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Dear WRT Family,
I’m writing this note from Kraków at the tail end of an incredible weeklong journey across Poland led together with Cantor Kleinman, with brilliant Jewish educators and local Polish guides, and fifty congregants who participated in this WRT “Free Birds” mission. (That just means “empty nesters” — and, if that means you, we’d love to have you participate in all our Free Birds programming!)
Our trip has encompassed themes of memory and hope, destruction and rebirth, moral failure and moral courage. At every turn we experienced paradoxes that challenged the head and the heart:
- Warsaw, where, under Nazi occupation, Jews were confined to a ghetto 1.3 miles square, subjected to humiliation, disease, theft, and privation. And in this same ghetto, after the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of their compatriots, young Jews bravely took up arms and resisted the Nazis in a three week uprising.
- In this same city we learned of a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland—a story of a flourishing culture, literature and Jewish life, punctuated by antisemitic hatred and violence. There, we visited the immense Okopowa cemetery where ordinary Jews are laid to rest alongside luminaries of Jewish scholarship, spiritual leadership, business, and politics. And we joined the Warsaw progressive (Reform) congregation for a rousing Shabbat service and the hospitality of a young, resurgent Jewish community.
- In Lublin, we were welcomed as family at the Yeshiva that originated the now-worldwide custom of studying one page of Talmud a day. Just four miles away, we walked into the heart of darkness: Majdanek, a concentration camp originally built by the Nazis to inter Soviet prisoners of war, later converted into an extermination camp where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered. It is a vast open field, with barbed wire and barracks, whose gas chamber and crematorium still stand, evident to the surrounding residents both then and now.
- From Lublin we journeyed to Kraków, where Medieval Jewry thrived in a city still famed for its beauty and mystery. Only 45 miles east of here sits Auschwitz-Birkenau, the immense labor-, concentration-, and extermination camp complex where the Nazis gave the “Final Solution” its ultimate expression: where a million Jews were murdered, where every survivor was forced to endure inhuman treatment and, perhaps most scarring, was forced to make choices, every single day, that violate both logic and morality. As Primo Levi, the great Italian author and survivor of Auschwitz wrote:
"It is an industrial scale system designed to break the victim’s capacity for moral judgment... The entry into the Lager [camp] was a shock... because of the immediate collapse of the moral universe of the new arrival, who found himself in a world where every normal rule was inverted.”
- Hours after walking out of Auschwitz as free men and women—free Jews no less—we were embraced at the Kraków JCC, which is engaged in bringing Jews and non-Jews alike into the fold of renewed Jewish life in Poland — including assisting tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees—and there we shared stories, good food, and the awareness that we had all shared a life-changing experience.
I write this on Wednesday, a day for exploring Kraków at leisure, indulging in our final meals, and taking in the Annual Jewish Culture Festival — remarkably, the brainchild of two non-Jews — now in its 35th year of celebrating Jewish music, arts, and contributions to science and letters. Festivities began today (July 1).
Cantor Kleinman and I have wanted to make this pilgrimage for many years, so being with our congregation in Poland is the fulfillment of a long-held hope and aspiration. We look forward to sharing more Jewish journeys with you, our WRT family, in the coming years. Save the dates of April 1-4, 2027, for a Free Birds trip to Charleston, South Carolina — cradle of Reform Judaism in America, and our next international trip (itinerary TBA) in Spring/Summer 2028.
Wishing you a restful and happy summer — and, with hope in the future of the Jewish people renewed from this experience, Am Yisrael Chai — the Jewish People lives and thrives.
Rabbi Jonathan Blake
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