Jewish communities in Prague, Krakow, and Warsaw

Our trip spanned two shabbats, so we spent them with the local communities, first in Prague, then in Warsaw. In Prague, Rabbi Olivier was invited to give the sermon at the local reform community. Two different reform communities came together to see him, which I guess was a big deal, because they don't get along, for reasons we never learned. Even with the two communities combined, there were barely 100 people there, and several of the people I talked to were visitors from the states. The prayers led by the local rabbi felt stilted and rote, and the community felt like they were still figuring out their place. They met in a synagogue that functioned as a museum 6 days a week, and as a synagogue only 1 day a week. The rabbi said he hoped one day these numbers would be reversed. After the service I chatted with a local young woman, who had discovered she had Jewish roots and started coming fairly recently, and was considering converting. She said she was embarrassed that she didn't know all the prayers and seemed to think this was unusual, but the more I learned about the local Jewish communities in the Czech Republic and Poland, the more I saw that this was not unusual at all; almost everyone is in her situation. Practicing any religion at all was forbidden under communism, but as I learned from Jews in Warsaw, practicing Judaism was even more forbidden than practicing Christianity. So all of these communities have sprung up only since 1989, and they are still sorting out their place.

In Warsaw, we went to services at the local reform community, which meets in a house in the suburbs, since the only synagogue in Warsaw that survived the war belongs to the Orthodox community. When we arrived, the cantor was singing Shalom Aleichem and the entire community was walking around, shaking hands with everyone they encountered and saying Shabbat Shalom. This was a wonderful welcome. The rabbi, who I later learned was Israeli, gave sermons and announcements in English and people from the community translated into Polish. He was nearing the end of a 3-year appointment here and had not learned Polish. I was told by a local that almost all the rabbis here are either American or Israeli, since the Jewish communities here were too young to have trained their own rabbis. But of course the prayers were in Hebrew, so the majority of the service was completely familiar. In both Prague and Warsaw, I loved reading the transliterations of the Hebrew prayers, and they helped me decode how most of the letters are pronounced in Czech and Polish (except that Polish has a whole bunch of letters that correspond to sounds that don't exist in Hebrew, so the transliterations were no help with these).

The Israeli rabbi here has been very busy doing conversions of huge numbers of people who have Jewish ancestry but were not raised with any kind of religion (or were raised Catholic), and are discovering it all from scratch. Many of these people did not know they had Jewish ancestry until recently. I talked to a young woman who had just converted with her 2-year-old daughter, and had to go all the way to London for her Beit Din (the panel of rabbis that asks you questions before you convert). She had always known she was Jewish, but it had taken her a while to figure out how to find a Jewish community.

I talked to one woman who said she lived in a village 3 hours away and had travelled all the way to Warsaw for services and the Shavuot workshops that were being offered during the weekend. I asked her if there was a synagogue in her village and she said no, it was destroyed during Crystalnacht.

Someone else in our group talked to a man who had started to suspect he was Jewish when he saw a picture of his mother as a child with her family and saw that she didn't look like anyone else her family, so he figured she had probably been hidden with them.

There were also many Americans here besides our group; a professor from Yale University on Sabbatical here and a guy from South Carolina who was here teaching English and had discovered Judaism in Warsaw.

After services there was a catered meal. I wanted to make sure I actually talked to the locals and not just to other Americans, so I sat down at a table where I didn't know anyone, only to discover that no one there spoke English! We all smiled at each other awkwardly, and then I moved to another table when I got up to get dessert. I ended up talking to a local who told me that the Orthodox community was trying to put this community out of business by starting their own "progressive" community nearby. He said there was a lot of fighting among the communities here because there is a lot of money at stake; American Jews are pouring lots of money into various communities here and everyone wants a piece of the pie. I asked him why he chose this community rather than the Orthodox community. He said, "I don't have the papers to prove my Jewish ancestry, and without papers they won't let me be a member. Everything there is very expensive if you're not a member, but free if you are." He waved his hand around the room and said, "Everyone here is Jewish enough for the Nazis, but not Jewish enough for the Orthodox." I asked him about whether the reform community here has the rule that you have to have been raised Jewish to be considered Jewish, and he said they can't afford to have that rule here. If they did, no one would be Jewish. I asked him about his own background and he said he had started to suspect he might be Jewish when he started traveling in other countries, and everywhere he went, people assumed he was Jewish. He found some things in his family background that made him think he was, but he still has no concrete proof. But he was drawn to Judaism and is in the process of converting. He said the Jews in Poland are like Moses; they were raised by someone else and had to go back to discover their tradition. I asked him how his family reacted to him deciding to practice Judaism, and he said when he made the decision, his wife left him. He said, "Moses also had to leave his first wife."

In my Jewish history class, we learned about the conversos in Amsterdam in the 16th century, who also had to recreate Judaism from scratch. In Spain under the Inquisition, first the Jews were forced to  convert to Catholicism, and then after several generations of living as Catholics, they were kicked out in spite of their Catholicism, because of their Jewish ancestry. Many of these so-called conversos ended up in Amsterdam, and since they were no longer legally compelled to be Christian, decided to return to Judaism. However, since their families had been Catholics for generations, they had no idea how to be Jewish, and had to learn it all from books. As someone who has also learned to be Jewish from scratch, I related to this story when I first heard it. And there is something about the story of the Jews in Poland that feels similar, and similarly inspiring. But there is something about all the American money and American rabbis that feels less than inspiring. The charitable interpretation is that we are here filling the needs of a people hungry for knowledge of their ancestry and traditions, and we are helping them to recover some of what they lost under the Nazis and the Communists. The less charitable interpretation is that we are over here pushing our own agendas, fighting it out to try to spread our particular version of Judaism rather than some other version, and creating a bunch of stupid fractures in a community that is too small to be divided. I think both interpretations have elements of truth in them.

