Certain dates do not merely record events, they seal eras. The 16th of October 1946 (21 Tishrei 5707) was one such fateful day, October 7 2023, (22 Tishrei 5784) the other.
That October morning, ten men convicted at Nuremberg were hanged. The day was Hoshana Rabbah when, according to the Zohar and midrashic tradition, the judgments of the year are completed and the heavenly decree is sealed. As Julius Streicher, the most notorious antisemitic propagandist of the Nazi regime, approached the scaffold, he suddenly cried out: “Purim Fest 1946!”
The cry was not planned. It rose from the man himself at the moment of his own judgment. In that instant, the ancient Purim festival of reversal when the plot to destroy the Jews was turned back Streicher screamed it out aloud over the gallows of the Third Reich.
2500 years prior, the Book (Megillah) of Esther prophetically prepared the pattern. It records that Haman had ten sons. After Haman's threat to destroy the Jews was overturned, Esther specifically requested that those ten sons be hanged on the gallows (Esther 9:13). The text lists their ten names, and within those names three letters are written smaller than the rest:
ת (tav) in Parshandata
ש (shin) in Parmashta
ז (zayin) in Vayzata
These letters together form תש״ז, whose numerical value is 707 comply with the long held practice identifying the century, decade and year. The Hebrew year 5707 had just begun, it corresponds to October 1946. A large vav appears in the same passage, read by some as marking the completion of the sixth millennium. Through the millennia small letters had been written in every scroll, silent witnesses waiting for their moment.
On Hoshana Rabbah 5707, a day before the Jewish festival of Sukkot the alignment was complete: ten sons, ten gallows, the exact method of execution the Megillah had specified, the precise year encoded in the miniature script, and the day of sealed judgment. Even the man who had spent years twisting the story of Purim into Nazi propaganda became, at the end, the one who named the day “Purimfest.”
In the wider realm of Jewish memory, 16 October 1946 carried an additional weight. It symbolically marked the close of the greatest war ever waged against the Jewish people, the war that sought not only their defeat but their total eradication. The hanging of the ten principal perpetrators at Nuremberg, on the day tradition associates with the finalizing of divine judgment, felt to many like a terrible but fitting punctuation mark at the end of that chapter. Yet the ancient conflict was not sealed.
77 years later on 7 October 2023, a new war against the Jews began with sudden and deliberate violence. This fateful day was 22 Tishrei, Simchat Torah a holiday for Jewish people following Sukkot. Once again the intent was articulated in language that echoed the ancient decree: to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate. Once again Jewish communities around the world felt the ground shift beneath them as antisemitism surged in its wake.
The Megillah does not speak only of one Purim. It speaks of a recurring pattern, a war against the Jews that rises in different generations under different names, yet carries the same essential character. Haman -Hitler becomes the archetype; Amalek-Nazi's the recurring memory; the command to “remember what Amalek did” (Deuteronomy 25:17) a perpetual vigilance rather than a closed historical file.
The small letters that spelled 5707 did not promise that the pattern would never recur. They marked a particular moment of judgment within that larger story. The text continues to accompany the people it was given to, through endings and through new beginnings of the same ancient struggle.
The Megillah ends with a charge that has proven more prophetic than anyone could have imagined: “These days of Purim shall not pass away from among the Jews, nor the memorial of them perish from their seed” (Esther 9:28). In 1946 that memorial did not merely survive in the synagogue. It reappeared on a scaffold in Nuremberg, spoken by one of the architects of the attempt to erase it.
In 2023 the same memorial was invoked again, this time not from a place of judgment over the perpetrators, but from within a new chapter of threat. The scroll does not grow old. Its patterns continue to surface when the conditions that gave rise to them reappear.
Sixteen October 1946, Hoshana Raba and seven October 2023, Simchat Torah now stand as markers on either side of a long arc: one date sealing, in the eyes of many, the close of the greatest war against the Jews in history; the other marking the violent opening of a new phase in that same enduring conflict. Between them lies the living text with its small letters, its specific demand for hanging evil, its insistence that the days of Purim be remembered crowned by Sukkot, the annual Jewish festival that continues to honor nations of the world since Israel emerged from its first antisemitic encounter in Egypt 3300 years before.
