Visiting Poland

We are on the road once again — and this time, our journey has taken us much farther from Hod HaSharon. We have arrived in Lublin, Poland.

Early Wednesday morning, our students departed from Ben Gurion Airport and began exploring Jewish history in Poland, and its tragic near-extinction during the Holocaust.

Our first stop was a courtyard in Warsaw, where a small memorial marks the site where the Oyneg Shabbos archive was buried during the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto. Led by Jewish sociologist Emmanuel Ringelblum, a group of Jewish academics and volunteers — all imprisoned within the ghetto — risked their lives to document, collect, and preserve the stories of the Jews of Warsaw.

Despite starvation, illness, and mass deportations to death camps, they secretly gathered to record and assemble materials of every kind: playbills, food coupons, medical records, Torah lectures, and more — all hidden underground in metal containers. Remarkably, most of the archives were recovered after the war.

We reflected on the meaning of this extraordinary project — a powerful testament to the determination of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto to preserve their stories, names, and creativity in the face of the Nazi effort to erase them. One of our goals on this Poland journey is that through learning and bearing witness, we too will become storytellers, carrying forward the memory of those who were destroyed.

We then visited the beautiful yet haunting Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, where more than 150,000 Jews were buried over centuries. There, we learned about the lives and dreams of Polish Jews — from mystical rabbis to socialist activists, from Yiddish theater icons to literary giants.

We sat beside one of the few remaining segments of the Warsaw Ghetto wall and walked from the square where tens of thousands of Jews were deported to their deaths, to Mila 18, the bunker where the final stand of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place.

Tonight, we are in Lublin. In the coming days, we will visit the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva, the Majdanek death camp, the lost Jewish towns of Izbica and Łańcut, abandoned synagogues, train yards, farmhouses, and more. Together, these places tell the story of the vibrant Jewish communities of Poland, their tragic destruction, the Jews who resisted, the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to save Jews, and the complex conversations about Holocaust memory and how these stories should be told today.

For Shabbat, we plan to stay in the city of Krakow, exploring the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz and enjoying some free time in the main town square.

Next week, we will visit Auschwitz and Plaszów before returning to Israel on Monday night.

We are certain that your children will return with powerful and meaningful reflections to share.

And in the spirit of this journey, we leave you with a word of inspiration:

“A little light dispels much darkness.”
 — The Duties of the Heart, Rabbi Bahya Ibn Paqud