Last night my wife and I left Poland. We flew from the airport in Warsaw to Israel. We had a final dinner together with our incredible guide. By the end of the trip, the experiences of the trauma of the past had fully embedded themselves in me. You cannot go to death camps and mass …
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Psalm 83: A lament
In future posts, I will try to describe other Jewish cemeteries I saw in Poland. These are unlike the Lodz cemetery, and they are painful to recall and describe. Psalm 83, a cry from the heart that captures better than anything I could write about what I bore witness to, seems an appropriate preface: The …
Getting ready to leave
I’m a few hours away from setting out on an Air France flight via Paris to Warsaw. I’m an anxious traveller, an even more anxious flier. Yet as I prepare to embark on this journey of discovery, perhaps self-discovery, I am more nervous than usual. In my mind I know I will be seeing things …
Preparing for Poland
I have not written anything for a while. For the past few months, I’ve been working on my plan to visit Poland. The tickets for my wife and I have been purchased, and we leave in eight days. We will be arriving and staying in Warsaw, then traveling to Krakow for Shabbat, then moving on …
The Yizkor Book project
As I mentioned in a previous post, I now serve as a board member of the Zambrow Landsmanschaft. Once a year we have a membership meeting. A few years back, the president asked for someone to volunteer to assume responsibility for overseeing the translation of the Zambrow Yizkor Book into English. I’d worked as an …
Lost connections
Exploring the past, especially one’s European Jewish past, necessarily means trying to reach across generation and continents to connect with the pain they must have felt. And here I’m not even attempting to imagine the last days of my great grandmother and my great aunts, whose lives were taken in the most horrific manner possible, …
Roots and Identity
I would like to try to clarify how my exploration of family roots relates to my Jewish identity. Before the massive emigration of Jews from Europe in the latter half of the 19th and first quarter of the 20th centuries, Jews identified themselves not only as Jews, but as Jews from a particular location. Of …
Zambrow: real and imagined
There was, as long as I can remember, a special book on my parent’s bookcase. I knew it was special because of the reverence in which my parents held it. I rarely pulled it off the bookcase and looked at it, nor do I remember my parents ever reading it. All I knew was that …