I know Ola from my studies in Britain, where we became close friends and each other’s support in the wild Oxford jungle. Ola is a truly unique woman – bright, hard working, strong, decisive, caring and great friend. It was immensely pleasant to come and see her marry her fiancé Rafal. The wedding was joyful, decent and in style, everybody seemed to enjoy it greatly. Moreover, Ola, who is always admirably organized and has great sence of planning, brought to Warsaw also other students from our Oxford year – Esther from London/Melbourne, Maja from Oxford/Zagreb and Christoph from Munich. To see everybody again felt very familiar, as if no time had passed – it was a great reunion (btw. Christoph still dances samba with irresistible charm :o)
I cannot but admire the grace and dignity with which not only Rafal and Ola but also both their parents prepared the event. The whole time everybody was calm and relaxed. The couple and their parents never mentioned any stress or difficulty they would have with the wedding, on the contrary, they smiled all the time and seemingly with no effort made sure that all the guests were comfortable and had all they needed. I felt like it was me not them who was the important person at the wedding and I am sure most other guests, especially the oversees ones felt the same. Ola and Rafal came to pick up every single guest from the train station or airport (the last guest came at 9am on the wedding day(!), lodged half of them in her own house and made sure that also the others had a convenient place to stay. With me, Ola made sure I was close to the synagogue. When she brought me to the apartment, the kitchen had a fridge full of kosher food including a kosher le-mehadrin chicken pate and the times of the Warsaw synagogue services lay on the table. Unbelievable.
I enjoyed being at the wedding greatly and I was leaving on Sunday morning with pleasant aftertaste of a joyful event. However my stay in Warsaw was slightly discomforting. Altogether, I had 2 days in Warsaw, Friday and Saturday. I spent the first half of the Saturday in the synagogue and the other half at the wedding; I had only Friday for sightseeing. As this was my first time in Warsaw and I had so little time I had to set priorities about what to see. I chose to see the Jewish sights at which I spent most of my time leaving only very little for the rest of Warsaw. I visited the old Jewish cemetery, the Jewish Historical Institute/Museum of Warsaw Ghetto and the Memorial of the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto. I myself come from a country in several aspects similar to Poland. Also in the Czech Republic the Jewish community was decimated during the Shoa and the current small Jewish community has to face numerous challenges. I am used to the framework, words, pictures, sentiments of a such a European community. Despite that the two Warsaw days were mind boggling. Before the war, there were some 350,000 Jews living in Warsaw, which made it the biggest Jewish city in the world of that time. Seeing the pre-war Jewish cemetery and through that realizing how varied and rich the Jewish life used to be here and then to see the museum of the ghetto, walk the area of the city where the war ghetto used to be and where so many people found death under such horrible circumstances is something hard to grasp. I know several young Polish Jews and I know about their current activities; I know that the Polish Jewish reality of today is not what I saw during my day and a half. But I still found it hard to fight the feeling of gloomy heaviness, especially after seeing a huge anti-Semitic graffiti on one of the apartment buildings at the end of the day, on my way to the Friday night pre-wedding dinner.
This 32-hour experience, however, helped me understand the last year’s arguments of my Yeshiva friends – arguments in our discussions about whether Europe is a reasonable place for Jews to live. Many of them have been to Europe only once in their life, for a similar 24-hour Poland death and destruction memorial tour on their kids-pilgrimage way to Israel. How unfortunate that organizers of such pilgrimages rarely make the effort to make these kids see some European Jewish life after showing them the horrors of the history. Kol ha-kavod to Joseph and Yael that they did it differently for their kids this year!
5 comments:
you know, I used to be very upset about the Israelis coming to Poland on death camps tours - exactly because they come only in order to see traces of death, and not Jewish life as we have it now. on the other hand, some of them tell me: "we don't come to Poland to meet young Jews, it's not our purpose, we don't care. we come as one comes to the cemetary, to honour our fathers." I don't know, maybe we should get used to the fact that Poland happens to be the hugest Jewish cemetary, and that they don't really have to care about the Jewish life at present...
Hi Yael! Great to hear from you again. You made an interesting point and on some level you are right. I think it is all right if such a turist knows he sees only a part of the reality when visiting these memorials, if he comes specifically to see one part of the history of the place, knowing there are others, which he just did not want to see at that point. However, my experience is that this is often not the case. They often come to only to reinforce their image of Central Europe as the grave of Jews, a place where no Jews should live anymore...I am often hurt and offended when they try to fit me into such a picture...
It is similar to a situation (well, is this a good example?) when I would come to the US and visited only the Disneyland and several McDonald´s and said I was not interested in anything else but for the consumerism in America and then came back home and told everybody how incredibly shallow Americans were, what horrible ways of entertaining and eating they have and then discussed the issue with every American I met and told them I thought they were ignorant people. But you are right - we have to face the fact we live in a Jewish cememtery of some sort, and it is legitimate when people from the outside percieve it (also) this way.
Dear Gafna,
Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, I enjoy reading them and even started my own weblog, but unfortunately for you it is in Dutch ...
Today I read an interesting quote from Samuel Halevi Barzani, 16th century Kurdistan: "Any community that does not have a religious school is as if it did not have G'd." And immediately my thoughts drifted off to you and your work as a teacher (I think more often of you, missing you here in Jerusalem).
Behatslacha with your work and keep writing!
PS Did you meet Agata in Warsawa???
Shavua Tov from Jerusalem.
Hi, Clary.
No, unfortunately I didnt. She was out of the town - she wanted to come but in the end didnt manage. She has a baby girl called Maria Sophia.
There are several people I know that are going to Israel this week - Ales (I have had him over almost every Shabbat since the time we came back, what a shame he is leaving), Ute, Jan Fingerland (for Pardes) and my friend Jirka (for the Conservative Yeshiva). Well, enjoy the year and let me know how it is going!
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