The Jewish faith has a long history of well-regarded poets. From Ibn Ezra, a devotional symbolist from the Islam-dominated territories of the Middle Ages, to American modernist Ezra Pound, Jews have always been a people fascinated with the word's potential for beauty. But of all the poets in the history of Jewish culture, few ever get the honor of having their work elevated into the liturgy of the faith. One such poet was a Zionist and soldier named Hannah Szenes, or Chana Senesh as it is often transliterated.

Chana was born in Hungary in 1921. Her family was ethnically Jewish but they did not practice any religious rituals of the faith. She would have been known as an "assimilated" Jew. Assimilated Jews in early 20th century Europe didn't get to enjoy the same benefits as secular-leaning individuals of Christian backgrounds. They were still branded as ethnic outsiders whether they practiced or not. They were still barred from certain professions and some varieties of land ownership, and they also incurred extra fees for things like private education.

At the end of the 1930's many Europeans countries began embracing anti-semetic laws, encouraged by the social fallout after the First World War in the West and Soviet anti-semetism in the East. These injustices pushed Chana Senesh into religious devotion and soon into political Zionism. She joined Maccabea, one of the Zionist youth organizations of Hungary. Upon her graduation from high school, she emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine where there were opportunities for Zionists to join various labor movements. Chana chose the Girls' Agricultural School in Nahalal, then took part in a kibbutz two years later.

Before long, Senesh reacted to the violence against Jews in the Second World War as many Zionists in Palestine did. She joined Haganah, a Zionist military organization that would one day become the Israeli Defense Forces.

At the height of the war, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill formed the Special Operations Executive, a small branch of the military set to carry out delicate and dangerous missions behind enemy lines, much like the American ISS. Chana Senesh, being a citizen of a British territory, was able to enlist in the army and soon trained to be a paratrooper for the SOE. She took part in a mission to support a Hungarian anti-fascist partisan group and was eventually captured at the border between Hungary and Yugoslavia. She underwent torture and imprisonment, though she never gave any information to her captors.

The details of Chana Senesh's trial are murky at best. There were several judges removed from her case and replaced, as well as several postponements of the final verdict. She was executed before even receiving a sentence, and was posthumously cleared of all charges in 1993. During her time in prison, Senesh kept a diary that doubled as a book of poems. Just prior to her death at the age of 23, she penned a poem that Jews all over the world recite in temple to this very day:

Eli, Eli

She'lo yigamer l'olam

Hakhol v'hayam

rish-rush shel hamayim

berak hashamayim

t'filat ha'adam

This translates as:

"My God, my God/ Do not let all of this end/ The shore and the sea/ The waves on the water/ The thunder of Heaven/ The faith of mankind"

Today, Chana Senesh rests at the Mt. Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem. She is regarded as a heroine and as another of too many tragic losses in the horrors of World War II. Hers is a story of defiance, a microcosmic rendition of the stories that played out all over Europe to end that most brutal conflict.