A teacher at a school for Jewish girls in Budapest run by the Church of Scotland, Jane Haining refused orders from her superiors to leave Hungary when World War II began. Eventually she was sent to Auschwitz, where she died. Some of her last correspondence was recently discovered in church archives, shedding new light on the details of her story:

Despite being under surveillance, [Haining] managed to keep the children safe for four years until she was betrayed by the cook’s son-in-law, whom she caught eating scarce food intended for the girls. She was arrested by two Gestapo officers—they gave her fifteen minutes to gather her belongings—and charged with eight offenses. She was accused of working among the Jews; weeping when seeing the girls attend class wearing the yellow stars; dismissing her housekeeper; listening to news broadcasts on the BBC; having many British visitors; being active in politics; visiting British prisoners of war; and sending British prisoners of war parcels.

The church has a translation of the last letter Miss Haining wrote—a missive written in German and in pencil to Margit Prem, the Hungarian head teacher who ran the Scottish Mission in Budapest, on a letter-form headed “Konzenstrationslager Auschwitz.” It is dated July15, 1944—two days before she died—and is mainly concerned with the welfare of others, food, and the practical details of the school.

Contributing to the Jewish state’s current controversy over efforts to reform its judicial system, observes Peter Berkowitz, is its lack of a written constitution. Berkowitz encourages Israelis to seek a way out of the present crisis by looking to the founding document they do have: the Declaration of Independence.

The document does not explicitly mention “democracy.” But it commits Israel to democratic institutions not only by insisting on the equality of rights for all citizens and the establishment of representative government but also by stressing that Arab inhabitants would enjoy “full and equal citizenship.”

The Israeli Declaration of Independence no more provides a constitution for Israel than does the U.S. Declaration of Independence furnish a constitution for America. Both documents, however, announced a universal standard. In 1859, as civil war loomed, Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter, “All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”

Something similar could be said about Ben Gurion’s . . . affirmation that Israel would be based on, ensure, and guarantee basic rights and fundamental freedoms because they are inseparable from our humanity.

Perhaps reconsideration of the precious inheritance enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence could assist both sides in assuaging the rage roiling the country. Bold and conciliatory, the nation’s founding document promises not merely a Jewish state, or a free state, or a democratic state, but that Israel will combine and reconcile its diverse elements to form a Jewish and free and democratic state.