I think all of us were surprised by how small the Jewish communities here are. In all the cities we have been to, the population was about a third Jewish before the war. Now there are about 6000 Jews in Prague, 600 in Krakow, and 6000 in Warsaw. But of course these numbers depend a lot on how you define Jewish. Given the huge percentage of Jews in the population before the war and the degree of integration, it seems likely that almost everyone here has some sort of Jewish ancestry. All of these communities seem to be attracting people who have some kind of Jewish ancestry and want to come back to it. After talking to Polish Jews from the older generation, my sense is that in the 90s, the return to Judaism felt like a giant movement and they expected it to continue to grow and flourish. But it has stayed small and become fractured, and many from the older generation are disappointed and bitter because the growth did not meet their expectations. It is hard to predict what will happen in these communities. It is hard to know what should happen.

On Saturday, Olivier led a workshop on Jewish meditation at the Jewish community center in Warsaw (which was actually named something else in Polish, unlike the American-named JCC in Krakow). Attendance was light, probably because he had unwittingly scheduled it at the same time as the Shavuot workshops at the reform community. But the 5 Polish Jews who attended fell in love with Olivier and immediately started making plans to invite him back for a week-long workshop. One woman, who had been raised Catholic and was still struggling with "how to believe in God" (which I think is a very Catholic question and not a Jewish question at all), asked lots of question and had a major spiritual revelation as she worked through his answers. This was all very inspiring to see, but I worried about us being one more American group pushing our brand of Judaism. Olivier and Gerardo seemed to think we could be a bridge between different competing communities. I hope they are right.

What's the point?

I thought we were done with the bad stuff after Treblinka but I guess I hadn't looked at the itinerary closely enough. On our last day we took a day trip to Lodz (pronounced Woodj), the third largest city in Poland, a couple hours from Warsaw (but as we learned on our way back, many more hours if there is a major accident on the highway). There we visited the train station from which the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto were shipped off the death camps. There was yet another memorial, and more photos of Jews in the midst of their daily lives who would all by dead within a year of the photographs being taken. And horribly, sitting on the train tracks, there were replicas of the cattle cars that took them to their deaths, and you could go inside them.

Early on in the trip my mind struggled to make meaning of the things I was seeing. Even if I couldn't make sense of what had happened, I wanted to take something away from the experience, to learn something that I could take back and contribute to the world. By the end I had given up. I just surrendered and cried and then tried to get the hell out of there as fast as I could. There was no meaning, no sense to be made, nothing to take away but pain. I wondered why I had come and had no answer. Many people respond to these things by becoming angry and hateful, by feeling like victims or building walls to avoid ever becoming victims again. None of these responses were acceptable to me. I needed to keep an open heart. But in keeping it open it felt like it would be crushed. If the response to this is to become angry and bitter, maybe it's better to forget. If the response to this is to be crushed, what good does it do? I know there is a reason I am here, and it may come to me eventually, but right now I can't find it. Now I just want to leave and never come back and never think about the holocaust again. Now I understand why so many survivors never talk about it.

After writing what I wrote above, I talked with Olivier, who had been writing similar things on his own blog. Early in the trip, we were all jumping to answers and actions too easily. Maybe now, in the face of some of the worst things human beings are capable of, it's better to be in a place of not knowing and not having any answers.

Warsaw

I am completely blown away by Warsaw, in a million unexpected ways.

We spent the first couple days of our trip in Prague, then went to Oswiecim, then Krakow, and then we spent the second half of our trip in Warsaw.

I've at least passed through most countries in Western Europe, but had never been to Central or Eastern Europe before this trip. I grew up in the cold war and my dad studied Russian literature and language, traveled to Russia in the 70s, and talked a lot about communism when I grew up. I always imagined Eastern Europe as a dark gray place under communism, and as a completely different world than Western Europe.

So I was surprised when I arrived in Prague and it felt just like Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, or any other Western European city. I had expected it to feel more foreign. Our tour guides have explained that both Prague and Krakow escaped almost all the bombing and destruction during World War II, so most of the old buildings are still there, and there just wasn't much room for the communists to build monstrous ugly building. Prague is gorgeous... every single building is covered with so much incredible ornamentation that if any one of them were placed in an American city, it would be an attraction that people would travel hundreds of miles to see. Krakow is an adorable ancient town.

Warsaw is another story entirely, and is unlike any place I've ever seen. Warsaw is a giant city that was blown to smithereens by bombing, the destruction of Jewish buildings from the ground, and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in which the entire Ghetto was destroyed by fire, and the Warsaw Uprising in which the Nazis destroyed almost everything that was left. Soon after the war, the Soviets occupied Poland, ripped down even more buildings in the capitol city, and built giant communist-style monuments and buildings everywhere. In 1989 capitalism came with a vengeance, many communist monuments were torn down, and all remaining space has been filled with ultra-modern buildings that look like they belong in Shanghai and giant advertisements. Today Warsaw is an absolutely crazy mix of very old classic architecture, Soviet architecture that is all concrete and square, and modern architecture that is mostly glass and filled with curves.

After taking a train that our French friend said was nicer than the trains in France, and exiting the elegant and clean train station, the first thing we saw was this:

That is a crazy curvy building with a lot of skyscrapers in the background. Only a few years ago, the landscape was dominated by the Soviet Palace of Culture and Science, which now peaks out from behind the skyscrapers:

We went straight from the train station to a bus tour of the city where we got to see a dizzying array of architecture.

