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Alumni From Around the World Look Back at What March of the Living Means for Them
Jerusalem Post By Jerusalem Post Staff The most transformative moments of my trip were those spent with people who endured the horrors of the Holocaust. The survivors’ passion and drive were…
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Remembering the Past, Facing the Future By Phyllis Greenberg Heideman
Jerusalem Post By Phyllis Greenberg Heideman As I reflect on my first March of the Living, I recall the eerie sensation of slowly walking into Auschwitz and timidly passing under the…
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Blind Israelis March from Auschwitz and Birkenau with Their Guide Dogs
Jerusalem Post A 28-minute documentary film, “Blind Love,” recounts a trip in 2013 to Poland of a delegation of six blind Israelis who lead the viewer on a different kind…
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Sigmund Rolat’s Speech in Poland, 2015
Dear March of the Living Students, We have all gathered here to remember. From all sides, we are called upon not to forget. But why should we remember at all? If…
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Playing Music for the March of the Living, Violinist Yevgeny Kutik Writes About March of the Living
Last week, at the invitation of International March of the Living (MOTL), I traveled to Poland to perform at the Holocaust memorial ceremony, held in Auschwitz- Birkenau. In addition to playing at the Auschwitz ceremony, I performed at a concert honoring the liberators who were the first to enter concentration camps and discover Nazi atrocities. I also visited sites around Poland, including the mass graves near Tykocin and the Treblinka concentration camp. As I flew back to the USA, I found that I was at a loss for words. Without a doubt, this was one of the most profoundly moving weeks of my life, yet at the same time I didn’t quite know what to say. Tykocin is a small village in northeastern Poland. Around the time of WWII it was inhabited by 1800 Jewish residents. Over the course of two days, as the Nazis came in, nearly all the residents of this village were taken to the nearby forest and executed in waves. Three pits were dug and the residents were forced to stand in them as they were shot one group at a time, each standing upon the bodies of the previously shot group. The Treblinka concentration camp was responsible for the death of over 800,000 Jews. This camp was designed to execute thousands within hours of arrival. Mass graves and several cremation pits, one of which survives today, were used to dispose of the dead bodies. Upon visiting each of these sites and hearing details of the indescribable subhuman perversity shown by the Nazis, I would find myself go through the same pattern of thought and emotion: shock, a passionate anger and frankly, hate, sadness, and grief. And then suddenly, on the day of the Yom Hashoah ceremony at Auschwitz, I began to experience hope. In preparation for the ceremony I arrived early and walked the length of the overwhelmingly enormous field at the Birkenau death camp to get to a makeshift stage at the other end. An eerie silence filled the space as I quietly walked by myself. After a week of seeing the remnants of Holocaust atrocities first-hand, I was beset by sadness and confusion. After warming up, I stood off in the wings getting ready to open the Yom Hashoah ceremony with music. As I waited, I suddenly saw the first of over 10,000 people start marching onto the field of Birkenau; many of them young, together with Holocaust survivors, veterans, VIP’s, Jews, and non-Jews all walking arm in arm down the same path countless numbers walked to their deaths. This was hope in physical form – the future, understanding, love, and a commitment to good. Inspired, I went out on stage. As at Auschwitz, both at Tykocin and Treblinka, I pulled out my violin and played. At Tykocin I stood by one of the mass graves and played Ravel’s Kaddish (Click here –http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCXYPEsDFsQ – to watch performance of Ravel’s Kaddish during the March of the Living.) At Treblinka, I stood by the remaining cremation pit and played Kol Nidre at the site were so many were turned to ash. The sound of music cutting through the quiet, hallowed silence said more than I could ever express with words. (To watch performance of Ravel’s Kaddish at the March of the Living, click here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd0hCjEs1GI What is there to say? These horrific events happened, and they will forever be burned into our history. All we can do now is always remember what happened and work together to make sure such evil and hate never shows its face again. Never again.
