Marilyn Schein and Sid Keyles are looking forward to the trip (except for the mornings of those early flights!).  Marilyn has not been to any of the 4 cities and is pleased to see the Jewish highlights in all 4 of them.  Sid has been to all 4, but is excited at the prospect of returning to all of them, especially Krakow, where he spent only a partial day.  We are happy that the Jewish Museum in Berlin is part of the itinerary, as Sid has advised Marilyn that it is one of the best Jewish museums he has been to.  We are looking forward to seeing Sid's cousins Pearl and David, who are joining the group from Miami Beach.  We had heard that Rabbi Tow is an excellent tour guide and we imagine that seeing the important Jewish sights will be enhanced by his knowledge.

Rabbi, if you need any help with getting around on local public transit, Sid is generally very knowledgeable on how to do it most efficiently.  We will also be bringing a local tour book for each of the cities we will be visiting and are willing to share them with the group.

We look forward to meeting others in the group at the Shabbat service in Glen Rock the day before the trip.

Marilyn and Sid

Terezin - Poems from the Holocaust

Northwest of Prague, is the city of Terezin, a concentration camp in its own right, but really a way station to Auschwitz.  It was a place where many adult and youth artists, musicians & writers, expressed themselves during their confinement.  At its height, the prisoner population reached 55,000.  97,000 Czech Jews died at Terezin.

The book "I never saw another butterfly" is a collection of poetry and art from children who were imprisoned at Terezin.

The title comes from the poem by Pavel Friedman who was deported to Auschwitz where he was murdered in 1944.

The Butterfly

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing

against a white stone. . . .

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly 'way up high.

It went away I'm sure because it wished to

kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto.

But I have found what I love here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut branches in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don't live in here,

in the ghetto.

Auschwitz Through the 'Eyes' of a Tree

In the new April 2013 issue of Reader's Digest, there is an article, "What the tree saw," that begins, "From historical horrors, to painted panoramas, trees have stood watch...here they break their silence."

These imaginative and compelling entries, all told from the perspective of trees as witnesses, include one oak tree that stands just beyond the gate into Auschwitz:

"As any carpenter will tell you, my wood is dense.  I can be split, but I don't give way easily.  And I haven't fallen apart.  I'm a hardy Polish oak tree accustomed to harsh winters.  My unhappy fate is that I grow at the entrance to a Polish army barracks.  After the German invasion, in September 1939, I thought the barracks had been abandoned.  But I was wrong.  On May 1, 1940, before sunup, I saw Commandant Rudolf Hoess arrive, flanked by SS guards.  On his face was the satisfied smile of the conqueror.  A rictus grin (gaping grin, grimace from Old Church Slavi 'rogu' = mockery) to make my sap run cold.  Less than two months later, the first victims passed beneath my branches:  728 Polish political detainees.
Other prisoners poured in, mostly Jews, from the four corners of Europe.  "Juden" (Jew)--I'd never heard that word before.  And I had never heard the music of Johann Strauss.  Each morning, the most able-bodied prisoners marched off to work past an orchestra of fellow inmates forced to play joyful tunes.  In the evening, the workers returned exhausted, carrying those who had died, and were marched back into the strains of "The Blue Danube."  My bark has healing properties as an astringent, but what use would that have been?  For a long time, I breathed the gray smoke from the crematoriums.  Ever since, I've lived on ground filled with the ashes of 1,100,000 people.  I might be the only tree that has ever wanted to run away."

This piece appears on page 112 of the April, 2013 Reader's Digest.  The picture below shows the tree.

Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau: A personal reflection

The Auschwitz gate inscription reads 'Arbeit Macht Frei', 'Work Makes [you] free.'  This deceptive statement contains within it a subservise message from the prisoners who created it.  Note that the 'B' in 'Arbeit' is upside down.  See the excerpt below from an article on the website of the International Auschwitz Committee:

"The inscription was a cynical lie, as all the prisoners knew and physically experienced day in day out. But what most of them didn’t realize was that the sign contained a subversive message: the survivor Tadeusz Szymanski told of a conversation he had some years after the liberation with another survivor who had been forced to work in the camp locksmith’s workshop. As he accompanied Mr Szymanski beneath the gate, he told him that when he and his camp comrades were ordered by the SS to weld the sign together, they had deliberately placed the ‘B’ in the word ‘Arbeit’ upside down. It was a sign of self-esteem and self-assertion in an environment where all vestiges of human rights had been eradicated."

