Couscous and truffles

Top Israeli chef Mika Sharon, her face flushed and her hair swept up in a clip, last week shared with her D.C. dinner guests the Mediterranean-inspired menu that she had prepared for them.

"And please let me know if you don't like it," instructed Sharon, who trained at the French Culinary Institute, hosts cooking shows on Israeli television and operates several popular restaurants in Tel Aviv.

These dinner guests, however, weren't typical: They were homeless.

A curtain call for Terezin

With a touch of irony and a nod of his head, Edgar Krasa, 90, acknowledged his dramatic "role" as a survivor from Terezin.

"Otherwise, I couldn't be here," the real-life Holocaust survivor said.

Krasa and fellow survivors shared their "insiders' perspectives" of their time in the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1941.

But their recollection of the camp's improbable musical chorus -- and its courageous young conductor, Rafael Schaechter -- was the focus of the evening's program