The old town is filled with classic buildings that miraculously survived the war:

Throughout the city there are classic buildings that only half survived, but are in the process of being renovated:

The tomb of the unknown soldier is in the only tiny fragment that remains of what was once a giant palace:

There is ghastly advertising everywhere (imagine living behind this sign!):

And Soviet buildings turned into centers of finance:

Our hotel is a giant old Soviet building:

 that has been completely modernized inside:

Both Prague and Krakow still have completely intact Jewish quarters with hardly any Jews in them. In Prague they are proud that they lost only one synagogue during the war, and in Krakow they are proud that they lost none. In Warsaw, where there were once hundreds of synagogues, only this one remains:

While in Krakow they bragged about having no security at the JCC, in Warsaw there was security at the synagogue. In Warsaw there is no Jewish quarter anymore. Throughout what was once the Jewish Ghetto, there are engraving in the floor showing where the wall once was, and small memorials showing where things used to be. Only one small fragment of the wall remains.

One street of apartments from the old Jewish quarter remains:

The other side of the street is still being renovated:

Treblinka

Warning: The descriptions of atrocities below are graphic and horrible. You might not want to read them if you don't want to have your day ruined.

Yesterday we visited Treblinka, thankfully completing our tour of concentration camps and death camps after Terezin and Auschwitz. After Auschwitz I felt inspired to do something to educate and stop genocide in the world. After Treblinka I am just exhausted and emotionally drained. It is not that Treblinka was harder, but that it was later in our trip, after I had already seen a lot more, and I could only take in so much. The hardest part of our trip was actually not any of the camps, but a video we watched in a museum a few days ago about the Warsaw Ghetto. After this video, I started to shut down. The camps were more tolerable because there is actually not much left to see. As Olivier described in his blog post about our trip there, the Nazis completely destroyed Treblinka, and we know about it only because a prisoner who escaped wrote books and drew sketches, so now there is nothing left but a beautiful memorial. The video was much harder because it consisted of actual footage taken by Nazi soldiers during the war. The footage conveys such horror that it is hard to comprehend how anyone could film such things: children starving on the street, people collecting corpses on rickety carts, and those corpses being dumped into mass graves. There was also footage of children sneaking out through holes in the wall to smuggle in food from the outside, and of children who had been caught doing this and shot. I can't imagine how they got the footage of the children sneaking through the wall. Did the Nazis happen upon them, film them, and then shoot them? It is incomprehensible. After seeing the horrible suffering in the Warsaw Ghetto, it almost seemed like it would have been a blessing to be sent straight to Treblinka, deceived about your destination until the last possible minute, and then killed quickly. There were many layers of deception: they often made people buy their own train tickets, and gave them baggage check tickets, telling them to hold onto them so they could collect their baggage after they arrived. The building where they sorted belongings was painted on the outside to look like a normal building, and the path to the gas chamber was curved so they couldn't see where they were going. It was called "the path to heaven."

While there was nothing left to see of the actual death camp of Treblinka, there was a model in the small museum, reconstructed from reports from escaped prisoners. Seeing this model, I was struck by how large the building for sorting through people's belongings was compared to the building where prisoners lived. Hardly anyone lived here; almost everyone was sent straight to the tiny gas chamber, and they kept alive only enough people to deal with the bodies. The largest thing on the camp was the pits dug with excavators for burying the bodies. They buried the bodies until the Nazis discovered a Soviet mass grave and publicly accused the Soviets of mass murder. They then realized that the same thing could happen to them, so they started to hide the evidence of their own mass murder by digging up and burning the bodies. Unlike Auschwitz, there were no crematoria and Treblinka, only a long grill like a giant barbecue, on which they piled all the bodies at once and burned them. Instead of Zyklon B, the gas chamber here used carbon monoxide from a diesel motor. To fit more people in, they told people to raise their arms up, and then they threw the children and babies on top. This last piece of information was more than I could bear, and I shut down even more after hearing this.

Treblinka is two hours from Warsaw, in the middle of nowhere, in a peaceful pine forest with birds chirping. I think some people felt comforted by the isolation of it, but I couldn't stop thinking about how the Nazis chose this isolated place to hide what they did, and I didn't feel safe there.

I was very relieved when we got back on the bus to Warsaw, and I knew I was done visiting such places. I've enjoyed Poland and would come back, but I have no interest in going back to these camps any time soon, if ever. I think it was important to visit these places and bear witness, so I'm glad I went, but I'm also really glad it's over, and am looking forward to going home.

How can you live in a site of tragedy?

We were shocked to see a mid-sized city within a few miles of Auschwitz, and even more shocked to see houses literally right next to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where people could look out their windows and see the barbed wire fence, the guard towers, the baracks, the train tracks, and if you squint just right, the remains of the gas chambers. Throughout this trip, many members of our group have been asking with horror and anger how people can go about their lives so close to these sites of mass murder, why they choose to live here, and why they don't leave. This has become even more accute in Warsaw, where the entire city was the site of massive oppression, destruction, and warfare. Little remains of the Warsaw Ghetto, and shopping malls, apartments, and schools have grown up to fill the space. In the space that once housed a massive train platform from which 300,000 Jews were sent to their deaths at Treblinka, there is a small memorial, a girls' school, a parking lot, and a playground. We couldn't imagine how people could go to school, park, and play in such a site.