The sense of 'self-assertion' in the face of enslavement and genocide gives me some strength.  Since the tour began to take shape, visiting Auschwitz has been a source of discomfort, fear, and mystery for me.  It is not a site like other historical sites, even battlefields, where I have visited in the past.  Omaha Beach, for example, and its accompanying cemetery of white stone grave markers was the product of a war of liberation.  Auschwitz was a place of merciless inhumanity and destruction of innocent, non-combatant life. A Jewish man who once visited Auschwitz told me he could not bring himself to take pictures at the camp.  Something made it uncomfortable to record images of the place, as though the act of photography there was sacrilegious.  The wife of an Auschwitz survivor shared that when she and her survivor husband visited the camp he felt a sense of pride and strength to be able to walk in and out of the camp as a free man.  There is such an interesting range of reactions to the camp.

Elie Wiesel tells the story of 2 Hasidic Rabbis who stopped for the night in Oswiecem/Auschwitz, Poland, some 100 or more years before World War 2.  In the darkness of the night there they felt afraid and unnerved.  They had to move on. 

Given the range of reactions to the camp, what does it mean for me, for our tour to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau?  How do we approach this site?  What should our 'kavannah' or spiritual intention be when we go there?  How can we best support one another through the likely emotional roller coaster of visiting this site?

Part of the answer for me is that I want to have a first hand experience of a place that I have only heard about from survivors, read about in books, and 'seen' through the eyes of an amateur camera or Hollywood filmmakers.  It is important for me to be able to describe the 'feeling' of the place to my family, to my community, and to my students who are living in a world in which the number of Holocaust survivors who can tell their stories is decreasing.  The day will come when no living survivors can tell their stories to audiences, when we will have to depend on video and second hand material.  

   

The Golem of Prague

Our first stop on the Eastern Europe tour is Prague, in the Czech Republic, a region where Jews have lived since the 9th century.  As for Prague, a Jewish community developed there in the 11th century, and it is the city with the oldest, and still active, synagogue in Europe, the Altneu Shul (Old-New Synagogue) that was built around 1270.  The popular Golem legend places the Tolem's remains in this synagogue's attic, awaiting a revival to once again use its strength to protect the Jews.  Legend has it that the great Maharal, Rabbi Loew of Prague, animated the Golem to protect the Jewish community.

Here is an article from the New York Times (2009) about the revival of the Golem legend in Prague.

May 10, 2009

Hard Times Give New Life to Prague’s Golem

By DAN BILEFSKY

PRAGUE — They say the Golem, a Jewish giant with glowing eyes and supernatural powers, is lurking once again in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue here.

The Golem, according to Czech legend, was fashioned from clay and brought to life by a rabbi to protect Prague’s 16th-century ghetto from persecution, and is said to be called forth in times of crisis. True to form, he is once again experiencing a revival and, in this commercial age, has spawned a one-monster industry.

There are Golem hotels; Golem door-making companies; Golem clay figurines (made in China); a recent musical starring a dancing Golem; and a Czech strongman called the Golem who bends iron bars with his teeth. The Golem has also infiltrated Czech cuisine: the menu at the non-kosher restaurant called the Golem features a “rabbi’s pocket of beef tenderloin” and a $7 “crisis special” of roast pork and potatoes that would surely have rattled the venerable Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Golem’s supposed maker.

Even the first lady, Michelle Obama, paid her respects, when she visited Rabbi Loew’s grave last month and, following Jewish tradition, placed a prayer on a piece of paper and put it near his tombstone.

Eva Bergerova, a theater director who is staging a play about the Golem, said it was no coincidence that this Central European story was ubiquitous at a time of swine flu and economic distress. “The Golem starts wandering the streets during times of crises, when people are worried,” Ms. Bergerova said. “He is a projection of society’s neuroses, a symbol of our fears and concerns. He is the ultimate crisis monster.”

Rabbi Manis Barash, who oversees an institute here devoted to Rabbi Loew’s work, said that “because of the financial crisis, people were increasingly turning to spirituality for meaning.”

Others, like Jakub Roth, a derivatives trader and a leader of the Jewish community, noted that the Golem had contemporary relevance because he protected sacred values from imminent dangers. “In the past this was anti-Semitism,” Mr. Roth said. “Today it is global recession, Islamic fundamentalism and Russian aggression.”

