Shalom!
We have spent two touring days in Berlin, and now we are getting ready to pack our things and head to the airport early tomorrow morning. I will update the blog with photos and stories from Berlin soon.
At this point, now that we have had time to digest the information and experiences, there have been good discussions about how to make sense of all that we have learned. These are observations as of today, and I hope that some of them will not turn out to be true in the long run:
-The Jewish communities of Eastern Europe are small and will continue to be small for a long time: Despite some positive news that there are a few babies being born to Prague Jews, it appears that demographics in this part of the world are tough for the Jewish people. The Holocaust decimated our numbers, and then Communism continued to oppress Jewish communities until the 'iron curtain' parted and the wall came down.
It appears for the moment that the local populations will need an infusion of young adults who will become more active & more people who will marry and have Jewish children in order to change the dynamics.
-The Jewish communities tend to be in decent, if not excellent (e.g. Prague) financial shape. Many large and ornate old synagogues have been refurbished. There is a little kosher food available, more in some cities and less in some. New Jewish schools are open and students are studying Judaism in ways they have not done before. Local Jewish communities have good intentions, good people, and programs available. However, there is still a palpable post-Communist ethos that we felt especially in Prague and Poland: People are private - they fear organized institutions knowing about them, People struggle with identity - Many hid their Jewish identities during the Communist area as a way to protect themselves and now many are just discovering they may have Jewish ancestry -- Such revelations can be unnerving, People and cities struggle mightily with the Holocaust and Nazi past - We found in Krakow that interest in Jewish 'culture' seems paramount. The Ariel restaurant in Krakow, and others like it, serves 'Jewish' food in a room with walls covered with the standard drab paintings of brownish Jews in shtetl wear and tallit-covered Rabbis reading Talmud by candle-light. They serve latkes that are literally rectangular in shape - Did they even check the internet for Bubbe's recipe? Most of the large synagogues are museums and concert halls, obviously, due to the low population numbers. In Warsaw, the Nazis left precious little of the ghetto and the umschlagplatz and Mila 18 are stone memorials amidst modern buildings and housing. We hope the new museum of Polish Jewry will bring out the Jewish story in a more centralized, organized, and intellectual way. We applaud Poland's efforts to welcome huge numbers of visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The numbers of annual visitors from countries all over the world is staggering and they handle the crowds well. However, we did not sense the same level of sophistication in Poland as in Germany with regard to teaching both Judaism and Jewish history. The planners of the Warsaw museum, if they have not done so already, would benefit from a careful review of Liebskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. The museum has some great artifacts, but its power is in the way it helps the German youth visitors to 'feel' the Jewish experience and interact with that experience in creative and active ways. We hope the museum in Warsaw will activate the imagination and be an important outreach tool.
-A final conclusion I draw is that it is very important for American Jews to visit Jewish heritage sites in Central and Eastern Europe. While we have tried to not allow the Holocaust to be the only underpinning of Jewish identity and mission, all of Central & Eastern European Jewish history tends to be of the sentimental type, stories told by grandparents about pogroms, discrimination, family recipes or the like. To see these places first hand is to feel an electric spark of connection with the people who lived here and with the people who live and struggle here to define themselves as Jews. Jump off the tourist track for a moment, attend a class or program at the JCC of Krakow, for example, and talk to people about their experiences. While I agree with the rhetoric that a Holocaust-based Jewish identity is not in and of itself a recipe for Jewish continuity, nor is any one track - like Zionism, the power of seeing a place like Auschwitz is immeasurable. Growing up, the Holocaust was a black and white world, a world that I read about and heard about from people who had lived through it. Something fundamentally different and piercing happened, though, to me when I walked through the gate marked 'Arbeit Macht Frei'. To see the shoes of adults and children heaped up in storage containers behind glass, to see a hundred cans of Zyklon B and walk through a gas chamber and crematorium, is to come into direct contact, in full color, with a history that is less than 100 years old. The conviction I feel for my Jewish identity and mission has been strengthened in a way I never expected - actually, I did not know what to expect. Now, though, I feel in my heart an, again, unexpected joy and freshness. Now I can tell first-hand what Auschiwtz and Terezin were like. Now I can be a better teacher to my students. The privilege of visiting Auschwitz with a survivor who bared the number on his arm as he walked, as a free man, through the gate pushes me forward to tell the story in a new and more direct way that I hope will communicate the message that 'Never Forget' is a good starting point, but not an extended plan of action. It is my hope to direct my students toward Poland-Israel pilgrimages, March of the Living, and perhaps even future Europe trips that I hope to lead.
It was a blessing to travel through all these places with such a wonderful group, to eat and pray together, to get on and off the bus together, and to huff about early wake up calls for flight after flight. In microcosm, our group represents the way I hope we can all engage actively and directly with our Jewish identities and histories. Europe may be the 'Old World', but it was, and is, our world, too.
With blessings,
Rabbi Tow
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