Everyday life is experienced linearly; physics suggests that it is relative, but Judaism always focuses on the cyclical. We place a strong emphasis on the circle of life, and it is through that lens that we tend to view history. We have developed a strong appreciation for the repetitive nature of history and how the more things change, the more they are the same. This has provided us with a certain insouciance to the frequent difficulties that have plagued us over the centuries. That being said, every once in a while, circumstances throw a curveball, and now seems to be one of those times.

In 1827, Czar Nicholas I issued the infamous and brutal Cantonist decrees; they remained in place for a 30-year period. This was weaponized legislation designed to brutalize the Jewish community and effect the erasure of a culture. Jewish boys, sometimes as young as 8, were torn from their homes and yeshivas and forced into a 25-year conscription. Often baptized and broken, most of these boys never returned home, and those that did found themselves geographically home but spiritually and emotionally a world apart. The Czar’s plan was to eliminate the Jewish identity within a generation, and he nearly succeeded.

Parents lived in a perpetual state of fear for their young sons, even going to the lengths of mutilating their children in the desperate hopes of avoiding the draft. Khappers were proxied to raid the shtetls and hunt down young boys in order to........

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