Last night in Europe - Reflections

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

Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau

The Auschwitz-Birkenau visit was one of the darkest moments of the trip.  While all the communities we visited had been decimated by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Shoah, it was scary for me to visit the place most connected in worldwide imagination with the extermination of European Jewry.

As with Terezin-Terezinstadt, the Germans took the Polish city of Oswiecim and changed the name to Auschwitz.

The gate to the camp, as with other camps, indicates "Arbeit Macht Frei", work will make you free.  This false promise contains here at Auschwitz a hidden message.  Notice the 'b' in 'Arbeit' is installed upside down, an intentional protest message from the enslaved craftsmen who fashioned this metal gate.

It was a special privilege to visit this place with Abe Bowski, who was imprisoned here in Auschwitz I, Block 14.  Rachel Blumenstyk's husband Myron was imprisoned here in Block 7.  Here is the photo of Abe entering the camp.

Abe shows his prisoner number to the guide.  

Abe in front of the Auschwitz I prison block where he was imprisoned.

For me, the most piercing photos displayed at Auschwitz are those of children and their parents.  In this one photo of Jews at the time of selection, I noticed a mother and her baby each looking with deep suspicion, one to the left and one to the right.  It is as if they know something is wrong but cannot tell what is wrong.  

Here the eyes tell a painful, horrifying story.

The instrument of destruction, Zyklon B gas was used in the gas chambers.  Body heat activates the agent.

The Nazis, in their ruthless efficiency, plunder currency from the prisoners.  Here is one record:

Notice here the variety of plundered currencies:  Polish Zwoty, Russian Rubels, US Dollars....

The Nazis collected everything from the prisoners:  suitcases, shoes, hair and toothbrushes, dishware...

If the small foot of a child

The foot that takes its first step

To the smiles of parents and beaming skies,

If this foot is buried in Auschwitz mud

And a browning, forlorn shoe is all that remains

Then here will be a shrine, marking not the first step

But the last.

 The double row of electrified barbed wires fences with guard posts all around, with concrete walls sunk below the ground to prevent digging, are forbidding as they arc toward the camp.

The only gas chamber/crematorium remaining at the whole Auschwitz complex is the one at Auschwitz I.  The gas chambers at Birkenau, the killing center, were destroyed by the Nazis.  Here is a photo of the crematorium - I could not bring myself to photograph the gas chamber itself.

Upwards of 1.1 (to a maximum of 1.5) million people were murdered at Auschwitz.  

The gateway to gehennom, the Birkenau gate.  Birkenau was constructed down the road from Auschwitz I as the killing center.

Guard towers line either side of the train tracks.  The doors of the cattle cars open up and the dead fall out first.  The SS doctors point to one direction or another, to the gas chambers or to a slower death by working.  Here we see the 'judenrampe', the Jewish platform - the two main gas chambers were at the end of the train line just beyond view.

Birkenau is built on swamp land - as soon as there is significant rain, the whole area gets filled with mud and muck.  After long days of slave labor, the SS guards might test a prisoner's mettle by asking him to jump from one side of the drainage ditch to another.

The barracks - hard wood 'beds', a stove that produced heat only if there was some coal...

Looking back toward the gate

The tracks of life get shorter

The journey of life will be cut down

The train that helped us surge forward, 

Connecting one person and city to the other,

Now is the decelerating demon of death

The end of the line.

Locked in and locked away

Where is the wider world?

Where is the kitchen, the soup smell?

Where are the stairs that rise up past addresses of friends?

Where is the chair where we read a book together?

Where is the window that let us see the snow fall and kept the cold air out?

Here at the end of the tracks,

The end of decency

The end of humanity

The end of gentleness

The end of vast skies

The end.

The undressing area (top), the gas chamber bottom - right side, crematorium - bottom, left side.

May God hold all the victims in God's Eternal Presence,

Forever watching over their souls with compassion,

And may we create a world of kindness, justice, and peace

As we seek to honor their memories.

Amen.

Terror in Boston - Looking on from Warsaw

Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those who lost loved ones and those who are suffering physical and emotional wounds from the attacks.

We ask God to watch over the first responders and helpers who rushed to the scene to offer aid.

I write these words in Warsaw, Poland, a city where the ghetto trail takes us on a journey from victimhood to strength, from the darkness of deportations to the light of the uprising that occurred exactly 70 years ago.  Boston is also framed by a trail that points to freedom.  In the wake of this heinous attack, may we continue to live and teach the message of freedom and its blessings.