Back in Krakow, we asked an American who had lived in Poland for many years this question. Her response was, "Some people say 'How can you live right next to Auschwitz?' Others say 'How can you live in Oswiecim?' Others say 'How can you live in Poland?' Others say 'How can you live in Europe?' Everyone has a different level of comfort. New York is on top of a Native American burial ground. Horrible things have happened all over the world and we all live right next to them."

I've been turning this over in my mind for the last couple days, trying to make sense of the life in the midst of destruction here. Then, in the middle of watching a heartbreaking documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto that brought us all to tears and exhausted many of us to the point where we didn't feel like we could ever return to normal life, a memory hit me that gave me peace around this issue.

I remembered that the first time I walked by the building where I work at SPU after the shooting there, I felt nauseated, and I was afraid that I would never be able to go back inside and work there. But the first time I actually went back inside, all of that disappeared. That building is a home for me, and I had so many good memories there that they outweighed the bad ones. Now I work there every day, and regularly walk right over the spot where someone died and the spot where someone almost died. But I don't regularly think about the shooting. Because those are also the spots where I have had conversations with friends, participated in professional development, and generally gone about my life for years.

The scale of the suffering in the SPU shooting cannot possibly be compared to the suffering in Auschwitz or the Warsaw ghetto. But it was suffering just the same and we experience it the same. This memory helped me understand how we can return to life, and how we always want to be home. I think it is hard for us to understand how people can live in these places because for us these places are only sites of tragedy. But for the people who live here, they are sites of tragedy AND they are home. I can understand wanting to be home no matter what has happened there. Seattle is my home and I would always want to come back to it. I have tried to live other places, but the aching for home is always too strong. SPU is my home, and for me, that is stronger than the memory of tragedy.

Poland after communism and before Russia strikes again

Poland has been taken over again and again throughout history because of the unfortunate tragedy of being located between Russia and Western Europe. It is particularly tragic that it was taken over by the Soviet Union so soon after the utter destruction of Nazi occupation. Life was hard in Poland under Soviet Rule. Now, 26 years after the fall of communism, Poland is a thriving capitalist democracy.

Throughout Poland and the Czech Republican, there are old communist buildings, which were originally ugly and grey, which have been painted in bright colors and crazy patterns since the fall of communism. These buildings are now a cheerful sign of life and recovery and I am completely in love with them. I posted a few pictures here.

Tomasz, who has studied history carefully, reminded us repeatedly that people who live in stable systems tend to take it for granted that those systems will continue forever, when history shows otherwise. It sent chills down my spine when he mentioned that he was afraid for the future of Poland after Russia’s actions in Ukraine. He told us that if you study the language Hitler used when taking over Sudetenland, and the language that Putin used when invading Ukraine, they are almost identical. In his farewell email to us, he begged us to "keep and eye on Poland and follow occasionally some local news from the region."

After seeing how Poland is thriving and recovering from communism, it is heartbreaking to imagine it happening again. Being here definitely makes me want to pay more attention in the future and protest things that threaten peace in this region.

Our guide in Warsaw told us that people here are afraid to take down soviet-era statues because Russia would get angry. We couldn’t believe that Russia’s power here was strong enough to influence what people do with some old soviet-era statue. (I’m trying to imagine anyone in Russia having an opinion about the statue of Lenin in Fremont, and it seems absurd.) But apparently Russia did get angry when they took down a statue in some other country (Hungary?) and it was a big deal.

(I will have much more to say about Warsaw tomorrow! For now I must sleep.)

Jewish life in Krakow and who counts as Jewish

As promised, we spent Wednesday learning about Jewish life in Krakow now and throughout history, again guided by Tomasz. Like Prague, Krakow has a giant Jewish quarter filled with synagogues that are mainly used as museums. Krakow has seven synagogues, and while some were used by the Nazis to store supplies, none were destroyed. (The synagogue that had been destroyed in Prague was not destroyed by the Nazis, but by Americans who accidentally bombed Prague because they thought it was Dresden. Oops.) The Jewish quarter in Krakow felt even more grotesque than in Prague. Everywhere you turned, there were stores selling menorahs and little figurines of caricatures of Jewish men, and restaurants advertising “Jewish food” with bands playing music from Fiddler on the Roof (one of these bands started immediately after Tomasz said “I am trying to convince you that Jewish life in Krakow was more than Fiddler on the Roof”). When we came to a market with stalls selling antique menorahs and other Judaica, I couldn’t help but think about where all this stuff had probably come from. Even though I knew that the people selling it in 2015 were obviously not the people who had stolen it from it from its original owners and that it was far too late to give it back, I didn’t feel comfortable buying any of it. There were few signs of local Jews, but plenty of foreign Jewish tourists. We saw a group of Hasidic men and boys speaking Yiddish and taking lots of pictures, who our guide said were probably from either New York or Israel. The most common Jewish tourists here are Holocaust survivors and their families, who come to see Auschwitz, and Hasids, who come to see the places where Hasidism was born and to pay homage to the founders of Hasidism. We visited the grave of a famous Hasidic rebbe, which is a major pilgrimage site. His tombstone was filled with little notes stuffed into the cracks asking for him to intercede in people’s problems. Tomasz said this was a custom that Jews had adopted from Catholics.

At the end of our tour, after seeing what the Jewish quarter looks like today, we saw a film of life in the Jewish quarter filmed in 1935, showing all the places we had just seen, filled with an amazing diversity of Jews. It was heartbreaking to know that all the life shown in that film was completely destroyed within 7 years.

