Thousands of participants in the March of the Living marched Monday from the gate of Auschwitz to Birkenau, where a memorial ceremony was held at a monument to the camp’s victims.

During the ceremony, Chabad rabbinical students wrapped Tefillin with more than 500 people. The opportunity to practice a mitzvah at these sites where so much of Jewish life was destroyed, was well received.

“Many people who put on Tefillin with us told us that they felt this was the most fitting thing to do, that the best way to respond to the Holocaust is to do another mitzvah,” says twenty year-old Yehuda Glaser, from Chicago, IL.

A Californian man who visited the Tefillin booth told Glaser that although he has a pair of Tefillin back at home, but hadn’t been using them recently. 

After donning Tefilin at the ceremony, “he told me that he will begin wrapping Tefilin every day when he gets back home,” Glaser said.