Poem: ‘Sefirah 5704’
between Pesach and Shavuos
in the Greater Hungary spring
of 1944
did Jews count
the weeks
in ghettos
the days
in cattle cars
without food or toilets
the hours, minutes, seconds
churning past burgeoning fields of new grain
until they reached
their ultimate
destination?
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO