These Things I Will Never Forget

Jewish day school, Jewish studies in college, rabbinical school, a doctorate in the history of Judaism – whatever criticisms can be leveled against me as a rabbi, the accusation that I took shortcuts in my Jewish education is not one of them. Which is why, in retrospect, it is nothing short of astounding to me – and not without some degree of embarrassment that I admit publicly – that I came this far as a Jewish communal professional without ever having visited Poland and Germany, as I did with our community two weeks ago.

Chaired by Ilene Penn and Vicki Warner, under the direction of Rabbi Savenor, and fully subscribed at 80 congregants, the trip was perhaps the most profound Jewish educational experience of my entire life. For the ten days since our return, I have found myself at a loss for words to describe the things we saw, the conversations we began, the community we formed, and the experiences we shared. Each trip participant was undoubtedly moved in his or her own way, and I have no doubt that each one of us took away something different. This morning I want to share my preliminary reflections, a travelogue of sorts that I hope will lead to a dialogue – not only on the places we saw, but on the themes and questions raised by our experience and worthy of reflection throughout our community both today and into the years ahead.

Roughly speaking, the content of the trip can be divided into three thematic units: prewar European Jewry, the destruction of European Jewry, and finally, the seeds of rebirth in post-war European Jewry and into the present.

First, prewar. Remember, while Israel may be our birthright and historic homeland, the Judaism we practice, our laws, our literature, our music are all rooted in Eastern and Western European Jewry. To see the synagogue and grave of Rabbi Moses Isserles, the great codifier of Jewish law in sixteenth-century Krakow, was akin to visiting Plymouth Rock or Independence Hall in Philadelphia. In Berlin, we visited the grave of Moses Mendelsohn, arguably the founder of the modern Jewish experience and the first Jew to carry a hyphenated Jewish identity. At the Warsaw cemetery which is the final resting place of the Netziv, I.L Peretz, Solomon Anski, and so many shapers of the Jewish religious and cultural experience, the sense of history is overwhelming as one engages in the heart of Ashkenazi Jewry. We visited the brand new Museum of the History of Polish Jewry, where we studied the world that once was, the nearly 1000-year presence of a Jewish community in Poland. Hasidism, the Reform movement, klezmer and cantorial music: so much of who we are as Jews is anchored in the communities we visited.

The second theme was, of course, the Shoah. To walk under the gates of Auschwitz, to see the gallows, the gas chambers, and the crematoria, to see the piles and piles of discarded suitcases, canisters of Zyklon B, shoes, and human hair provoked a visceral physical reaction like none I have ever experienced. As much as the barbed-wire fenced concentration camp itself, I was struck by the the home in which the Kommandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, lived with his wife and children just steps away from the site of genocide. How in the world, we wondered – and this is a point to which we returned again and again – could a human being become so desensitized, so devoid of empathy, so capable of absolute evil as did Hoess and the entire Nazi death machine? Powerful as our visit to Auschwitz was, for me, there is something about the scale of Birkenau that transcends words. As a parent of young children, to stand where the selections took place, to walk on the very path that so many took to the crematoria, to see the inhuman conditions in which so many lived and were ultimately murdered, the memorial service we shared – these things I will never forget. These places must be seen by us all.

The day we visited the camps was perhaps the most emotionally draining, but to the great credit of Rabbi Savenor and the chairs, the scope of our study extended beyond the horror of the crematoria. As we stood at the Umschlagplatz, the Warsaw boarding station where so many were put on the trains to death, as we stood at the site of the Nazi book burnings, we sought to understand the conditions and context that could give rise to the “topography of terror” that was the Third Reich. The camps we visited were in Poland, but they existed because of the Nazi regime. We debated complex questions: Were the Poles accomplices, victims or bystanders? We were all acutely aware of the narrative choices that were made at the Museum in Warsaw, the Schindler Factory Museum, and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and, for that matter, by our local guides. Each telling reflected subtle and not so subtle agendas, begging the larger question of where historical truth can be found. For that matter, we asked ourselves difficult questions. When we visited Mila 18, the sculpture of Janusz Korczak, and the sculpture in memory of the Warsaw uprising, we wondered whether our focus should be on the Shoah or on the Gevurah, on the destruction itself or on the spiritual and physical heroism and resistance of those facing certain death. As with any story, what we choose to emphasize and what we choose to excise says as much about us in the present as about what actually transpired in the past.

