Heritage - We get Letters…………..
Dear Michael,
While I thanked you several times in person for the great job you did and for all your love and care you
showed for the group, I wanted to follow up with a brief but heartfelt note recognizing your tireless efforts to
make this trip a true success.Your attention to every detail and the amazing staff that you employ make
Heritage and Ramaz the perfect partners.May we have the zachut of working together in the years to come.
Sincere thanks,
Kenny Rochlin, Administrator, Ramaz School
Michael,
What can I say? We are back in Israel, where we should all be! We went out for breakfast this
morning. There was a young woman sitting in the cafe with her tiny baby. I went over to her and asked if I
could hold the baby. I explained that we had just returned from Auschwitz and I hadn't seen my grandson
since our return. She understood and immediately handed me her two month old. I held the baby in my arms
and sobbed. Yes, no surprise there! How wonderful to leave behind the graveyard of millions of Jews and to
hold a baby, a Jewish baby, an Israeli baby in our homeland!!!
I will never forget the past week of my life. I believe that the last 55 years were just a prelude to the week in
Poland. You made it possible for me to face my past as well as my future. Somewhere my grandparents are
smiling and saying thank you for visiting our last place on our earth and for your tefillot on Tisha B'Av.
Michael, I left a picture of our grandson in my mother's barrack and my mother-in-law's barrack.
May you and your family be eternally blessed! Thank you!!!
Love,
Bonnie Pollack
Hi Michael,
It has been an incredibly enriching and emotional bonding experience, one that will remain with us for the
rest of our life. Thank you again for making this trip so special! May we all meet again soon in good health
and good spirit and recap together some of the highlights of our journey to our heritage and past.
Shalom ulehitraot,
Massimo & Teri Szulc
Dear Michael,
I wanted to thank you for making this a meaningful experience and important trip for me. I appreciate your
efforts and organizing the ins and outs and intricate details of every aspect of this trip. I also note the
spirituality that you infected into the trip. I was always moved by the pieces you read- especially at the
children’s grave, and at the shul in Tereziin. Though you have done this 91 times it does feel like rote in any
way shaper or form. You helped make it alive with emotional import. I thank you for arranging my personal
trips to Bochnia and Dubieko, my father’s roots. Know that it took me a half of a second to decide to go on
Heritage. Your experience made the trip seamless. I will never forget it.
Thank you on my behalf and that of the group.
Beverly Druck
Six Days in Poland
A Report on the Ramaz Seminar – The Nine Days, 2009
by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein (delivered on Shabbat Eikev, August 8, 2009)
‫לא תשכח‬...‫זכור את אשר עשה לך עמלק‬
“Remember what Amalek did to you…do not forget!” We will read that commandment three weeks from
today. A week ago, however, during a six day Ramaz seminar in Poland (followed by three days in Prague)
forty-seven members of the Ramaz/KJ family fulfilled that great mitzvah. I knew this experience would be
extraordinary; but no one could have imagined how extraordinary it actually was. We arrived in Poland on
the Sixth of the Nine Days – Monday afternoon, July 27, – going straight from our arrival at the Warsaw
Airport to the Warsaw cemetery, where the tombstones literally told the story of the richness of Jewish life in
Poland. Pre-war Poland had the second largest Jewish population in the world – three million Jews. It also
had what was perhaps the most active Jewish community in the world: Torah institutions, a rich religious
life, a strong and varied Zionist movement, secularists, socialists (the red hued tombstones reflecting that
movement), maskilim, yiddishists, all contributing to a kaleidoscope of color, energy, creativity and tension.
We went on to Lublin and Zamosz and we observed Tisha b’Av in Auschwitz and Shabbat Nachamu in
Krakow. It would be impossible to find a more fitting time to study and experience the glory and the tragedy
of Polish Jewry.The depth of that experience was made possible by our seminar scholar, Dr. David
Bernstein. Dean of the Pardes Institute, and former teacher at Ramaz and KJ, who combined depth of
scholarship along with the ability to evoke personal feelings and inspirational moments. David and his
colleague – Heritage Seminars Director, Michael Berl, Ramaz’s legendary Music and Choral Director,
opened the book on Polish Jewry so wide for us – intellectually, religiously, emotionally and experientially.
We spent Tisha b’Av to Auschwitz. In an historic “first” organized by the Director of Heritage Seminars,
Michael Berl, we traveled at night to Birkenau, making a long trek on foot, in the dark, as we marched by
flashlight to that terrifying gate and the tracks that carried the Jews into Birkenau. The march was led by
those of us who had lost very close relatives in Auschwitz – Each of them took a turn at carrying the Torah
at the head of the line. As we walked in silence, we recited Psalm 91. Deep inside the camp, we sat on the
ground, davened Ma’ariv, read Eicha and recited Kinot. We were back in Birkenau and Auschwitz early
Tisha b’Av morning to daven in the only shady spot in Birkenau, and then to traverse the entire camp to
study in depth what happened to us – I stress the word “us” – in that kingdom of hell. It is clear from the
interpretations of the Rav on the Kinot of Tisha b’Av that just as we re-experience the exodus on Pesach so
we re-experience Churban Ha-bayit (the destruction of the Temple) on Tisha b’Av.
The last place we visited in Poland is called Zbilatowska Gora, a site not far from the town of Tarnow.
Sometime in 1942, the Jews of Tarnow were ordered by the Gestapo to come with their families to the Rynk
– the town square. Their children – eight hundred of them – were taken from the parents, and driven some
distance away to be shot dead. The bodies were buried in a mass grave in Zbilatowska Gora, As we stood
at the grave of the eight hundred children, Michael Berl asked us to write down our feelings in a letter to
anyone to whom we chose to write. I wrote the following letter to my children and grandchildren:
Dear Children and Grandchildren,
Neither Mom - Grandma – nor I had close relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. Some of Mom’s Grandma’s - father’s siblings whom none of us ever knew were actually among the victims. We, however,
were essentially spared personal tragedy. Experiencing, however, the “full” scope of the Holocaust from
Warsaw to Lublin to Zamosz to Krakow – in Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz – and, finally, at the mass
grave of eight hundred children of Tarnow, shot while their parents stood helplessly barefoot in the Rynk,
and buried in a lonely field a couple of miles away, evokes for us the unbelievable pain, horror and sadness
of the Shoah and the gratitude we have to God for the blessings bestowed upon us by our parents and our
grandparents who made fortunate decisions which meant that we and you have experienced none of this
tragedy personally. Nevertheless, I hope you will all come to Poland at some point – and we pledge to help
you do just that – in order to sense an infinitesimal fraction of the Shoah and to fulfill the very important
mitzvah.
Let me close this letter by quoting a handmade sign, written presumably by an Israeli, which was placed on
the fence around this mass grave of eight hundred children.
‫הזכות לזכור; החובה לא לשכוח‬
“It is our privilege to remember; it is our obligation never to forget”
We love you all,
Mom (Grandma)
Dad (Grandpa)