There are instances, such as when they are faced with forced conversion to another religion, when Jews should choose martyrdom and sacrifice their lives rather than commit a chillul Hashem which desecrates the honor of God.

[3][4] Jewish history is replete with many episodes in which Jews who lived in different times and places chose to become individual and mass martyrs.

Judaism, and the Abrahamic religions such as Christianity and Islam, all draw their notions of martyrdom from the Jews' Hebrew Bible as put forth in the Torah.

This was the worst of the ten tests of Abraham and the fact that Isaac was willing to give up his own life serves as a role model for all subsequent people who are called upon to sacrifice their lives for their God, religion and beliefs.

In the Book of Samuel both King Saul and his sons especially Jonathan are regarded as martyrs because they sacrificed their own lives rather than being captured and humiliated by the Philistines.

[12] Zechariah ben Jehoiada a righteous priest who spoke up for justice was stoned to death on the orders of an evil king of Judah, as described in the Book of Chronicles.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego known in the Book of Daniel as Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were thrown into a fiery furnace for disobeying the Babylonian king who had commanded his subjects to worship an idol.

Many Jewish fast days and mourning periods were instituted and observed since ancient times, all of which also commemorate the martyrdom of Jews in those times:[citation needed] 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees recount numerous martyrdoms suffered by Jews resisting Hellenization, being executed for such crimes as observing the Sabbath, circumcising their children or refusing to eat pork or meat sacrificed to foreign gods.

[14] Judah Maccabee, the leader of the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid Greeks was killed in the Battle of Elasa (160 BCE) and together with his men, they died as martyrs.

In Judaism and Jewish liturgy, recounting the killing of the Ten Martyrs, as taught in Midrash Eleh Ezkerah, by the Romans is considered by many a solemn high point of the Yom Kippur prayer service.

Jews and Judaism commemorate the tragedies leading up to and including the destruction of the Second Temple, its catastrophic aftermath, and the martyrdom of so many, on the solemn fast day of Tisha B'Av.

This has resulted in the death and martyrdom of countless Jews and Jewish communities dating from Roman times to the present as outlined in the various sections of this article.

A special Hebrew prayer, Av HaRachamim ("Father [of] Mercy") still recited in Ashkenazi synagogues today was composed commemorating the Jewish martyrs resulting from the First Crusade (1096-1099).

The status of those crypto-Jews who had pretended to adopt Christianity in an attempt to avoid persecution is unclear in Jewish Law that forbids Apostasy in Judaism under all circumstances.

Over more than a hundred years, tens of thousands of innocent Jewish civilians, men women and children were massacred by rampaging mobs.

The 1991 Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn, New York is regarded as a latter day Pogrom that resulted in the killing of Yankel Rosenbaum and another man who looked like a Hasidic Jew.

The approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust during the period of the Second World War are regarded as martyrs by most Jewish religious scholars.

[24][25][26][27] Some famous rabbis who chose martyrdom al Kiddush Hashem ("for the sanctification of God's Name") immediately before they were murdered by the Nazis include Avraham Yitzchak Bloch, Elchonon Wasserman, Azriel Rabinowitz, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, Menachem Ziemba, and Ben Zion Halberstam.

There are special Jewish memorial prayers, known as hazkaras in Hebrew, (see El Malei Rachamim), that are recited in synagogues and at special gatherings for the thousands of Jewish Israeli soldiers and civilians who are regarded as martyrs (kedoshim meaning "holy ones" in Hebrew) who have been killed in the course of the Arab–Israeli conflict and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.