One stop on our tour was the JCC (Jewish Community Center). Yes, it’s called the JCC, in English. This was a beautiful brightly decorated building with a wide open gate, and as they proudly pointed out to us, no security. We got an introduction to the place from Sebastian, a non-Jewish Polish volunteer, and Jessica, a young New Yorker on a one-year internship to make connections between the Krakow Jewish community and various American Jewish groups. (It didn’t dawn on me till later how weird it was that we didn’t actually meet any Polish Jews at the JCC. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I met any Polish Jews the entire time I was in Krakow.) Sebastian and Jessica explained that the function of the JCC is to revive Jewish life in Poland and to support people who discover they have Jewish roots in rediscovering what it means to be Jewish. It serves as a community center, synagogue, and educational center all in one. They have Shabbat dinners every Friday, holiday celebrations, classes, and outreach. To be a member, you have to “have one Jewish grandparent or be in a reasonable state of conversion.” There are also many non-Jews who are not members, but volunteer and participate in order to learn about Jewish history and culture. Sebastian explained that many non-Jews recognize that Jewish culture is a huge part of Polish history that suddenly disappeared in 1942, and they want to learn about it in order to better understand their own culture.

It is very common for Poles today to suddenly “discover that they are Jewish,” meaning that their parents or grandparents were Jewish and hid it even from their children, because being Jewish was dangerous under both the Nazis and the communists. Since communism fell in 1989, it has finally become safe to be Jewish, and many young people are getting interested in their roots and discovering these things. And when they do, the JCC is there to teach them all about how to be Jewish. Sebastian made it clear that the JCC views anyone who has discovered they have Jewish roots as a “potential Jew,” and that their goal is to convince these people to become Jewish. They emphasized that they have a very inclusive definition of what it means to be Jewish and they welcome everybody, no matter what their heritage, their denomination, or their degree of religiosity. I know that the question of who counts as Jewish is a very controversial one in the US, and I asked them a few questions about this. In response, they made it very clear that this is not controversial question at all here, because their community is too small to be picky. They said if they ever reach the point where different denominations start fracturing and arguing, they will consider it a success that their community has gotten large enough for that to happen. But in Prague the tiny Jewish community is already completely fragmented, so I don’t think you have to be large for that to happen.

The JCC is all about emphasizing Jewish life in Poland, in contrast to too many organizations and individuals who emphasize death by coming to Poland only to visit concentration camps. In response to the March of the Living, they organize a yearly event called “Ride for the Living”, in which people bicycle from Auschwitz to the JCC. This year they will have a participant from the US, an 80-year-old American Holocaust survivor who had to walk from Auschwitz to Krakow after the war, and is now returning to Poland for the first time to retrace his journey in a new context. (If you do the math, he must have been 10 years old in 1945 when he made the first journey.) I told them they should have giant billboards outside of Auschwitz, to reach the people who only go there and don’t know that there is any Jewish life in Poland.

Sebastian said that unlike the rest of Europe, anti-semitism is pretty much non-existent in Poland today, so they don’t need security at any kind of Jewish place. (Other people I’ve talked to since have disagreed with this statement.) He said there was one anti-semitic incident in Warsaw a few years ago, but the perpetrators were visiting German neo-Nazis, not Poles. This sounds lovely, but I couldn’t help but think that it’s easy not be anti-semitic when there are almost no Jews in your country, and you view Jews through a romantic historical lens. From my study of Jewish history, my understanding is that anti-semitism becomes most prevalent when there are economic problems, and Jews are in important roles in society that can be perceived to be responsible for those problems. Since there are almost no Jews in Poland today, they play no significant role in economics or politics, so it makes perfect sense to me that there is no anti-semitism. It is not clear to me that this will remain the case if the JCC is successful in its mission. On the other hand, in Prague there was plenty of security when we went to Shabbat services, so maybe it is possible to have anti-semitism even in a place with almost no Jews. And Olivier just reminded me that anti-semitism was particularly virulent in England after they had already expelled all their Jews.

I have mixed feelings about the JCC, and am still trying to make sense of them. Questions of who counts as Jewish and evangelism bring up my issues around so-called Jewish tribalism and Christian universalism, and make me feel uncomfortable as a convert with practically no Jewish ethnic background. Overall, I loved the JCC. It felt like a beacon of hope and life in a place where Judaism could have easily died and become a fossil. Everyone there was incredibly enthusiastic and they are clearly filling an important role in satisfying the hunger of both Jews and non-Jews who are desperate to learn more about Judaism. But there was also something uncomfortable about it. The approach of the JCC feels like a weird mix of evangelism and tribalism to me: trying to convince people to become practicing Jews because of their ethnic background, even if those people are baptized adults who have been practicing Christians their whole lives. This brings up lots of questions for me about what it means to be Jewish. Should someone be expected to be Jewish just because of their ethnic background? Certainly if their parents are Jewish and they grow up knowing they are Jewish, their parents have a right to expect them to continue to be Jewish (even if ultimately their parents have no control). But if their parents chose to lie to them and baptize them? Are they still Jewish simply by virtue of their genes?

Sebastian described two adult brothers he knew who recently discovered their Jewish ancestry, one of whom dived head-first into Judaism, learned everything he could, had a bar mitzvah and became shomer shabbas and kosher, and the other of whom continued to practice Christianity. He said the JCC still sees the second brother as a “potential Jew.” I understand that Jews are a tiny minority, especially in Poland, and hanging on to anyone we can is important for our own survival. But while supporting the first brother in every way we can seems really awesome to me, I am uncomfortable with seeing the second brother as a “potential Jew” rather than respecting his choice to continue to practice the religion he grew up with and has devoted his life to.

