A hundred and fifty years ago Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. Now, the only Jews in Poland are the ones who leave Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom and a handful of other nations to go on a journey for a week or so, all asking the same question: What happened here? These Jews wish to understand what Jewish life was like in Poland and how that life was destroyed in the Holocaust. A few weeks ago, I was one of those Jews.
In an eight-day trip we managed to visit at least twenty-five distinct sites. We learned about how developed the Jewish community was in Poland, all the way back in the nineteenth century. There were more Jewish newspapers in print then there are now in Israel. There were Jewish governing bodies in Poland. It is almost impossible to count how many schools, synagogues, youth clubs, homes for the elderly, hospitals and other institutions the Jewish community built in various cities and towns of Poland.
We went to the Okopowa Street Cemetery in Warsaw, which somehow still stands. It is a huge graveyard that was used by the Jewish community for years before the war. We saw the graves of Jews who were influential in the arts, government, linguistics and religious studies, all given dignified burials.
We went to Tykochin, a shtetl (small town), which had a four hundred year old synagogue. It was one of the biggest and most beautiful shuls I have ever seen, and I have seen quite a few.
We went to Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, the first campus-style yeshiva (religious school) where people lived together in addition to learning together. This concept, which is so popular today in Israel and in some places in the U.S. was started in the building in which I stood in Poland.
We went to Lazjansk and saw a mikvah (water basin for ritual purification) used by Chassidic men before Shabbat each week. We learned about how all Chassidim around the world have Poland to thank for the origin of their movement.
We went to a kibbutz, yes a kibbutz, in the middle of nowhere in Poland. It was set up by Zionist youth groups to train people for life in Palestine. We learned about the plethora of Zionists and socialists in Poland. We learned just how active the Jews of Poland were.
And then we learned about how that beautiful burning flame, that was the Jewish community of Poland, was extinguished so quickly and without hesitation. We went to Treblinka, the most efficient death camp of its kind in history. 800,000 Jews were killed there in just a few years. The entire Jewish community of Warsaw, as big and strong as that of many major U.S. cities, was brought to Treblinka and killed, just like that. We went to Majdanek, where you can still see and even go inside the gas chambers and crematoria. 90,000 Jews were killed there. We went to Auschwitz and Birkenau. One and a half million Jews were killed there. The place was the size of a small town. A small town where trains rolled in, Jews got off, about three quarters were sent right to their deaths and the other quarter were chosen to work, a much slower death. We saw ghettoes and mass graves in forests.
We went to Poland and saw that Polish Jewry no longer exists. Right now, more Jews live in Israel than in any other place in the world. I have been living in Israel for over six months now. It is hard to know what to say about the Holocaust, but spend just a week in Poland learning about that darkest of moments in Jewish history and it is easy to love the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Am Yisrael Chai.
