I have now been in Israel for six months. One thing I have noticed is that in general, there isn’t the same instant gratification I had in the States. When I wait in line, I really wait. When I talk to a friend or family member, we really talk. When I need to get somewhere, I sit on a bus, and I mean really sit, for hours on end. With so much time to sit and think, I notice many things that may have passed me by had I been driving in my own car and singing along with my music as the hours melted away.

Poland was cold. There was a chill in the air that burrowed down through your skin and tried to extinguish your internal flame, the flame that is your heart and soul.

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 9 (JTA) – Sydney Pickman thought she "knew everything" about the Holocaust.

The 16-year-old from Queens had learned about it in school and at BBYO conventions. But like most of her friends she'd never heard about the Jewish partisans, the young men and women who fought the Nazis.

Her eyes were opened last month, when the San Francisco-based Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation presented a workshop to 200 teenagers at a BBYO convention in the Catskills Mountains in New York.

JERUSALEM (JTA) — A group of refugees from Darfur on a visit to Yad Vashem lingered next to a model of the crematorium at Auschwitz, taking in the ghastly sight of bodies carried on cots and pushed into ovens.