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Comment by arcatek | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand, how is it even possible ?

How is what possible? The Germans put all Jews on, even pregnant ones. His mother gave birth in the cattle car.

He was lucky. They survived. Most of his relatives did not.

He is an observant Jew. Follows all dietary laws, goes to Temple, observes all religious holidays, etc. He does this as a strong assertion that he is a Jew, he will not let anyone take that away from him. Ever.

He just doesn't happen to believe in God.

The Germans murdered all children and pregnant women. How could a newborn survive?

> The Germans murdered all children and pregnant women.

That's false.

> How could a newborn survive?

By having at least one very determined parent and an absolutely enormous amount of luck.

Have a look:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010n3tz

Because they obviously did not. Camps varied in cruelty quite a bit. It's worth learning about how a modern society like Weimar Germany could have been influenced to take the course of action that it did. Similar things continue to happen all over the world, and education is important in combating it.

I do not know all of the details, and this was someone I worked with over a decade ago. I've never had any particular reason to doubt his honesty, but I never tried hard to verify that particular claim either.

However I know that he was a Hungarian Jew. His family therefore would not have faced deportation to concentration camps until after the German invasion in 1944. According to http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142 there were some children successfully hidden by prisoners in camps.

After some time with Google, I wonder whether he could have been the one born on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kastner%27s_train. (Which was indeed a cattle car on its way to a concentration camp - but the people in the car survived.) I do not know and, due to the fact that I have not seen him since I moved to the West Coast a decade ago, am not in a position to ask.

The concentration camps weren't uniform, and even within the camps, some people were able to survive for a while and transfer. The system also varied a lot through time.

Judaism it not a religion. It is a complex mix of culture, religion, language, history, nationality, and ethnicity each to varying degrees. Being a Jew is never predicated on what you believe, athiests and believers - traditionalists and liberals - are both jews to equal measure. There is such a hodgepodge of viewpoints and movements that you will not have to dig long before you find observant Jews who are skeptical about the existence of god - or most likely just don't bother with that question.

Judaism is a religion - it is the name of the religion of the jewish people. But you can be jewish without adhering to judaism. And I suppose you can follow the traditions and rituals of Judaism without believing in the existence of God.

Sounds very similar to my experience with Japanese culture. We call their Shintoism a 'religion' but it doesn't fit either, it's much more like what you list.

I consider myself an atheist. However, my parents insist that I will never stop being Jewish because it is primarily a culture/creed.

I'm not sure which point is hard to believe, but hoping this helps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Judaism

I can't speak for his personal beliefs, but the reason one might so often encounter the "atheist jew" phenomena is simply an inherent compatibility. This is seated in the resistance to anthropomorphism of god, skepticism of false idolatry, etc. The past thousand years of rubbing with christianity has formalized what we now recognize as "religious" rite, but faith is the paradoxical belief in something that doesn't necessarily exist -- that's why it's faith.

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