March of the Living Southern Region 2008

What an incredible two weeks! What amazing participants! What a joy that we were able to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary in Israel along with 6,000,000 other Israelis. It was a remarkable experience.

Our MOL 2008 young people are amazing! They have selected to participate on this trip and give up many of their end-of-school activities as well as having to commit to a series of courses, and weeks of travel with a grueling schedule. It has been an amazing 2 weeks. Our survivors especially have been “formidable.” How they persevere in retelling their story, time after time after time is just mind-boggling. They are a very special group of people and God willing we’ll have them around for quite some time.

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Shabbas morning at the Rabin Youth Hostel unfolded with breakfast and three services in the various rooms in the Hostel. Rabbi Bloch led the Reform service with Rabbis Westman and Weitzman leading the Conservative and Rabbis Lew & Tannenbaum leading the Orthodox. Imagine being in the corridor and being abole to hear the resonating strins of the Sh’ma from three different streams of Judaism. Each singing the sounds of Hear O Israel with majesty and delight. Services segued into lunch and then a lovely walk over to the Israel Museum just down the street form the Rabin Youth Hostel. Returning to the Hostel for a farewell gathering proviced the culminating event of the day as we all celebrated the end of Shabbat and participated in a joint Havdallah service led by Rabbi Lew.

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Friday in Israel is always a very special day of the week. The anticipation of Shabbat is always a wonderful way to go through the day. People are scurrying about all over Jerusalem. There are so many last minute details before Shabbat – creating this weekly holiday celebration.

Everyone gets ready for their Yad Vashem visitation. Unfortunately a “bug” has caught a number of our participants off guard. The virus is severe enough giving about 15 of our youngsters and one of our survivors some serious cramps, nausea and everything associated with it. Nevertheless our medical team rose to the occasion and provided incredible care for all those in need.

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Thursday is the March through Jerusalem. What an awesome event for some 4000 MOL participants as they meet at City Hall Square to dancing and celebrating being in Israel. The musicians are contagious. Everyone is just enraptured by the music and it creates an energized ruach that is hard to duplicate. We were just amazed at the exhilaration demonstrated by these young people who are enraptured with one another and love celebrating Israel. What a joy!

Then the students moved into the street and began to march towards the Kotel. Moving to the rhythms of all of the music along the march was absolutely innovative and exciting. Water is distributed along the way, white and blue balloons predominate the route with everyone interfacing among all of the groups. Young people from Argentina through United States march together enjoying one another’s company and repartee.

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Our first morning in Israel is in Beith Shean – the day I’m told, since I’m with the adult bus in Jerusalem, is exciting with a wonderful Israeli breakfast. The students are eager to join in the variety of activities including Jeep riding, and other assorted exciting Israeli activities.

By mid-day the buses prepare to separate into their partnership 2000 communities as we prepare for our home hospitality evening on Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day. Atlanta, West Palm Beach, Dallas, Tampa/St. Pete and Boca Raton each get to spend the next 18 hours with their hosts from their Federation’s partnership community.

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An exciting day awaits. We are about to leave for Israel. Morning prayers are rather extended since it’s Rosh Chodesh. It is exciting to be in the service and hear the Orthodox chanting the melodic and loud strains of Hallel while the Reform service at the other end of the same room is offering their morning prayers. The pluralistic nature of this March is still one of the watermarks of the Southern Region’s March of the Living. We are truly one within our own streams. It is a wonderful experience for me to be able to witness this first hand and document the joy of watching and participating in each of the prayer services.

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We left leisurely this morning as we headed out towards Lublin to visit the Yeshiva and Majdanek. The weather was very ominous with a 60% chance of rain. That can be challenging! The five hour drive to Lublin was long but gave many a chance to catch up on some sleep and each bus had an opportunity to do some more sharing.

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There’s a reason God gave us Shabbat! 8:00am wake up after a week of 5:30 – 6:00 wake up calls. The day begins after some catch-up sleep for us all. Breakfast at 8:30 and services at 9:30 are just what the “doctor” ordered. Rabbi Lew along with Rabbi Westman will be taking those who want to walk back to Kazimierz to the Ramu synagogue for services a bit earlier. They will remain for a Chabad lunch at the Isaac synagogue. The remaining Rabbis will be offering services at the hotel. We have Rabbis Singer & Bloch offering the Reform Service, Rabbi Weitzman leading Conservative and Rabbi Tanenbaum the Orthodox. It is incredible how we make space where none exists. In one corner of the lobby the Reform will be chanting their minhag, while in the terrace dining room the Conservative offer their approach to Shabbat services and the Orthodox will be on the 2nd floor landing where the echoes of their nigun will be heard throughout the floors of the hotel.

One of my greatest March joys is to be able cavort among all three services and hear the chanting, the talks, the explanations, the ruach and the genuine spirit of Shabbat davening in one place. Sometimes while in the Orthodox service during a momentarily silence we all can hear the Reform sounds wafting up the stairway  and while at the Reform service I was able to make out the strains of the kadosh during the repetition of the amida from the Orthodox. What an incredible sense of Ahm Yisroel Chai – the people of Israel are one.

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This morning we travel to the city of Oswiencim to visit and walk through the barracks and the camp of Auschwitz I. Although we were in Auschwitz as we prepared for the March we did not have an opportunity to walk into the blocks and see what type of camp this was. We walked around with survivors of Auschwitz sharing their personal accounts at different locations in the camp. The Camp is a museum telling the story of the Holocaust with all of it’s components through graphic artifacts, maps charts and actual remnants of the luggage, shoes, hair, clothing talaisim, glasses, prosthetics,  etc. It’s just an incredible demonstration of the nature of a holocaust experience.

Many of our young people are so moved by the crematoria, the gas chamber and the account of the survivors with us on the March. The youngsters focus on how they would react and how they would survive. It’s a difficult concept to understand. Two of our survivors are Auschwitz survivors and share their accounts with the youngsters. They are compelling! The opportunity to hear a survivor, like my mother, stand in front of her block #13 and tell everyone this was her block, how she had to get up each morning and stand on line in her uniform while they were counted, how she worked in the kitchen and was one of the lucky ones to be able to “steal” potato peels and put them under her dress to bring back to her block to share and for herself. Each story was emotional for so many – each story showed the incredible strength of these survivors who come to Auschwitz to make sure that this 3rd & 4th generation never forget what happened here… this is the March of the Living.

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Our day begins early in Warsaw with a 5:00 am wake up in order to get ourselves down to Auschwitz by 1:00 pm in time for the opening ceremonies of the 20th March of the Living. Everyone wakes up on time, attend services at 5:30, breakfast at 6:00 and by 6:45 outside with our luggage ready to load the buses for our trek south. The bus ride is relatively quiet after the morning announcements and orientations. We are eager to get to Oswiencim (the Polish city which the Nazis renamed to Auschwitz). There is something surrealistic about our eagerness to rush to get to Auschwitz. It is an amazing concept and we deliberate upon it for awhile.

Today, May 1 is also a national celebration – May Day and coupled with May 3rd on Saturday which is the Polish Independence Day – it is quite a challenge to navigate the traffic of hundreds of thousands of cars leaving their cities to go to mountain resorts (Krakow is in the mountains) and enjoy a 4 day weekend. Our arrival time of 12:00 is extended to 1:15. with a few well placed phone calls we are able to have them hold the March until we arrive. The moment we are in the camp and heading to our staging area, we hear the call of the shofar as we prepare to march OUT of Auschwitz under the infamous sign, Arbeit Mach Frei – Work will Free you – what an oxymoron of the times.

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