My eldest daughter has spent the past week in Poland with her school. From the time we arrived in Israel and she learned that most schools here make the trip to Poland in 11th or 12th grade, she said she wanted to go. Since last May, when she signed up for the trip, the school has spent days and weeks educating the girls, both historically and psychologically, what to expect. They left before dawn last Monday morning, arriving in a cold, wet Warsaw around 8am, and went immediately to a Jewish cemetery. They have traveled the routes traveled by our own ancestors, visited towns and cities where Judaism once thrived, and seen the horrors of Treblinka, Majdenak, and the woods of Zbylitowska Góra where there are mass graves of Jews, including thousands of children, shot to death by the Nazis. Tomorrow, Sunday, is the final day of the trip, one that is spent at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Parents were asked to send a letter to their daughters for them to read over Shabbat, which they spent in the city of Krakow. Below is an edited version of the letter that I wrote to my daughter. It was originally written 2 weeks ago, but I have modified it slightly to reflect the anti-semitic murderous attack that killed 11 Jews in Pittsburgh just one week ago.
<<I am writing this on Erev Shabbat Lech Lecha, when Hashem commanded Avram to leave his homeland and his birthplace, and to go the land that Hashem would show him. In the parasha, we see Avram’s blind faith in Hashem, how he was willing to leave behind everything that was familiar to him, to follow Hashem.
For thousands of years, the Jewish people yearned to return to Zion, to the Land of Israel, after the exile and the destruction of the Beit haMikdash. The area that makes up the Promised Land has been controlled by so many different powers during these years of Diaspora, and each of these governing people played some role in making sure there was no official Jewish homeland.
Finally, in 1947, immediately following the genocide committed in Europe by Hitler and the Nazis, the British Mandate came good on the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to give the Jewish people their own state. There are those who believe that the only reason the modern state of Israel exists is due to the guilt felt by the world following the Shoah. These people believe that if it weren’t for the Shoah, we would never have our State of Israel, and we would not have been able to establish a Jewish homeland in the Biblical land that was promised to Avraham our patriarch in Parashat Lech Lecha. I choose to believe differently. I believe that while the Shoah was a factor in us getting back our homeland, the realization of the dream, the establishment of the state, is nothing short of a miracle. You see, as soon as Israel declared independence, all Arab nations surrounding us declared war on us. We had no proper army. Our army was made up of various underground movements who had resisted British, a haphazard group of people with little military training. We had newly arrived immigrants from Europe, (many of whom had arrived illegally, due to British limitations set on the number of Jews allowed to land in Israel in those post-war years) survivors of horrors worse than anyone could imagine, recovering from years of starvation and illness and mistreatment at the hands of the Nazis, who immediately joined forces to fight for their new homeland. It is only by God’s Hand that Israel won that war. As you know, that was only the first war, many more have followed, and still our enemies try to wipe us from the face of the Earth.
When I asked if you were anxious about your trip to Poland, you answered that you were not. You said that you hoped to get some clarity from it, some more understanding of what happened, and to find some connection to your past, to our past.
I have never been to Poland, nor do I have any desire to go. From what I understand from others who have made the trip, the last day is the hardest day. Auschwitz-Birkenau is always described as devastating – people who didn’t know they could feel such deep emotion, describe how it is impossible not to feel the souls of all those murdered there. Just the sheer size of the place, makes it impossible to digest how many were murdered there.
Yours is the second generation to grow up with the State of Israel as fact and reality, rather than a dream and a prayer. It is difficult to communicate to you and to your siblings and friends, the true meaning of Zionism and why it is so important. Your great-grandparents, and even your grandparents, remember the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948. They remember the 1967 Six Day War, which resulted in a unified, free Jerusalem, giving us access to the Old City and the remnants of the Beit haMikdash. It is easy to take this for granted today – that you can hop on a bus and then the light rail in Jerusalem, and show up at the Kotel whenever you feel like it. But we must never take any of it for granted. We must always remember the days when we didn’t have a country of our own, and when we had a country of our own, but no access to the holiest of places for the Jewish people.
Today’s fight is different. We have to continue to fight the BDS movement which does its best to put Israel in a negative light all around the world. When we hear people saying that Israel is an apartheid country it is up to us to show the world that this is not the case. The Palestinians do not want a 2 state solution – their vision is a single state that is devoid of all Jews. As a Jew, and as an Israeli, it is your job and your duty to educate others, to make sure that they see the truth, the real Israel.
As we learned last Saturday night, anti-semitism is alive and well. Exactly one week ago, eleven Jews, praying in their synagogue on Shabbat morning, just as we do every single week, were murdered, in an act not unlike those carried out by Nazis nearly 80 years ago. It can happen in Pittsburgh. It can happen anywhere. Where there are Jews, there are anti-semites.
I have no doubt that you will return from this trip changed. How can anyone visit Poland, and see what was lost, and not come back feeling changed? When we meet up at the Kotel on Monday morning, look at it with new eyes. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t see an ancient wall. Look again, and see all that is left of the Beit HaMikdash. Look again, and see the miracle that enabled us to reunite Jerusalem in 1967. Look again, and see how God is a part of everything that happens in Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael. Look again, and see how the existence of the State of Israel is not a direct result of the Shoah, but the realization of a promise, and of a dream of thousands of years.
I can’t wait to see you on Monday morning. I am sure tomorrow will be a tough day, but hopefully you will return empowered, and believing that God exists, even though we may not understand how He works, and why He makes things happen the way that they do. I pray that this trip has been all that you expected it to be, and that you return feeling proud to be Jewish and proud to be Israeli.>>
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