A butterfly can make you stop for a moment. Something small passes through your day, and suddenly you are thinking about someone you love, a change you are living through, or a possibility you had almost forgotten.
When we chose the butterfly for Alef Bet, we were thinking about those connections: freedom, opportunity, love, and the relationship between who we have been and who we can become. We also thought about a yellow butterfly remembered in a poem from the Holocaust.
The yellow butterfly in Pavel Friedmann’s poem
“The Butterfly” was written by Pavel Friedmann while imprisoned in Terezín, also known as Theresienstadt, on June 4, 1942. Friedmann was later deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.
One English translation begins:
“The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.”
The poem describes the remembered butterfly against the reality of confinement in the ghetto. Its yellow color and flight evoke a world beyond imprisonment. Reading it today, we hear the longing for ordinary beauty and the freedom to move through the world.
That is our reading of the poem. Its grief deserves to remain present, even when the butterfly also inspires hope.
Friedmann’s poem appears in I Never Saw Another Butterfly, a collection of children’s drawings and poems from Terezín. It also inspired Holocaust Museum Houston’s Butterfly Project, which gathered approximately 1.5 million handmade butterflies to commemorate the 1.5 million children murdered during the Holocaust.
Through remembrance projects like this, the butterfly has become part of how people learn about and remember the Holocaust. It asks us to remember individual lives, voices, and futures that were taken away.
What a butterfly can mean today
There is no single meaning that every Jewish person gives to a butterfly. For some, its connection to Holocaust remembrance is central. For others, it brings to mind freedom, renewal, family, or a loved one’s memory.
A butterfly’s transformation offers a way to think about our own changes. We can enter a new chapter while carrying the people, experiences, and identity that shaped us. Becoming someone new does not require forgetting who we were.
That thought can matter at a graduation, a move, a milestone birthday, or during a quieter change that only we can see.
A yellow butterfly and the memory of someone we love
Some people find comfort in the belief that a yellow butterfly crossing their path is a sign that a loved one who has died is near. They experience it as a moment of connection: a reminder of love, or a feeling that they are being thought of.
We speak of this as a personal belief, rather than a universal Jewish teaching. A butterfly can also become a meaningful reminder without being understood as a spiritual sign. It may bring back a particular person, a shared memory, or a moment we want to hold onto.
For others, yellow suggests warmth, happiness, blessings, and the possibility of good things ahead.
Why our butterfly carries Stars of David
Our butterfly necklace brings these ideas together with Jewish identity. Stars of David fill one wing, while the other has a smooth finish. For us, the design makes room for both the history we carry and the future we are still creating.
The warm yellow-gold color echoes the yellow butterfly that stayed with us from Friedmann’s poem. It also reflects the warmth and light we associate with love and possibility.
Someone may wear it in remembrance. Someone else may choose it to mark a beginning, express Jewish pride, or simply because the design speaks to her.
That is the thought behind our words:
What we carry. Who we become.
The meaning belongs to the person wearing it.
