Greater than 80 years after she parachuted into Yugoslavia as a part of the one army operation in World Struggle II that tried to rescue Jews, the Jewish poet and kibbutznik Hannah Senesh is having her second.
The play “Hannah Senesh” is working by means of Nov. 9 on the Nationwide Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in New York — a wonderful one-woman present, starring Jennifer Apple, that pulls straight from Senesh’s diary and poems.
A brand new e-book by Douglas Century, “Crash of the Heavens: The Exceptional Story of Hannah Senesh and the Solely Army Mission to Rescue Europe’s Jews Throughout World Struggle II,” is a piece of nonfiction written with the pacing and pressure of a thriller.
Early subsequent yr, the famous Israeli journalist Matti Friedman will inform the story of Hannah’s group of parachutists in “Out of The Sky: Heroism and Rebirth in Nazi Europe.”
And this week the New York Instances gave Senesh the obituary remedy she had been denied in 1944, as a part of its “Neglected No Extra” mission.
Why, in 2025, is the tradition turning its consideration to the story of this younger poet, soldier and martyr? What does her life imply, particularly, to Jews?
Hannah Senesh was born in Budapest in 1921 to an assimilated Hungarian Jewish household. Her father, Béla Szenes, was a widely known playwright and journalist who died when she was a baby, and her mom, Katharine, raised her and her brother alone. Their residence was cultured and secular.
As a schoolgirl, Hannah excelled in writing and was drawn to literature, however by her teenage years, antisemitism had begun to shut in on Hungarian Jews. Relatively than retreat, she grew extra acutely aware of her Jewish identification and of the brand new Zionist motion that sought to mix Jewish pleasure with motion.
In 1939, because the clouds of battle gathered, Senesh left Budapest for Palestine. She studied on the Nahalal agricultural faculty for ladies and later joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam close to Caesarea, embracing the pioneer life. Within the kibbutz she discovered a group rooted within the land and religion in the way forward for the Jewish folks. There she additionally honed her poetic voice, writing verses that will later grow to be a part of Jewish collective reminiscence.
I, together with numerous younger folks, grew up singing her most well-known poem in Jewish summer season camps. That’s “Eli, Eli” — “My God, my God, could this stuff by no means finish: the sand and the ocean, the rustle of the waters, the lightning of the heavens, the prayer of man.” The poem’s unique title is “Strolling to Caesarea,” which is the place Hannah wrote it. Caesearea, the Roman capital of historical Palestine, was the place the sages suffered martyrdom. The reference to the location suggests Hannah may sense the potential of her personal martyrdom.
So does “Blessed Is the Match,” one other of her best-known poems: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame, blessed is the flame that burns within the secret fastness of the center.”
Because the Holocaust unfolded, Senesh couldn’t stay on the sidelines. She volunteered for a particular British unit to coach Jewish parachutists who would drop behind enemy strains to assist Allied forces and help persecuted Jews.
Hannah Senesh wears the uniform of the British Ladies’s Auxiliary Air Power, which she joined in 1943. (Yad Vashem Picture Archive)
In 1944, she parachuted into Yugoslavia as a part of an Allied mission to succeed in occupied Hungary. Her purpose was to make contact with the underground and assist rescue Jews who have been being deported to Auschwitz. After months of working with Yugoslav partisans, she tried to cross the Hungarian border however was captured by fascist forces. Tortured, interrogated and supplied the prospect to avoid wasting her life by revealing secret particulars of her mission, she refused. When requested if she was British, she reportedly declared as an alternative, “I’m a Jew.”
Senesh was imprisoned in Budapest, tried for treason and executed by firing squad on Nov. 7, 1944. She was solely 23. Her writings — diaries, poems, and letters — have been preserved by her mom and later printed, guaranteeing that her voice lived on. Almost each Israeli family has a replica of her writings.
Like Anne Frank, Hannah left behind a diary chronicling her idealism and internal life. However the place Anne Frank’s writings replicate a confined adolescence, albeit with a free-floating spirit, Hannah Senesh’s life was outlined by company and motion.