I also asked how common it was for Poles with no Jewish ancestry to convert to Judaism. Sebastian said it happened occasionally but wasn’t common. Apparently there are tons of non-Jews who are fascinated by Judaism and want to learn all about it and participate and volunteer at the JCC, but don’t really consider converting. I think part of my discomfort about the second brother was that it seemed weird to me that Sebastian was so committed to trying to get this brother, who was not interested in Judaism, to become Jewish, but it didn’t occur to him to become Jewish himself, when he was clearly incredibly passionate about Judaism.

On the other hand, I am also uncomfortable with the approach of Reform Judaism, which is almost exactly the opposite of the JCC. In Orthodox Judaism, you are considered Jewish if you have a Jewish mother or if you have converted through an Orthodox synagogue. If you have a Jewish mother, it doesn’t matter what you have done or how you live your life, you are Jewish. I knew that Reform Judaism had changed the rules to recognize paternal descent and make them more egalitarian, a very controversial decision that had many Orthodox Jews complaining. I only found out a couple weeks ago that Reform Judaism had changed the rules in more ways than that. According to Reform Judaism you are Jewish if you have a Jewish father OR mother, AND you have been raised Jewish, or if you convert through any synagogue. This means that if you have a Jewish mother but were not raised Jewish, according to Reform Judaism, you’re not Jewish. So in one sense, reform Judaism is actually MORE strict than Orthodox Judaism about who can be counted as Jewish. I had trouble believing this when I first heard it, and thought it must be wrong until it was confirmed by a Reform rabbi. I was somewhat surprised that my reaction to learning of this rule was utter horror and anger at the leaders of Reform Judaism. If the Holocaust hadn’t happened, this might be a reasonable rule, but in the light of the Holocaust, it seems disgusting and completely insensitive to the context of the worst tragedy in Jewish history. When so many Jewish children grew up in concentration camps or in hiding, and were not raised Jewish because it would have threatened their survival, it seems like a cruel joke for the Reform community to declare that those children are not Jewish. My own strong reaction here teaches me that I actually do believe that Jewish ancestry matters, regardless of how you were raised.

(I’m laughing at how many times in this blog post I have written “on the other hand.” I’m starting to sound like Tevye in the Fiddler on the Roof. This blog must be my version of his processing things through conversations with God.)

Auschwitz

I've spent the last three days visiting concentration camps, and it seems like I should write something, but I don't know where to start. On Sunday we visited Terezin (also known as Theresienstadt), near Prague. On Monday we woke up early and took a bus to Oswiecim, the Polish town where Auschwitz is located. We spent Monday afternoon at Auschwitz I, the part of the camp where people went to work, and we spent Tuesday morning at Auschwitz-Birkenau, a few miles away, the part of the camp where people went to die.

I have always heard about the horrors of the Holocaust, and have always understood that many many individuals were killed. But before now, I only really thought about it in individual terms. I don't think I understood until this trip just how effective it was at wiping away entire populations of people. This first hit me visiting Prague, where we saw many synagogues and few Jews. Prague is a city filled with magnificent synagogues (not even counting the ones that were destroyed), but most of them are museums because there are hardly any Jews left to use them. There is a giant Jewish quarter, but it is a tourist destination, not a center of Jewish life. Prague used to have one of the largest Jewish populations of any city in Europe. Our guide told us that now there are 6000 Jews in the whole city. To make sense of this number, I looked up the Jewish population of Seattle, a city I think of as having hardly any Jews (I grew up there without meeting anyone I knew to be Jewish until high school). Seattle has half the total population of Prague but has 60,000 Jews. In Poland before the war there were 3.25 million Jews. 2.93 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust. The Polish Jewish population was literally decimated. There are now 25,000 Jews all of Poland. There are half as many Jews in the entire country of Poland as in the city of Seattle. In Auschwitz we learned more about how this came to be. Auschwitz was the only camp that had both a death camp and a work camp in the same place. There were 4 other camps in Poland that were only death camps. Auschwitz has become the symbol of the Holocaust because there were so many survivors who witnessed what happened there. Hardly anyone survived from the death camps. The Nazi leadership decided on January 20 1942 to enact the final solution to systematically kill all of Europe's Jews in death camps. When our guide told us that the other 4 death camps were all dismantled and the evidence of them destroyed in December 1942, we were all perplexed and asked why. He said because they were finished; they had already killed all of Poland's Jews. Auschwitz continued to function to kill the Jews from other countries, but there were none left in Poland. It took 11 months to wipe out the nearly entire Jewish population of Poland, 3 million people. It feels very different being here than in the US. The US is filled with Jews who escaped, survived, prospered, and grew. In the US, Judaism feels very much alive. Here it feels dead. I know that the rest of our trip is intended to help us see that it is not dead by introducing us to the thriving Jewish communities of Poland. I am glad we have the rest of the trip and I hope it will be convincing. But just looking at the numbers, right now it's hard for me to see the Polish Jewish community as anything but barely hanging on.

Gerardo, our trip leader who lived in Poland for 20 years and was an active member of the revitalization of Jewish life in Poland, told me a story about the March of the Living, which is an annual trip for Jewish teenagers from around the world. They spend a week in Poland visiting concentration camps, culminating in a march from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz-Birkenau carrying the flags of their countries. In Poland they see only death. Then they go to Israel for a week, where they only what is alive, positive, and good about Israel. There is definitely a political agenda here. Gerardo said his teenage son went on March of the Living a few years ago, and couldn't believe it when the bus passed right by the Yiddish Theater and the Museum of New Jewish Culture and no one said anything, so he stood up and started pointing them out and telling everyone how his father had been in the Yiddish Theater and how there was a thriving Jewish Culture in Poland. He was asked to sit down. The participants weren't allowed to leave the hotel and they didn't let Gerardo's son go out to have lunch with his brothers who lived in Poland until Gerardo intervened, and then only grudgingly. I am disgusted by this story and don't want to draw the same conclusions that this group is working so hard to promote by deception. But looking at the facts, I'm finding it hard to draw any other conclusions. Perhaps I need to lower my expectations, and instead of hoping to revive the incredibly rich culture that is mostly dead, appreciate the tiny shoots of life that exist, however small they may be.

