In 1775, the Spanish General O'Reilly attacked the city of Algiers and was successfully repulsed by the Dey of Algiers, Mohammed ibn Uman. Tradition has it that flames came out of the graves of the great Rabbis Isaac ben Sheshet and Solomon ben Simon Duran and contributed to the Spanish defeat. To celebrate the miracle of having escaped Spanish rule, the Jews of Algiers instituted a "Purim" on the 11th of Tammuz.
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R. Elchanan Bunem Wasserman headed a famous yeshivah in Baranovitch (in what is now Belarus), attracting many bright students. At the outbreak of World War II, he fled with the yeshivah to Lithuania. In 1941, when the Nazis broke their pact with the Soviets and overran Lithuania, he was one of the thousands of Jews who met their deaths, sanctifying G‑d’s name.
R. Elchanan authored Kovetz Shiurim, a collection of Talmudic classes he delivered at the yeshivah.
Link: A Mother’s Comfort
Why are you afraid? Why do you panic?
Eagerly and with purpose, your soul plunged downward to live in an earthly realm,
to enwrap herself in a body of flesh and blood.
What emboldened her? What drew her to squeeze her unbounded light
into the straitjacket of time and space?
It was neither fear, nor dread, nor panic.
It was the knowledge that here below is found beauty the highest of angels cannot touch.
Care for yourself, for your family, for your fellow human beings and our lovely planet earth, not out of fear, not from distress—
—but out of love and awe for the beauty found within all these things, the magnificence we came to this world to uncover.