Mordecai Anilewicz and the ghetto fighters fought back against a terrible blind hatred.  In the blood spattered sidewalks of Boston, we see this terrible hatred rear its head.

In my anger at the death of 8 year old Martin Richard, the maiming of his sister, and injuries to his mother, the death of 2 others and injuries of over 100 more, I wonder why those who hate must take revenge against innocent civilians.  

'Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil for You, God, are with me, Your strength and guidance comfort me...' (From Psalm 23)

Krakow - Jewish community and more

Shalom,

It's time to catch up on events of the past few days.  After a wonderful Friday in Krakow, we also had a special Shabbat experience.  We 'dressed up' and welcomed Shabbat together at the hotel.  Shabbat morning, we went together to services that were held at the Kupa Street Synagogue.  As the services began, it seemed to be that we would be just at a minyan, but then a stream of Israeli yeshiva students thronged through the door.  Later Saturday, I returned to Mincha with David and we also sang zemirot with the others during a small shalos-seudos. After havdalah at the shul, a shul with a tall painted ceiling, and a gallery around the 2nd level, we returned to the hotel for a Havdalah with everyone else.  We used grapefruit juice since there was no kosher grape juice available!

Shabbat Shalom! - Mariana and Rhoda

The R(e)ma synagogue is the former residence of the Isserles family, the family of Moshe Isserles, called the R'ema.  He wrote the Ashkenazi commentary to the Shulchan Aruch, the classic code of Jewish Law.  

Shabbat Shalom! - Sid and Marilyn at Rema Synagogue

Shabbat Shalom! - Max and Esther at Rema synagogue

A special place within a special place within a special place - The grave of the R'ema, inside the Jewish cemetery of Krakow, inside the complex of the R'ema shul.

The JCC of Krakow, a center of activity for the entire Krakow community.

Yom Ha'atzmaut - Israel Indepence Day - Krakow celebrations 2013

Remembering the Krakow ghetto:

The metal chairs in this square represent the former location of the ghetto, with empty chairs indicating the places where Jews once lived and thrived.

Remains of the Krakow ghetto wall:

Jews from the Krakow ghetto were deported to the Plashow camp outside the ghetto walls.

Oskar Schinderl's desk at his Krakow factory.  Here is where he was able to save the lives of over 1,000 Jews by employing them in his enamel factory.  

The Sukiennice, the Cloth Hall, is today a flea market with many stalls - filled with amber jewelry, toys, cothing and more.  It is in the Rynek, the vast town square of Krakow, that is a central gathering place for residents and visitors.

April 11: From Prague to Krakow

We all left the Majestic Hotel in Krakow this morning around 3am to catch a flight to Frankfurt and then to Krakow.  After changing dollars for zlotys at the airport, we drove to the Holiday Inn Krakow for R&R.

Isabela, our Krakow guide, is a third generation Krakow resident.  She led us up to the castle and cathedral that are the heart of the city, and the nation, the seat of its kings and queens as well as the spiritual center of the people.  This is the town where Pope John Paul II first became bishop and then cardinal.

Two views of the castle-fortress from the outside.

 

The Castle and Cathedral share the hill, and we see the eclectic architecture that represents several classical styles.

The Wisla River is central to Poland, and the statue of the dragon that you can see at the bottom of this photo is a classic story connected to Krakus, a pagan king whose name gives us the name of the city.  The King promised his daughter's hand to the one who could defeat the local dragon.  The dragon took as appeasement every girl in the city except the King's daughter Wanda.  No knight could defeat the dragon.  The simple cobbler's apprentice named Skuba had an idea.  He stuffed a lamb with sulphur and put it in front of the dragon's cave. The dragon noticed the free meal, ate the lamb, and then became terribly thirsty.  He drank all the waters of the Wisla, the nearby river and burst.  Skuba and Wanda were married.

A fun feature is that the dragon statue actually blows a puff of fire on occasion!

Tadeusz Kościuszko, a great Polish general who served in the Continental army during the Revolutionary War, is memorialized in a grand statue on Wawel Hill.

Tomorrow we go to Kazimierz, the Jewish section of Krakow.

April 10: Terezin

We spent the full touring day today at Terezin, an 18th century Habsburg fortress built toward the border with Germany in order to protect against potential invasion.