Our guide at Terezin was Sylvie Wittmann, who is a leader in the Prague Jewish community and runs her own tour company specializing in Jewish history. Normally she sends out her minions to give tours, but she gave us three days of her own time to take us all over Prague and finally to to Terezin. She was very blunt and always prefaced her best insights with, "I don't want to be politically incorrect... ah, OK, I will be politically incorrect."

Terezin was known as the "model concentration camp." It was not as bad as the others, children lived there, and they had schools, music, theater, and art. The Red Cross came to visit in 1944, and the Nazis went to great effort to clean up the camp (mainly by shipping large numbers of inmates off to Auschwitz) and put on a show to convince the Red Cross that life was good here. It worked. They also made a propaganda film showing how great life was there. Most of the people in the film were shipped off to Auschwitz within a few weeks after the film was made. Terezin was of course upsetting but it was not that bad. Not much was left of what it originally looked like, so mostly what we saw was a museum, and not a particularly intense one. Writing this now, after visiting Auschwitz, I'm having trouble remembering it.

One thing that stood out at Terezin was a "secret synagogue," so secret that none of the survivors Sylvie has talked to remember it. It is covered with inscriptions in Hebrew, not typical religious ones, but religious Zionist slogans. Sylvie said this was considered very dangerous by the Nazis. They encouraged displays of religiosity because it encouraged people to put their faith in God and not fight back. This was exactly the kind of place that encouraged people to fight.

Our guide at Auschwitz was Tomasz Cebulski, and I think he must be the best Auschwitz guide on the planet, although he is overqualified for the job and I feel incredibly privileged that our little group gets to have three days of his time. He grew up in Oswiecim and wrote his PhD dissertation on "State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau and the socio-political conditions of its functioning." He has dedicated his life to understanding this place and what it means for us today, and to communicating what he has learned. Although Tomasz said he tries to present what is here without an agenda, I don't believe this is possible. Everyone has an agenda. His agenda is to help us see that the Nazis were not monsters, but ordinary people, and that all human beings are capable of these atrocities, that such atrocities continue to this day, and our only hope is to confront this capacity within ourselves. He also has a agenda of educating us about the ways in which businesses profited from Auschwitz and were involved in every aspect of its functioning, and how the Nazis set up the concentration camps so that the prisoners did the most awful work, allowing themselves psychological distance from the atrocities. And he very gently reminded us that we are still doing both of these things.

The first shocking and unexpected thing about Auschwitz was that there is a mid-sized city right next to it, and people live out their lives there. On the way to the camp, we passed a shopping mall, a McDonalds, and the largest sign I've ever seen for KFC. There was also a billboard advertising "Peaceful Oswiecim," with pictures highlighting the many wonderful attractions of the town. There were houses lined up right next to the barbed wire fence of Auschwitz-Birkenau. None of us could imagine how anyone could live in such a place. We learned that the Nazis expelled anyone who lived within 40 miles of the camp, so this entire city has been populated since the war. Tomasz told us that no Jews live in Oswiecim. The last Jew there, a survivor who wanted to come back to his home town, died in 2000. Tomasz expects that one day Jews will live there again. The rest of us were skeptical and couldn't imagine that any Jew would ever live here again. There is a synagogue, but it is only used by visitors.

In Auschwitz I, I was mostly holding it together until we came to a display of children's clothes, shoes, and toys. It was a tiny display and you had to look over it to see what it was. As soon as I saw it, I broke down crying. I kept trying to go back to it and take it in, but I couldn't look at it. I could only glance at it out of the corner of my eye. I also had to rush quickly through the exhibit of children's drawings from Terezin, many of which were of things children shouldn't have to witness. I just couldn't be with them.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most shocking thing was the sheer vastness of it all. At its peak there were 120,000 prisoners. Tomasz emphasized the orderliness of the process from the perspective of the Nazis, who were constantly refining the system into the well-oiled machine, and the randomness of it from the perspective of the prisoners, who by the time they understood it, they were dead. He also emphasized the amazing capacity of humans to adapt. While most prisoners at Auschwitz died within 2 months, there were a few who arrived in 1940 and were still alive when the camp was liberated in 1945.

Another shocking thing about both camps was how beautiful they were. Auschwitz is in the middle of a beautiful forest, surrounded by lovely trees. Auschitz I had spruce trees growing throughout the camp, birds chirping, and a peaceful woodsy feeling. Auschwitz-Birkenau was more sparse. There is grass now, but in the 40s it was only mud. But even there, through the barbed wire fence, all around is a lovely forest.

The gas chambers and crematoria were all blown up by the Nazis before the camp was liberated, in an ineffective attempt to hide the evidence, so all we saw at Auschwitz-Birkenau was rubble, but the rubble showed enough. Tomasz explained how Jewish prisoners handled all the dirty work. The only piece of the process that the Nazis did themselves was inserting the canisters in Zyklon B into the gas chambers. This was the one piece that couldn't be trusted to the Jewish prisoners. Once prisoners started working in this section of the camp, they were carefully tracked and marked for death, never allowed to interact with the rest of the prisoners again.