The third theme of the trip was post-war Europe. We visited the Warsaw Synagogue, the Krakow JCC, and Berlin’s Jewish Museum among other tender sparks of Jewish life. The story is not a simple one. If it were not enough that Jewish life in Poland was functionally wiped out by the Shoah, until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the odds of any outward expressions of Jewish vitality were slim to none. Nobody has a hard sense of how many Jews there actually are in Poland – for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the lack of any conventional definition of who is and who isn’t a Jew. We heard multiple stories of Poles now discovering a Jewish past kept hidden out of fear of the Nazi regime or the Communist one. When we visited the Krakow JCC, we met a man named Mundek, who miraculously survived the war in hiding, his family murdered. You can only imagine the emotion, and the not-insignificant sense of “but by the grace of God,” when Mundek sang a medley of Yiddish songs with one of our trip participants, music bridging across time and geography to a shared Jewish past. As for Berlin, the story of rebirth post ’89 is a fascinating one, a combination of reclaimed identities, post-soviet émigrés, ex-pat Israelis and others. We celebrated Shabbat in the historic Oranienburger Strasse synagogue, where we had the pleasure of seeing a young German girl celebrate her Bat Mitzvah no differently than she would here at Park Avenue. We met with a group of rabbinical students poised to inspire the Jewish future. For me, having been raised on an aversion to anything German, these experiences prompted a fascinating paradigm shift evidenced by my decision to buy my children Berlin T-shirts and snow globes at the airport. It is downright curious to acknowledge that it is probably much better to be a Jew in Berlin today than in Paris. I am not quite sure what to do with this realization, but the fact of the matter is that I am looking forward to my next visit to Germany. Small, but scrappy and full of pluck, the Jewish communities we visited are making a go of it and deserve our support in both word and deed.

Inevitably, our engagement with post-war Europe raised all sorts of complicated questions not just for the Jewish community, but for the non-Jewish community as well. With the passing of the generation of the perpetrators of the Shoah, how do Germans move from collective guilt to intergenerational responsibility? Who were these non-Jewish volunteers at the Krakow JCC, and what is prompting them to give their time and energy to supporting Polish Jewish life? Why exactly do tens of thousands of non-Jews turn out in Krakow every year for a Jewish cultural festival? In the Jewish neighborhoods of Berlin, the sidewalks are dotted with brass Stolpersteine, “stumbling blocks” memorializing Jewish families at the addresses where they once lived. Are these isolated one-off gestures or reflective of much deeper soul-searching of a new generation? We questioned how Europe’s past informs her present. Many of us volunteered at a refugee center for Syrian immigrants. By no means is there a consensus on how to handle the humanitarian crisis engulfing Germany, but it is clear that Germany is playing to a different standard than so many other countries, who have closed themselves off to the refugees. Germany is well aware that the world is watching how their past informs their present policies. Underlying our entire trip was the question of the actions and inactions of the community of nations in the runup to World War II, a question whose answer, we all know, has ramifications for all of us today.

Prewar European Jewry, the slaughter of that Jewry, and the post-war narrative – far more than can be fit into any one trip and certainly any sermon. Time and again during our trip, I returned to a single biblical image – one that appears in this week’s Torah reading – the binding of Isaac. The potential of Abraham’s promised child, the ordeal of his binding and near sacrifice, and the post-traumatic question of how he reconstituted his faith in a God under whose watch he endured such suffering. Neither for Isaac, nor for European Jewry, is the story a simple one. On the one hand, Isaac never fully recovered, his faith somewhat muted in comparison to that of his father Abraham and son Jacob. On the other hand, it was Isaac who linked the generations one to the next; who, despite the ordeal, found the fortitude of spirit to see another day. The question of faith in a post-Holocaust world is a difficult one, and we should avoid the urge for facile answers. What I will share is that of all the powerful moments of our journey, perhaps the most unexpected one came when we left Auschwitz and stopped for lunch at the local JCC. Generally speaking, the fifteen-minute minha (afternoon) service is not the most awe-inspiring service of the Jewish day. And yet, when we opened our prayer books and our hearts just a few miles and minutes away from the site of the greatest horror humanity has ever known, I believe that I was not the only one in our group for whom that brief service was perhaps the most powerful prayer service in which I have participated. Where was God during the Shoah? I have no idea. What I do know is that my inability to answer that question does not immobilize my faith but just the opposite. It prompts me to probe more modestly and more deeply as I seek to understand the painful mysteries of what it is to live and believe in a post-Holocaust era.

A final image, a final prayer service to recall. At the invitation of Rabbi Gesa Ederburg, our entire community spent Shabbat in the historic Oraniengburger Strasse Synagogue, the seat of German Jewry in nineteenth-century Berlin. Damaged during Kristallnacht, the synagogue was bombed and destroyed during the war, left in disrepair until the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and partially reconstructed since. We prayed in a small chapel from which one can make out the outline of where the monumental synagogue once stood. The rabbi and cantor of the community graciously extended the bimah to our own Cantor Lissek who led a beautiful Kabbalat Shabbat service which she concluded as we might here, with the singing of the final verses of Psalm 92, Tzadik ka-tamar. The cantor chanted (as I will ask her to do momentarily) the melody composed by Louis Lewandowski, the cantor of that very synagogue in the late 1800s. The psalm speaks of the downfall of our foes, of those who would seek our destruction. It speaks of the planting of fruit-producing seeds, all the while affirming God’s uprightness. It was a haunting gift from the cantor: to contemplate those words, to listen to Lewandowski’s melody, to see the outline of the Jewish life that once was, and most of all, to share that moment with the Berlin Jewish community, with the Park Avenue Synagogue community, within a collective Jewish community, through time and space, across the chasm of destruction and now into a new era. That melody, that moment, that – I know – I will never forget.

I thank Rabbi Savenor and the chairs for the life-changing experience. I thank the trip participants for the journey together. Most of all, I look forward to that day in the not-too-distant future when we will offer another trip and once more, we will learn of our past, engage with the unspeakable, and bear witness to the seeds of renewal that is European Jewry.