runs every two years and draws entrants from around the world. The test’s 50 multiple-choice questions pull trivia from the deepest trenches of the Tanakh, and no, it’s not open-book. Most of the questions require contestants to answer a question about a verse or a phrase within a verse. There are 23,145 verses in the Five Books, Prophets and Writings — the liturgy included in the Tanakh.

The grand prize in the American competition? A free trip to Israel to compete in another Chidon, against winners from Argentina, France, Israel and other countries.

Here are 10 questions from this year’s exam, courtesy of The Forward.  [From the JPS edition]

P.S. There’s no shame in failing. Answers appear on the last page of this issue of The Shofar. No peeking…

1. How long did Jacob dwell in the land of Egypt?
2. 17 years; B, 20 years; C, 23 years; D, 30 years
3. A biblical character is described in the following quote: “His father had never scolded him: ‘Why did you do that?’” Who is it?

A, Amnon; B, Absalom; C, Adonijah; D, Shlomo

3. The following quote is addressed to a biblical character: “And listen to what they say; after that, you will have the courage to attack the camp.” Who is it?

A, Joshua; B, David; C, Saul; D, Gideon

4. When is it not mandatory to blow trumpets?

A, At festive times; B, At the beginning of the month; C, In wartime; D, When inaugurating a building

5. A biblical character is described as going to “the top of the hill that is near Hebron.” Who is it?

A, Samson; B, Caleb, the son of Jephunneh; C, David; D, Jacob

6. The following phrase is excerpted from a prophecy: “But let them be covered with sackcloth, both man and beast.” What is the prophecy about?

A, A person’s death; B, An epidemic; C, The destruction of a city; D, A defeat in battle

7. A biblical character is described in the following quote: “And taking of every clean animal and of every clean bird, he offered burnt offerings on the altar.” Who is it?

A, Shlomo; B, Noah; C, Samuel; D, Saul

8. Which biblical character said the following: “As you say, my lord king, I and all I have are yours.”

A, Ziba; B, Ahab; C, Mephibosheth; D, Shimei, son of Gera

9. Who of the following was not born in Egypt?

A, Moses; B, Efraim; C, Jeroboam, son of Nevat; D, Genubath

10. Which biblical character utters the following prayer: “Please, O Lord, remember how I have walked before you…”

A, A Psalmist; B, Elijah; C, Jonah; D, Hezekiah

In front of a residential building in Berlin, Germany, a flower lies atop stones honoring people deported  and killed by the Nazis. The gesture was photographed on Nov. 9, 2021, 83 years after the night of broken glass, known as Kristallnacht — when during anti-Jewish pogroms, rioters smashed the windows in synagogues and storefronts. The inscriptions include the names of the victims and the dates of their births and deportations. AP Photo/Markus Schreiber. On the right, a visitor to the Shoah Wall of Names Memorial in Vienna, Austria. AP Photo/Lisa Leutner

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, better known as the Claims Conference, announced on Oct. 6 that it had secured an additional $767 million in benefits for Holocaust survivors. During the past 70 years, the German government has set aside more than $90 billion for survivors.

As part of the most recent negotiations, the Claims Conference said that Germany had agreed to recognize the extreme suffering of Russian Jews who had endured the more than two-year Nazi siege of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.

An additional 2,000 Holocaust survivors who hid in France and Romania will also qualify for the pensions. Another 1,700 survivors who were children during the Holocaust and had previously received one-time payments will now be eligible for supplemental hardship payments.

Rabbi David Maxa first read from a Torah scroll eight years ago during a summer he spent at a camp for Reform Jewish leaders. Maxa, who was visiting from Prague, had traveled to Kutz Camp in the U.S. He didn’t know it then, but the Torah he read from had originated in his home country, in the Czech city of Brno, about 40 years earlier.

On Sept. 28 (Simchat Torah), that same scroll returned to the Czech Republic when Maxa and his nascent Prague congregation, Ec Chajim, welcomed it into their ark.

The return of the Czech scroll to Prague also marks a return of another kind. In the 75 years Following WWII and the near collapse of Jewish life in Europe, many of its treasures, including 1,564 Czech Torah scrolls, made their way to Jewish institutions across the world, the majority in the U.S. and Canada. Now, some of them are returning home, including the Brno Torah scroll, which had been used most recently at Camp Kutz.

Some 117,500 Jews lived in the area of Bohemia and Moravia before the Holocaust. Only about 10,000 survived the war. Jewish life in what is now the Czech Republic was nearly extinguished by the Nazis and the Communists that followed. But Jewish congregational life is finally reemerging.

Thanks to an historical quirk, Czech Jewish liturgical objects, such as Torah scrolls, never disappeared during the Nazi and Communist eras, but were ordered to be packed and shipped to the Jewish Museum in Prague. The Communists tried unsuccessfully to sell them to Israel, but a British lawyer and philanthropist, Ralph Yablon, agreed to buy 1,564 scrolls from the Communists, and turn them over in 1964 to the Westminster Synagogue in London. The synagogue loans out scrolls to Jewish congregations that need them. About 1,000 came to North America. The Kutz camp received one of the Czech scrolls in 1974. The scroll remains the property of the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London, but it will be on permanent loan to the Czech congregation for as long as it needs it.