She was not solely a poet and diarist; she was a soldier who took up arms towards the Nazi battle machine. Her imaginative and prescient of heroism fused cultural Zionism with bodily braveness — a mannequin of Jewish power that’s each mental and militant. She was, in some ways, a determine nearer to Theodor Herzl than to Anne Frank: a Hungarian Jew whose secular upbringing gave approach to a acutely aware and proud Jewish identification, and whose life was dedicated to the belief of that identification within the land of Israel.
Like me, Douglas Century grew up studying Hannah’s story. In my dialog with him, he advised me that “her martyrdom amazed and terrified” him. He got here to know David Senesh, Hannah’s nephew, who’s a therapist specializing in trauma (and who this month spoke to the Instances of Israel about how his aunt’s story influenced his life and his work with former hostages and different traumatized Israelis). David had been a prisoner of battle within the 1973 Yom Kippur Struggle, and spent months present process torture. David’s father, George, had been in a POW camp in Vichy France, and his grandmother, Catherine, had been a prisoner of the Gestapo
As David wryly advised Century: “I generally assume it’s our future – or one thing within the Senesh household DNA.”
These converging story strains of Jewish company and sacrifice recommend why Hannah’s story could also be proper for these fraught instances, marked by antisemitism, anti-Zionism and ethical confusion.
The Folksbiene manufacturing of Hannah Senesh and the books by Century and Friedman arrive at a time when Jews really feel stress to attenuate or conceal their identification. The play’s climactic second — when Senesh asserts her Jewishness to her captors — seems like a direct message to as we speak’s viewers: a name to not erase or apologize for who we’re. It’s each a historic reenactment and an ethical demand.
To that finish, the Nationwide Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene has launched a particular fundraising initiative to make tickets for “Hannah Senesh” obtainable freed from cost for college students — each Jewish and non-Jewish. With incidents of antisemitism, intolerance and hatred happening at an alarming clip within the metropolis, NYTF is dedicated to offering as much as 1,000 free pupil tickets.
There’s additionally a deep cultural starvation for tales of heroism and ethical readability. Senesh’s story even seems within the late Sen. John McCain’s memoir, “Why Braveness Issues”: “I don’t assume Hannah needed to die for the sake of getting her reminiscence exalted in historical past or to show herself equal to a romantic picture she conceived for herself,” writes McCain. “Her goal wasn’t to die. She died for her life’s goal.”
Senesh’s story can be a rebuke to the best way too many Jews and others bear in mind the Holocaust. For many years, a lot of Holocaust illustration has targeted on Jewish victimhood and struggling. Senesh represents one thing completely different: defiance, motion and dignity. Her story restores a story of Jewish energy and resistance, embodied not by generals or politicians however by a 23-year-old girl who refused to compromise her Jewish identification. In an age when many really feel ambivalent about that identification — when assimilation, concern, or politicized hostility problem Jewish expression — her unwavering sense of goal feels radical and obligatory.
At a time when “Zionist” and its hateful cousin “Zio” are epithets, extra usually spat than spoken, the musical, specifically, reclaims that identification as a badge of braveness. Furthermore, it locates a Zionist identification the place it belongs — as an emblem of idealism and resilience. Within the present, Hannah makes it clear: Her Zionism echoes that of the thinker Martin Buber, who believed that each Jews and Arabs may and would share the land.
Each time I lead providers from the Reform prayer e-book, “Mishkan T’filah,” and I come to the readings earlier than the Mourner’s Kaddish, I encounter Hannah’s poem, “Yesh Kochavim”: “There are stars up above, so far-off we solely see their mild lengthy, lengthy after the star itself is gone.” That’s Hannah Senesh — a star that fell to earth lengthy earlier than its time, however whose mild nonetheless illuminates the world.
That is Hannah Senesh’s second. It comes at a time that requires fashions of Jewish power, compassion and integrity. The play and Century’s e-book reply that decision — not with nostalgia however with renewal. They remind us that, even when surrounded by darkness, the match nonetheless burns, and the celebs nonetheless shine.
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is the co-founder/co-director of Knowledge With out Partitions: a web-based salon for Jewish concepts. His most up-to-date e-book is “Inviting God In: A Information To Jewish Prayer” (CCAR Press).
The views and opinions expressed on this article are these of the writer and don’t essentially replicate the views of JTA or its father or mother firm, 70 Faces Media.
