By Olivier Melnick

"If God exists, He doesn't need me for anything, and I sure don't need HIM."

These were my comments when asked about God as I grew up in Paris, France. As many European, secular Jews born after World War II and raised in the aftermath of the Holocaust, I was not interested in God at all. After all, maybe my mother was right when she claimed that God died in Auschwitz with the six million - including her father.

By Andrew

I was born in North London in 1964, to Egyptian Jewish parents who had fled to England during the political upheaval of the Suez Canal crisis in 1957. Our Egyptian Jewish ancestry extends as far back as we know, and my father was very devout. We went to Hendon Reform Synagogue in London where I became Bar Mitzvah.

By Mitch Glaser

My background as a Jewish American is common for those of my generation. I was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents. My dad is from a non-religious but very Jewish home, and my mom, whose parents were from Russia, is from an Orthodox home. I grew up going to an Orthodox synagogue in the Queens section of New York City. At the age of thirteen, I became Bar Mitzvah. Then, like many other nice Jewish boys of my generation, I left the synagogue.

By Fran Feldman

The horrifying reality of the Holocaust was not something I had to learn about in books or in movies. It was the moving force that shaped my family's life.

When my parents and older brother came to America from Europe after World War II, they settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was born a year later and my younger brother came along five years after that. Many of our neighbors had the same background, and the Holocaust was something we all were trying to put behind us.