The surge in popularity of the Golem also anticipates the 400th anniversary in September of Rabbi Loew’s death in 1609, at nearly 100. A Jewish mystic and philosopher who a leading scholar of the Talmud and kabbalah and wrote at least 22 books, he was known widely as the Maharal, a great sage.

Few here dispute that the Golem, who is often depicted as either a menacing brown blob or an artificial humanoid, has become a lucrative global brand. But it is also a profound irritation to Prague’s Jewish leaders that Rabbi Loew’s legacy has been hijacked by a powerful dunce whom the Talmud characterizes as a “fool.”

“I am frustrated by the legend of the Golem in the same way I am frustrated that people buy Kafka souvenirs on every street in Prague but don’t bother to read his books,” Rabbi Karel Sidon, the chief rabbi of the Czech Republic, lamented. Alluding to the recent rise of neo-Nazis in the Czech Republic and elsewhere, however, he hastened to add, “We like the Golem because he protected the Jews.”

Rabbi Barash emphasized that in the Talmud, the Golem was considered a dumb klutz because he was literal-minded, could not speak and had no “sechel,” or intellect. “If in school,” he said, “you didn’t use your brains, the teacher would say, ‘Stop behaving like a golem.’ ”

According to one version of Prague’s Golem legend, the city’s Jews, under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, were being attacked, falsely accused of using the blood of Christians to perform their rituals. To protect the community, Rabbi Loew built the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River.

He used his knowledge of kabbalah to make it come alive, inscribing the Hebrew word emet, or truth, on the creature’s forehead. The Golem, whom he called Josef and who was known as Yossele, patrolled the ghetto; it is said he could make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead.

Eventually, the Golem is said to have gone on a murderous rampage — out of unrequited love, some explain. Fearing that he could fall into the wrong hands, Rabbi Loew smeared clay on the Golem’s forehead, turning emet into met, the Hebrew word for death, and put him to rest in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue.

Though a quintessentially Jewish tale, the saga of the Golem, popularized here in a 1950s fairy tale film, has long been regarded as a Czech legend. Benjamin Kuras, a Czech playwright and the author of the book “As Golems Go,” said the fighting figure of the Golem had appeal in a nation traumatized by centuries of occupation and invasion.

“After living through the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Nazism and decades of communism, the Czechs are drawn to a character with supernatural powers that will help liberate them from oppression,” Mr. Kuras said. “Many here don’t even realize he is a Jewish monster.”

Such is the pull of the Golem that Rabbi Sidon said he received dozens of requests each year for visits to the Golem’s attic lair — requests he politely declined. During World War II, it was rumored that Nazi soldiers broke into the synagogue, and Rabbi Loew’s Golem ripped them apart, limb by limb.

“We say the Golem is in the attic, up there,” Rabbi Sidon said. “But I have never gone there. I say that if the Golem was put there 400 years ago, then today he is dirt and dust and can’t do anything to disturb anyone.”

Asked if the Golem was fact or fiction, Rabbi Sidon shrugged and sighed. “It’s possible he is real,” the rabbi said. “I just don’t know.” But he noted that there had been several cases of sage rabbis who had supposedly created golems.

Rabbi Sidon recalled that in the late 1990s, an elderly Jewish woman asked him where the Golem was. “I told her he was in the attic,” Rabbi Sidon said. “ ‘Not that one, the real one,’ ” he said the woman replied, insisting that she had been at the synagogue a year earlier and had met Mr. Golem, a lanky figure with ruddy cheeks.

Recognizing the description, the rabbi said, he confronted the synagogue’s shamash, or attendant, a man called Josef, who shares the Golem’s first name. Josef eventually confessed that he had been telling visitors he was the Golem’s great-grandson.

By Pearl and David Landesman

David and I are looking forward to joining Rabbi Tow and the group from Glen Rock Jewish Center on this exciting  Eastern Europe tour.  We jumped on board when David's cousin Sidney Keyles told us about the trip.    We found our chance to see  the camps at Auschwitz , Plashow, and Terezin.  I will also - hopefully will have an opportunity to go visit my parent's home town of Ksiaz Wielki which is a small town not far from Krakow, Poland, about an hour's drive by car.  My grandparent's had a bakery there, and the family lived upstairs.   This town before the war, had a thriving Jewish community.  My mother's father was a Gerrer Chasid.  My mother is the sole survivor from her immediate family. Unfortunately, most of the Jews from the town were nebuch killed there, or taken to work camps or the concentration camps. Just a handful of the Jewish residents of Ksaiz survived. Some live in Israel, and the others are here in the U.S.
      This will be like our March of the Living.  We look forward to experiencing the old historical places, and seeing the vibrant modern changes over the years.  

