Poland

So I spent a week in Poland last week touring the country and seeing the rich Jewish life that existed before the Shoah and the destruction that was the Shoah. So we started out taking a 6 AM flight which meant we were in the airport by 2 AM. So we didn't sleep much and when we landed went to the best preserved Jewish cemetery in the country. Located in Warsaw, this huge cemetery was used to outline the different types of Jews living in Poland and how Judaism today is more of a direct descendant of Eastern European Jews than some of us realize. We learned about the three major types of Jews in Poland: religious, Zionist, and Bund Jews. The religious Jews are self explanatory; the Zionist Jews are mostly socialists who wanted to come to Israel and start a Jewish state; and the Bund was a Polish political party of socialist Jews who were nationalist. So we learned about the three types of Jews by their graves. The varieties can be seen here:
This is the grave of a Rosh Yeshiva whose grandson is the Joseph Salevechik, the founder of modern Orthodoxy.

This is a grave of a member of the Bund party.

And this is the first Jew to write prose in Yiddish. Before the only writing done in Jewish life was on Torah.

Later in the week we visited a shul in Tykochin, a small village that was once half Jewish before the Shoah. The shul was beautifully restored and there also exists a destroyed Jewish cemetery. The shul looks like this and here is a tomb stone in the cemetery.


We also visited three death camps, but I don't want to put pictures of them up. I visited Auschwitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdonek, and Treblinka. I'm not going to talk about much because everyone reading this blog should see those place and pass their own judgments.

So I spent much of the week seeing old Jewish life, learning, and seeing the destruction of the Nazis.
Two of the last things we did were listen to the testimony of a 'righteous gentile' and go to a newly discovered shul in some really small town. A righteous gentile is someone who helped save a life of a Jewish person during the Shoah. We listened to a woman's account of how her family housed a woman.

The next morning we went to this small shul in the basement of some Polish family. The local government is awaiting money to restore it, but this is what we saw.


We came back to Israel after taking a 10:30 flight out of Poland. We landed at around 4 and went straight to the Western Wall. We showed up right before sunrise to do shacarit, the morning services. It was amazing to be back in Israel and the sky was beautiful. There was no better way to appreciate Israel than the Western Wall.