Three years ago, Simchat Torah changed forever.
On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, as Jews across Israel were preparing to celebrate the completion of the annual Torah-reading cycle, Hamas terrorists poured in from the Gaza Strip, murdering 1,200 Israelis and taking 251 others hostage.
Suddenly, a holiday associated with dancing became one of slaughter.
For many Jews, that has made Simchat Torah one of the most emotionally complicated days on the calendar. How do you dance on the anniversary of a massacre? How do you sing when the date itself summons memories of young people hunted down at the Nova music festival, families murdered in their homes and communities along the Gaza border overrun?
An answer can be found in another Simchat Torah, more than 80 years ago, in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.
The Germans had begun the mass deportation of Warsaw’s Jews to Treblinka. More than a quarter of a million had been sent to their deaths. Of the roughly 400,000 Jews who had once been crowded into the ghetto, perhaps 60,000 remained.
Yet when the Jewish holidays arrived, some Jews in the ghetto insisted on observing them.
Dr. Hillel Seidman, a religious Jew who kept a remarkable diary of life inside the ghetto, recorded what happened on Simchat Torah.
About 15 men gathered in the apartment of the great Torah scholar Rabbi Menachem Ziemba at 37 Nalewki Street. They took Torah scrolls in their arms and began the traditional hakafot, circling the room. But there was little joy.
Among those present was Rabbi Yehuda Leib Orlean, a prominent Gerrer Chassid and Torah scholar. His wife and five children had been murdered. Seidman described him as utterly broken.
The men began reciting the familiar Simchat Torah verses, but instead of singing them exuberantly, they intoned them mournfully.
Then something unexpected happened: a 12-year-old Jewish boy entered the room.
The sight itself was extraordinary. By then, almost no Jewish children remained in the ghetto. Children had been among the first targets of the Nazi killing machine.
Rabbi Orlean saw the boy, grabbed him and pulled him close to the Torah scroll he was holding.
And then the shattered rabbi began to dance.
A yunger Yid mit di heilige Toyreh! he cried out in Yiddish. (“A young Jew with the holy Torah!”) Again and again, he sang the words as he danced with the child.
The men around him began to weep. Then they joined in, forming a circle around the rabbi and the boy.
Seidman would later describe it as the final dance of the final Simchat Torah celebrated by the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Warsaw in the fall of 1942 and Israel in 2023 are not the same, and they should not be equated. The Jews trapped in the ghetto were stateless and defenseless, surrounded by an enemy systematically exterminating them. Israel is a sovereign Jewish state with an army capable of striking back.
But the two moments confront us with a similar question: What is Jewish joy when everything around us seems to argue against it?
Rabbi Orlean’s answer was remarkable precisely because he wasn’t pretending that everything was fine. His world had been devastated. His dance did not erase his grief. And yet, he saw a Jewish child standing beside a Torah scroll and understood that this was something the Germans had not yet managed to destroy: the possibility of a Jewish future.
Last year, on Simchat Torah in 2025, hundreds of people, including Israeli soldiers, gathered at the site of the Nova festival, where so many young Israelis had been murdered. They carried a Torah scroll and danced, singing Am Yisrael Chai, “the nation of Israel lives.”
The place where Jews had been hunted while celebrating just two years previously became a place where Jews once again danced.
None of this makes the losses disappear. There will be empty places in countless homes and synagogues this Simchat Torah. There will be parents without children, children without parents, and families who will never again experience the holiday as they once did.
We will remember them.
But we will dance.
Not because we have forgotten Oct. 7, but because we remember what Rabbi Orlean understood in Warsaw. More than eight decades ago, he looked at a Jewish child beside a Torah scroll and saw something worth dancing for: the Jewish future.
This Simchat Torah, after everything the Jewish people have endured these past three years, perhaps that is what we should see as well.
A young Jew with the holy Torah. And the Jewish story continuing.
