On the seventh night of Chanukah in 1944, my father was in Auschwitz. He had been deported with his parents and four of his five siblings to the Nazi extermination camp eight months earlier; by Chanukah, only my father was still alive. That year, he kindled no Chanukah lights. In Auschwitz, where anything and everything was punishable by death, any Jew caught practicing his religion could expect to be sent to the gas chambers or shot on the spot.


Like other Jewish holidays, Chanukah was often chosen deliberately by the Nazis as an occasion for murdering Jews. In Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, the historian Yaffa Eliach recounts one such slaughter:


"The men selected were marched outside. SS men with rubber truncheons and iron prods awaited them. They kicked, beat, and tortured the innocent victims. When the tortured body no longer responded, the revolver was used.... The brutal massacre continued outside of the barracks until sundown. When the [Nazis] departed, they left behind heaps of hundreds of tortured and twisted bodies."


On the seventh night of Chanukah in 2007, I was in the White House. President and Mrs. Bush have made it an annual tradition to host a Chanukah celebration in addition to the customary White House Christmas parties, and my wife and I were honored to receive an invitation to this year's reception.


It was in every way a beautiful and festive event. It was also an unmistakably Jewish one, from the lavish buffet dinner prepared in a meticulously "koshered" White House kitchen, to the Hebrew songs performed by the Zamir Chorale, to the several hundred guests drawn from every segment of the American Jewish community. There was even a spontaneous worship service in the Green Room, where at one point about two dozen guests assembled for Ma'ariv, the Jewish evening prayers. All this in a White House richly decorated for Christmas and occupied by a president who is devoutly Christian. It is hard to imagine a more compelling illustration of the American culture of religious tolerance and freedom.


Earlier in the evening, there had been a menorah lighting in the Grand Foyer of the White House. Chanukah commemorates the victory of Jews who fought long ago to preserve their religious identity in the face of an oppressive government determined to erase it, and President Bush spoke of the ongoing struggle for religious liberty today.


"As we light the Chanukah candles this year," he said, "we pray for those who still live under the shadow of tyranny."


He described his private meeting earlier in the day with a small group of Jewish immigrants to the United States.


"Many of these men and women fled from religious oppression in countries like Iran and Syria and the Soviet Union," Bush said. Among those in attendance was Baghdad-born Ruth Pearl, who was 15 when her family - like so many other Jewish families in the Arab world - was forced to flee from Iraq.


She and her husband Judea, the parents of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, had come to the White House with their family menorah, which Daniel's great-grandfather Chayim had taken with him when he escaped Poland for Palestine in 1924. Daniel was murdered in 2002 by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan; his only crime, observed Bush, "was being a Jewish American - something Daniel Pearl would never deny."


Auschwitz, Baghdad, Poland, Pakistan: In so many places, across so many generations, to be Jewish has meant to be oppressed, excluded, terrorized. More than most people, Jews know what it means to be a hated and persecuted minority.


And more than most, therefore, they have reason to be profoundly grateful for the United States and its blessings. America is what the Jewish sages called "malchut shel chesed" - a benevolent and generous nation. In the long history of the Jews, America has been a safe harbor virtually without parallel. Nowhere in all their wanderings have the Jews known such freedom, peace and prosperity.


So, I strolled about the White House last week, gazing at the portraits of past presidents and first ladies and listening to the Marine Band play "I Have A Little Dreidel." By the light of the White House menorah, I thought about my father, and about the unimaginable distance from the hell he knew in 1944 to this place of joy and warmth where I found myself in 2007. I was overcome with a feeling of gratitude so intense that, for a moment, I was too choked up to speak. To be an American and a Jew is truly to be doubly blessed.


This article originally appeared in the Boston Globe on Sunday, December 16, 2007.