I didn't think today's road trip would be blog worthy....Just a long uneventful bus ride. But I was wrong. We left Jaipur after a buffet breakfast, of course, first stop was a beautiful Hindu temple, all white marble. Kapil is a Hindi and gave us an intro to the basics of the religion. We got lucky and were there during the morning service. A curtain came up on a gilded, lit up statute of Vishnu and his wife. There was music and fire...At the end water was sprinkled on the worshippers. Beautiful! Next stop, the small village of Abhaneri in northern Rajasthan. Here we saw an amazing step well, a water reservoir built in the 10th century. Next to it there was a Hindu temple. Met a group of Indian girls who are all nursing students, ... read more

Back at home enjoying my children and grandchildren at the beach…..doesn’t get better than that for me….but while they’re sleeping, my thoughts go back to this trip and what it meant to me. The last evening in Warsaw there was a dinner at a nice Italian restaurant in Warsaw (raviolis and perogies really are the pretty much the same thing) and people made short speeches thanking the organizers and sharing their appreciation for the diversity of the group (first time they included Americans and other English speakers), and lots of pictures were taken. It was very warm and friendly. After one more delicious buffet breakfast with Meir and Rita, I flew from Warsaw to Toronto where we had 2 hours to catch our connecting flight to Newark. That did not go so well. Our flight was ... read more

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "rita feder" > I was not sure why I volunteered for this blog, but I know now that I wanted to share today. Thoughts of Today's trip had been on my mind before we left home --today was the visit and tour of the Auschwitz concentration camps. I don't think it's necessary to talk about what we all know about --suffice it to say that the mountains of hair shorn from terrified new or already dead prisoners, the piles of tattered suitcases that were once filled with victims' precious belongings, along with all of the other graphic reminders are as real and heart wrenching to see as can be imagined. But there were other things that I saw and never knew about that must be shared. Beginning with The ... read more

I will write about our first 2 days in Poland at another time but I want to share about today because today we were in Sosnowiec. It is a city I've heard about many times over the years. My father's family moved here in 1935 and the other day we were on the street where they lived, but today we were at the spot where their lives changed forever. On August 12th 1943, the Germans rounded up all the Jews of Sosnowiec in a large fenced in sports field. I didn't hear many stories of the Holocaust from my father but what happened that day and the next few days is one I know well. And we were at the sports platz this morning. We participated in a ceremony at the monument commemorating the 26000 Jews ... read more

I've already gotten behind in writing. I'm sharing our experience visiting the Memorial at Langenstein Zweiberge 2 days ago. My father was here from 2/17/45 until the end of the war. It was a sub camp of Buchenwald, more than 2 hours north of Weimar. This small camp, 2000 inmates, was working to create a weapons production site under the ground by digging tunnels into the mountain. Once some years ago I learned that my father had been 'liberated' from this place I ddecide I would come here if anything was left to see. Some lucky googling got me in touch with the new director of the memorial and we had an appointment to meet with him. After a 3+hour ride that included blocked roads and getting lost numerous times (Google maps is definitely not updated ... read more