Rema synagogue Krakow and Jewish community

The synagogue of the REMA, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, 16th century, is, according to light research, the only active synagogue in the city.  Isserles was the writer who introduced an Ashkenazi commentary to make the Shulchan Aruch law code fit the Ashkenazi perspective and practices.

Isserles built the synagogue in memory of his first wife after her untimely death at age 20.  The synagogue was built in what was his own house that he subsequently gave over to the Jewish community of Krakow.  Isserles himself is buried next to the synagogue.

See the website http://www.krakow.jewish.org.pl/ for more information about the Krakow Jewish community.

During our visit to Krakow, we will join this synagogue community at 40 Szeroka St. for Shabbat services.

Here are some nice photos of the synaogue exterior and interior:

 

Jews & Poland - 1968

As I was reading yesterday about the history of Jews in Poland and Polish anti-Semitism, I came across the story of the expulsion of some 15,000 Jews from Poland in 1968.  This is an event that I had not learned about in any of my studying on Polish Jewry.

Here is an article from 2008:

Jews Expelled From Poland In 1968 To Have Citizenship Restored

Read more: http://digitaljournal.com/article/251401#ixzz2Mg16KzOz

Polish president Lech Kaczynski has said that he wanted to atone for the 1968 event he deemed “shameful” where at least 15,000 Jews were kicked out by the regime installed by the Soviet Union.

Kaczynski had called the event in 1968 as shameful where at least 15,000 Jews were kicked out of Poland when it was under the rule from the Communists that were backed up by the Soviet Union.

The purge followed student protests throughout the nation of Poland after a patriotic play was closed by the government.

The play was made by Poland's national poet, Adam Mickiewicz. This was during a time where Poland was relatively a new comunist country. The government had made the decision to close down a patriotic play.

Students had protested at Warsaw University. Through violence, the police had broken up the protests. However, most of the student protesters and professors were Jewish.

Like the Nazis in Germany, the communist controlled government had made the Jewish community of Poland as the scapegoats. They were blamed and then stripped of their citizenship. The Communist Party of Poland used this as a means to blame Jews and kick them out of the country.

Jews in the thousands were expelled from the country of Poland. Most of the Jews in Poland had survived the Holocaust back in World War II. In short, the government had ejected half of the nation’s population from the country.

At the anniversary on Saturday, President Kaczynski has made the promise to restore the citizenship of the at least 15,000 Jews that were kicked out of the country. Kaczynski said that this was the start for atoning for what the communist controlled government had did back in 1968.

Michal Sobelman, one of those that were ejected had attended the ceremony.

“We left because we couldn’t be Poles and we couldn’t live here as Jews,” Sobelman had explained.

“The Poland of those times did not want us,” he added.

In terms of giving back citizenship to those kicked out of Poland, Kaczynski said: “I treat this as my personal contribution to reversing the consequences of those said, shameful events. Never more.”

Read more: http://digitaljournal.com/article/251401#ixzz2Mg16KzOz

Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw

http://www.jewishmuseum.org.pl/en/cms/home-page/

Check out the latest on the construction and plans for this new museum in Warsaw. We will be travelling to Poland during the 70th year anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  While the full museum will likely not open until Fall 2013, there will be events in April to mark the April, 19-May, 16 1943 Uprising of Jews who fought against the deportations from the Ghetto.  Volunteers in Warsaw will be handing out paper daffodils on city streets in the same way one of the Ghetto fighter leaders Marek Edelman used to lay daffodils at the Ghetto fighters memorial.

I hope that we will at least be able to see the new museum under construction during our visit and maybe even participate in one of the 70th anniversary events.

To learn more about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, take a look at:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/uprising1.html

A great short film on Jewish life in modern Poland

At youtube.com, search "Jewish Life in Modern-Day Poland | Journal Reporters" for a hopeful report on Jewish life, including a look at Krakow where we will be spending Shabbat during the tour.