Earlier this year, construction workers laying the foundation for a new apartment building in the Belarusian city of Brest, known in Yiddish as Brisk, discovered a mass grave holding the bones of over 1,200 people—the ghoulish evidence of a Nazi massacre of local Jews. Upon a recent visit to Brest, Meir Soloveichik—whose great-great-grandfather, the pathbreaking talmudist known as Ḥayyim Brisker, as well as his father, were rabbis in the city—recited kaddish on behalf of the dead. He writes:

On December 20, a Palestinian waited in a wooded area near a Jewish village in northern Israel in the hope of encountering a victim. Soon enough he spotted Esther Horgan walking home from an evening jog and killed her by beating her with a rock. He later told the police that he did the deed to avenge the death of Kamal Abu Wa’er, a terrorist in Israeli custody. Itamar Marcus explains: