BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

SAYING KADDISH. AT LAST. Holocaust survivor learns father's fate By ARON HELLER In 1942, 8-year-old Moshe Bar-Yuda walked hand-in-hand with his father to a collection point in his hometown in Slovakia and watched him being shipped off to a Nazi labor camp. The boy never saw him again, and for 66 years was left to wonder about his father's fate. Because of a newly opened Nazi archive, the mystery has been resolved. Bar-Yuda, now 74, was one of the first to obtain Nazi documents now available to the public after they were stashed away for more than 60 years in a secret German archive. Up to now, only limited queries were answered. The Bad Arolsen documents — transportation lists, Gestapo orders, camp registers, slave labor booklets, death books — contain references to about 17.5 million people, Jews and non-Jews. It is the largest registry of Holocaust victims ever. The archive showed that Bar-Yuda's father, Alfred Kastner, was killed in a Nazi gas chamber at the Majdanek de...

LIFE IN THE HEREAFTER by Zalman M. Schachter Death did not frighten the pious Jew of old. He had faith in the talmudic contention that death is simply a transition from one life into another, likened to the ease of taking a hair out of milk. What the Jew wanted above all was to die fully conscious, to be in full possession of his mental faculties at the time that his soul left his body. For the hasid (righteous) it was a matter of absolute faith and conviction that the same One God who was worshipped in this world could be served in the worlds to come, as well. For the not-so-pure, however, the process of extricating from bodily life was a bit more problematic. The soul that had become too fully identified with the body through sensual indulgence would find it difficult to separate from it. To accompany the body to its final resting place and to behold the putrefaction and the decay was understandably painful for such souls. This state of being is known as hibbut ha-kever, the pain and...