← 11/8/10: Day one: Plane Ride & Warsaw Cemetery11/11/10: Warsaw Ghetto → 11/9/10: Tikochin Cemetery, Beit Knesset, and our first “death site” Posted on November 29, 2010 by israelieleni 9:15 am. On the bus again. Beautiful Polish countryside rolling past our windows. It’s flat, cloudy, gray, wet, dreary, and picturesque. They’re playing Fiddler on the Roof to introduce us to shtetle life, and the rain on the windows, the clouds…I love everything about this situation. Long travel trips, driving in the rain, being bundled up, watching movies. So, thus, a 3-hour Polish busride in the rain, watching Fiddler on the Roof in sweats and socks? A definite win. 11:00 pm. “Yesterday we used death to understand life, and today we used life to understand death.” This is the story of today, in the hours that have passed since I wrote at 9:15. We got off the bus and toured a shtetle. We tramped around the wet, muddy streets looking at the wet, muddy buildings with remnants of Jewish stars and Hebrew lettering, before coming to a wet, muddy meadow. Shira led us into it, and, coming to a rock, she kicked the wet, muddy grass off of it to reveal the Hebrew carved into it, dull and faded. I was stunned, to be honest, because once I realized what it was, I looked around a second time, and realized that there were these rocks all over the place, and that each of them was a tombstone. We were standing in the 500 year old neglected graveyard in the town of Tikochin. The last Jews were bured there in the ’30s, but since then, it has been completely and to every extreme neglected and ignored by the townspeople. While at the graveyard, I didn’t process why it was so overgrown, so neglected. Why wasn’t the Jewish community of the town keeping it up? Later in the day, I got my answer, and that is the last thing I’ll talk about in this post. After wandering around the site, reading the Hebrew on the stones (no Polish, which I thought was fascinating), we walked back into the center of the city, and held afternoon t’fillah in the only Beit Knesset still standing in the city. It was a spectacular t’fillah, not necessarily spritually, but in the Am way. Judaism, for the first time to me, was a culture, not just a religion, and it’s clear to me why that was. Yair led the whole thing with spirit and kavana and liberal application of guitar. We were chanting each prayer with all our hearts, and really getting into it. Directly after Amidah, Noah sot up, and from nothing, begins a hora circle in the center of the room. And all of us, every single kid, stands up, jumps over the benches, and grabs hands and joins in. The circle is whirling around the bimah in the middle, and our feet are kicking, and Yair’s guitar is alive with the spirit of the nigun, and our voices are soaring, echoing off the white domed roof, mixing into each others. For 10 minutes, we are the shtetle Jews who lived in Tikochin, the Moishes and Shmuels of the 1890s. Whirling and chanting and singing, and so alive with the melodies, we were them. Gradually, slowly slowly, it calms down, and Shira said the following to us: “When the Germans invade this area of Poland, they come, take all the Jews from this city, put them in trucks, and take them into a forest.” Any feeling of holiness vanished. In seconds, we crashed back to the present, and here again came that feeling of grimness, and this time it was grim certainty. We had no doubt what had happened in that forest, and so we grimly resigned ourselves to our first death experience. In silence, we got on the bus, in silence, we rode and watched the forest Shira talked about slowly converging on our windows, in silence we walked to three mass graves in the middle of the forest. This is when it hit me for the first time-what Jewish community was left to take care of that cemetery? Never before had the Holocaust been so real to me. Every. Single. Jew. Was gone from this city. The silence in the forest was overwhelming, something that was suffocating. Do you see what I mean about using death to understand life? That the Nazis came and wiped out towns means nothing until you’ve gone and prayed in synagogues that have been abandoned for 70 years. That is the reason that Poland is such a great and terrible experience. It forces realization.
Posted on: Sat, 26 Apr 2014 20:28:08 +0000
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