There were teenagers behaving horribly at Auschwitz-Birkenau, taking silly selfies, laughing, and chasing each other with insects on sticks. I found myself getting irritated with them, and with people in my group who I didn't think were behaving in an appropriately respectful way. I had to just keep telling myself that all these things were coping mechanisms, and everyone was doing the best they could in the face of something that is impossible to comprehend. In the end, I wasn't really upset with the teenagers, but upset with their guide, who hadn't done a good enough job of teaching them how to behave in a place like this.

Towards the end of the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, perhaps as my own kind of coping mechanism, I found myself consumed of thoughts of what I could do to take my experience of this place and turn it into something meaningful that would make a difference for the world. The numbers really impacted me, and since my work is in data visualization, I started imagining creating various visualizations of the numbers that would help make them more real to people. Tomasz talked about how when people first started talking about the Holocaust, as they do with every genocide, they focused on the numbers, but people couldn't connect with numbers alone, so then they started focusing on individual stories. So I started imagining interactive visualization of numbers where you could zoom in until you got to individuals and individual stories. I started thinking about how I could use my skills in data visualization to tell stories about all sorts of politically relevant issues, and started wishing I were independently wealthy so I could just do whatever matters instead of whatever the NSF would fund. I don't know whether these ideas will last or go anywhere past this trip, but these visits are definitely contributing to a growing feeling that ultimately I need to do something that matters more for the world than creating assessment resources for physics faculty.

After both days at Auschwitz, we got together as a group to process and talk about what was coming up for us. This was exactly what I wished I had after visiting the Holocaust museum, and I was grateful to have it. After both days, we were all completely emotionally exhausted. But it was good to be around other people who have been through the same thing.

There is so much more I could say, but I will stop here because I am too tired to say more.

Added on Wednesday:

A few more things I forgot to write about...

I've always had trouble wrapping my head around why, when the Red Cross came to visit Terezin, not a single person ran up to the Red Cross delegates and yelled, "This is all lies! It's all a show!" and explained what was really going on. Anyone who did this would have been punished brutally, but they were all going to be killed anyway, so why not? Of course the answer is that they didn't know they were all going to be killed anyway, and even if they did, they still might not have wanted to take the risk of a punishment worse than death. But it's still hard for me to wrap my head around. Yesterday we learned that at its peak, there were 120,000 prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and only 2700 SS officials. For someone on the outside, this raises the same question of why they didn't revolt. Even if the SS officials had guns and the prisoners didn't, if every prisoner in Auschwitz revolted, they could have overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. But of course the Nazis had set up a careful system to turn the prisoners against each other and keep each other in check. And then it hit me that this is the same as all sorts of power systems today, including our own government, where incredibly small numbers of elite keep incredibly large numbers of people from revolting. Revolt is hard, but it is often effective. Over the last few days, we've learned repeatedly about incidents in which the Nazis waited to see if the international community would object before committing the worst atrocities, and proceeded only after they heard no objections. When several Jews who were married to non-Jews were deported to concentration camps, their non-Jewish spouses stood outside the Nazi offices protesting, and after several days of protest, the Jewish spouses were released. After the Red Cross visit to Terezin, the Danish government, which was at that point occupied by Nazi Germany, insisted that their Danish citizens be sent home, and hundreds of Danish Jews were actually sent home from Terezin. It amazes me how often the Nazis responded when people protested, and how infrequently people protested.

I've noticed that within our small group of supposedly spiritual evolved people, all sorts of interpersonal issues have been coming up, and they were exacerbated in Auschwitz, probably because of the intensity of the place. It made me realize how much worse it must have been for people who were prisoners here. In addition to all the other horrible things they were experiencing, the intensity of the place must have triggered so much in their interactions with each other.

Another thing I learned on this trip that I hadn't realized was that no one talked about the Holocaust for 30 years after the war. The experience was so extreme that no one could understand what survivors were talking about. When they did talk, people thought they were crazy, so they quickly learned to shut up. This was especially true in Israel. Even though a third of the Israeli population after the war was Holocaust survivors, their experience as victims didn't fit with the popular Israeli narrative of heroism, and they were shamed for their experience. According to Tomasz, it was only in the late 70s and early 80s that people began to start talking about the experience of the Holocaust, asking questions of survivors, doing research, and writing books. By that time many survivors had been so thoroughly trained to shut up, that it was hard to get them to talk. There was a huge production of books that came out in the 80s. That was exactly the period when I, as a very young child, was reading every book I could find about the Holocaust, and Olivier said he was too. It had not occurred to either of us that this was a generational thing, and that our interest was part of a larger cultural phenomenon that was just beginning, and that these books hadn't existed until that moment.

After the SPU shooting, I wrote here about how impressed I was with the university's response, and how I realized that we know so much now about trauma education, and that the trauma counselors at SPU knew exactly how to support us in this situation and help us realizing that we weren't crazy and everything we were experiencing was normal. Without that support, I really would have thought I was crazy. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for Holocaust survivors, who after experiencing something far more traumatic, had none of this, and couldn't even talk about their experience.

This reminded me of the sermon in the service after the SPU shooting, about how everyone reads Psalm 23 after a tragedy, because it is comforting, but they don't remember that before Psalm 23 comes Psalm 22, which is all about despair. The conclusion was that we should not rush to comfort too quickly, but must first sit with the despair. I shared this with my group, and we read Psalm 22. It felt incredibly relevant to Auschwitz.

Finally, here is Olivier's blog post about the same few days, which captures a lot of what I wasn't able to say: http://www.betalef.org/2015/05/jewish-heritage-tour-of-czech-poland-day-fourfive-auschwitz-birkenau/