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Published: September 30th 2016
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Czestochowa 1932
The head Jewish religious leader of the city, Rabbi Nachum Asch meeting the Polish Prime Minister on a visit. Look at that Torah!! The title of this blog post written from the lobby of the Hotel Kazimierz in the former Jewish section of Kraków exquisitely sums up the complex contradictions and richness of this week's visit. Yesterday our voyage began early with an excursion to the famous Roman Catholic stronghold of Czestochowa. A new museum to the Jews of that city has just opened. The exhibition, narrated by one of its creators and designed in conjunction with the new Polin Museum of Jewish history in Warsaw captures the adaptability, initiative, and dare I say Polishness of that once vibrant community. But there was a tragic underbelly to this place because it became one of the hotbeds of not only Nazi bestiality during the war, but also because of a particular Polish strain of antisemitism, with some roots to that hate in the Church that so dominatesthe city's landscape due to the Jasna Gora (Luminous Mount) monastery that majestically sits atop the city, with its famous painting of the Black Madonna. During the war the local inhabitants requested that the Nazis order the priests to lock the churches to avoid having Jews hide in them. Whether this suggests that priests were willing to do so
Jewish Theater Moguls
Interwar Czestochowa had a thriving trilingual Jewish theatre. I cannot say. I must also add that this detail is recorded in one of my books about Poland's "Jewish problem," but was not mentioned in the museum exhibit.
We visited the monastery and observed a mass in progress, an event worthy of a comparison with a Yom Kippur Kol Nidrei. But we also heard the priest who gave us a tour say he'd read that Hitler had Jewish roots, but that he wasn't sure it was true...
When we returned to Kraków in the evening we descended the bus in front of the Kraków Jewish Community Center. For the past eight years or so, with funds from abroad and local as well, with an American born director and rabbi (both learning to speak Polish as adults!!) the little building that is built on the backyard of the Kraków Tempel (the "Reform" synagogue before the war and now a museum) this JCC is the focal point for renewed Jewish life in Kraków. We listened to the rabbi teach about the shofar's varied meanings and then we went outside and listened to him blowing it. With only a few days to go until the new year begins, I felt
glad that it was again possible to hear the sound of the Shofar in this open outdoor space. And sad when I thought about the way that the rabbi could take nothing for granted in terms of what the people present (Jews and others) might know about or have experienced of this ancient and eternal symbol of Judaism.
After our shofar moment a group of us went to a bar for the final evening. Around the corner from the JCC the bar is in what was once a synagogue. On the peeling walls are paintings of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the direction towards which the congregants must have prayed. So now instead of praying we sat together in fellowship of another kind. On the balcony, over the bar, of what must have been the women's section was the line from Psalm 20- "The life breath of a human being is the lamp of God." And so what has been a week of much encounter with death, loss, and suffering has also been one that reminds me of the most important mitzvah in Judaism - to live - l'chaim. And to do so with deeds of loving kindness in
Nazi Efficiency
Train Timetable for deportation from Czestochowa to Auschwitz on particular September dates in September to October 1942 with locations on the way. pursuit of shalom, a wholeness to our lives and the world. Not an easy task but a noble and needed one!
Shabbat shalom and Shanah tovah!! To a good year.
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Sarah Siegel
non-member comment
L'chaim!
Sarah, am so glad that we live in this generation, rather than during the one of the Holocaust ... but by living in this generation, we see the tragedy of a synagogue being transformed into a bar -- and not to be chic, like the Limelight in NYC, which was housed in a former church that had stopped being a church simply due to merging with another church. Thanks for your reflections while you were in the thick of the pilgrimage and for the photos. What a sacred journey! Travel safely. Shabbat shalom.