At Terezin, there was considerable courage shown in the face of Nazi cruelty.  One light that shined bright was Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, an artist who supervised the children's house there.  Her students created thousands of pieces of art work, and we can see many of these pieces in the collection "I Never Saw Another Butterfly."  This is a picture of a children's house at Terezin:

There was no train station right next to Terezin, and so the Nazis forced the Jews to build one.  Before they built this station, deportees would walk some 5k after their terrible deportation from home.  This photo shows the remains of the train station-siding the Jews built:

In Terezin, one burial ground for Jews who died there contains some 9,000 burials.  A stone menorah stands at the site.

While there were no gas chambers at Terezin, there was a crematorium that the Nazis used when in-ground burial was no longer possible.  They threw ashes of thousands of Jews into the nearby river when the Red Cross was on its way.  At the memorial lights inside the crematorium we recited the Kaddish.

One of the crematorium ovens, here with a 'shin' comprised of three red flowers.  The 'shin', as on the mezuzah, represents the way we invoke God's Presence into the world.

The ashes of one of our people, May he rest in peace and may his memory be for a blessing.

One of the hidden, secret synagogues in Terezin with Holocaust survivor Abe Bowski standing at the front of the room in front of the Hebrew inscription, "And our eyes will witness Your [God's] compassionate return to Zion." -- a message of hope and redemption.

On our way out of Terezin, one last look at the heavily fortified walls of this tightly guarded fortress.  Only 3 men were known to have escaped Terezin during the Holocaust years.  The small fortress, located across from the larger ghetto compound, was a prison. Here is the story of the escape:

Of the several dozen attempted escapes from the fortress, only one was successful. On Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, 1944, Josef Mattas, Miloš Ešner and František Maršík escaped while the guards were celebrating. They climbed down a rope into the moat and through a gap in a bulwark. They hid there until the end of the war.

We will be waking up at the early hour of 230am to catch flights that will take us over the border to Krakow in Poland.

April 8, Evening - April 9: Jewish Life in Prague, Past and Present

Last evening we met Rabbi Ron Hoffberg who has been the Masorti Rabbi in Prague for the past 13 years.  Before that, he was Rabbi in Cranford, New Jersey.  He joined us for dinner at Dinitz restaurant where we enjoyed wonderful homemade chumus and Israeli salads, salmon with a spicy red sauce, followed by chicken tagine with salad, potatoes, and rice.  We learned from Rabbi Hoffberg that there are currently some 1,500 Jews in Prague from a pre-WWII population of over 50,000 in the city.  Many in the city are interested in Judaism, and many have Jewish heritage in their families. He told the story of Peter, a Christian, who came from eastern Bohemia, somehow found his way to the Jewish community of Prague, studied Judaism while balancing a job on the railroad, and eventually discovered that his grandmother and mother were Jewish - despite an intentional effort to keep this information from him.

We began our tour of the Jewish Quarter at the Alt-Neu Shul, the Old-New Synagogue, completed in 1270 and still in use by the Jewish community here.  We were not permitted to take photos inside, so I will search the net for an available interior photo.

The Spanish Synagogue is an Ashkenazi shul with the distinctive, colorful Moorish style of arches and bright colors as you may have seen at Bnai Jeshurun in NYC.  This shul is no longer in use for davening.  There is a museum display of Judaica as well as many concerts held there.  On the facade, we noticed that the representation of the Ten Commandments shows Commandments 1-5 on the Left side in Roman numerals rather than Right-Left as with the Hebrew spelling of the Commandments. 

The Old Jewish Cemetery was also a notable site we visited today.  We find there the graves of the Maharal, Rabbi Loew, a great Rabbi and author of works on Jewish mysticism.  There is the grave of Rabbi Ephraim of Lunshits, the Kli Yakar, a commentary on the Torah.  Once again, photography was not permitted in the Cemetery without a payment of 40 korunas, about $2.  

In addition to Jewish sites today, after a full-morning of touring the classic synagogues, seeing the bronze statue of Franz Kafka, and enjoying coffee while watching the clock tower, we were able to wander through the Old Town Square and to enter the Church in the picture just above.  The striking spires of the Church complement the ornate chapels, art work, wood and metal work inside.

On the way back to the hotel in the afternoon, we stopped by this outdoor market where we found fresh fruit as well as all type of souvenirs.

Tomorrow, we head out of Prague to visit Terezinstadt for the day.