Today, the story of the Jewish educator and children’s author Janusz Korczak (né Henryk Goldszmit), the founder and director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw before and during World War II, is well-known in Poland, especially after it was recounted in a 1990 film. Korczak, having turned down offers to escape the Warsaw Ghetto, remained with his charges and was sent along with them to Treblinka to be murdered in 1942. Far less well-known is the very similar story of Rabbi Dawid Alter Kurzmann of Krakow, but he is now getting some much-deserved recognition, Ofer Aderet writes. (Free registration may be required.)

[Rabbi Kurzmann’s] grandson, Marcel Kurzmann, an eighty-three-year-old resident of the Tel Aviv suburb Rishon Letzion, has been working in recent years to gain recognition for the grandfather he never met. Marcel has had the assistance of his own grandson, Elad Furman, whose efforts helped get a street in Rishon Letzion named after Rabbi Kurzmann. This year a street in Krakow will also bear his name.

The rabbi’s descendants don’t know a lot about him. It’s known that he was born in 1865 in the city of Rzeszow to the east and grew up in Krakow. He made a living running a trading house for iron and other metal. He was also among the founders of the international ultra-Orthodox movement Agudath Israel, and of Ḥakhmey Lublin, a leading yeshiva in the city of Lublin to the northeast.

As president of the Dietla Street orphanage, he started to help run it on a day-to-day basis in 1918 and in practice served as its director. The orphans there referred to him as their father. He continued to run the facility after the Germans occupied Poland in September 1939, though the Nazis made the orphanage relocate to more crowded quarters inside the Krakow Ghetto.

On October 28, 1942, at the age of seventy-seven, Rabbi Kurzmann was sent to the gas chambers of the Belzec extermination camp along with 300 children who had been in his charge. Also killed with them were a teacher at the orphanage, Anna Regina Feuerstein, her husband, and Kurzmann’s daughter and son-in-law.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.