Today, Erev Shabbat, we began our day by davening in a beautiful Synagogue in Dabrowa Tarnowska. Since today is also Rosh Chodesh, we davened Hallel all together, which was a unifying meaningful moment to experience as a group. After, we drove over to the Buczyna forest located in Zbilitovska Gura near Tarnow. This area had been used by the Nazi’s to carry out their plan of the Final Solution.
The forest had been used to commit mass execution of not only Jews, but Poles, as well. Here 2,000 Poles had been executed and thousands and thousands of Jews, of which 800 of them had been children from an orphanage.
Each student had been given a biography of a child who had died in the Holocaust to read about and say Yizkor for. We then had a small tekes to remember all the 1.5 million children murdered in the Holocaust, reading poems children had written before they were taken by Nazis as well as stories about them. This experience helped us to understand on a deeper level the extent of what hatred could do to such young and innocent lives.
Then we left for Krakow, where we will be for Shabbat. After getting situated in our rooms we walked over to the Rama Synagogue and cemetery, where we discussed the life story of Rav Moshe Isserles and said tehillim at his grave. At the cemetery we also visited the graves of the Bach, Tosfos Yom Tov, and the Megaleh Amukot learning about each of their lives and their impacts on society to this day.
After this visit, we walked back to the hotel to get prepared for Shabbat. As the day is coming to a close one memory has been stuck with me. While reading a poem by a child named Gabor Ardesh, a 13 year old boy, who had been murdered in 1944 during the Holocaust, all I could think was that someone barely over the age of Bar Mitzvah is writing about such deep and complex emotions. A child describing his suffering and pain, so descriptively and emotionally as if these could be his last words ever.
Aden Fischoff