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Looking Back at the Holocaust, Through a Child’s Eyes
New York Times by Isabel Kershner JERUSALEM — Jakov Goldstein survived the Holocaust as a child by hiding alone for two…
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March of the Living to Focus on Post-Survivor Period
JTA By Sam Sokol 2015 marks the twenty seventh March of the Living, in which students from more than forty five countries around the globe make a pilgrimage to…
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At the Jewish Museum of Vienna, Enduring Images of Europe
By: Sarah Wildman, The New York Times Erich Lessing is one of the foremost chroniclers of 20th-century Europe, known equally well for photographing politicians like Charles de Gaulle, Eastern…
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Tracing Jewish Heritage Along the Danube
The New York Times By Lisa Schwarzbaum Like many who share my hair texture and fondness for rugelach, I am the descendant of Jewish forebears who boarded boats in the first half of the 20th century to escape bad times for our people in Central and Eastern Europe. These intrepid emigrants took to the water, settled in America and built a Jewish-American culture of creative assimilation. I owe them my life. Like about a third of the 120 or so fellow travelers with whom I spent seven nights on the Danube River last November, I boarded a boat called the AmaPrima in Budapest to float back to some of the same places so many of those same emigrants were — history has confirmed — lucky to leave behind. I was bound on a Jewish heritage tour, combining two growing travel trends: roots and rivers. In my case, the combination was a special-interest option laid over a popular Danube itinerary that AmaWaterways has been offering since the company entered the river-cruise market in 2002. On the water, we were all in the same boat as it powered from the Hungarian capital of Budapest to Bratislava, Slovakia; Vienna, Linz and Salzburg, all in Austria; and, finally, Regensburg and Nuremberg, in Bavaria, Germany. The AmaPrima cruise ship in Bratislava, Slovakia, top, one of the stops on the Jewish heritage tour along the Danube. Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. Each day, we shared the same abundant (nonkosher) meals and modest smartphone- and tablet-photography skills. Each night we repaired to our similar small, sweet, meticulously plumped cabins. (Our vessel could hold a maximum of 164 passengers.) And we all relaxed together each cocktail hour — mostly couples, mostly in their 50s to 70s, and mostly North Americans, along with some stray vacationers from England, Ireland, Australia and China — in the same pleasant lounge, with its big picture windows. Together, we admired the luxe bed linens, the Wi-Fi in every room, the bottomless free glasses of wine, the outdoor hot tub, the on-board gift shop, the minuscule hair salon and gym area, the all-inclusive pricing. But when we stepped onto dry land in a different city each day, with local guides and buses synchronized to meet us, each traveler could choose between a Jewish heritage tour or a more standard city tour. (Independent exploration was also an option.) And we who had booked our trips in honor of our roots would, for a few hours, explore paths haunted by ghosts. We would step into cemeteries with tumbled headstones. We would admire the very few synagogues that remain — so beautiful in Budapest, so stately in Vienna! — and listen to tales of the hundreds more destroyed. We would peer at old photographs and study rescued personal objects confiscated from the disappeared and today reverently displayed in glass cases. Each day we walked the streets of a Jewish heritage now effectively devoid of Jews, and we listened as guides described to us what used to be and is no more, along with tempered reports of precarious Jewish life as it exists today. Then, as darkness set in, we returned to the boat to reunite with fellow passengers who had spent the day on the cruise line’s default tour of gentile European culture. The Chatam Sofer Memorial, formerly the Old Jewish Cemetery, in Bratislava.Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. For a week, under the friendly efficiency of the cruise manager, Dragan Reljic, we clinked aperitif glasses of Hungarian, Austrian or German liqueur in friendly toasts to historic beauty, both original and rebuilt following war after war, century after century. Then we freshened up for another dinner banquet, warmed by the pleasurable, high-end comforts of our Danube holiday. This is the only way I can begin this story. The weight of your emotional baggage may vary. Budapest is an eminently logical place to start the search. Draped on both sides of the Danube, the city is home, still, to one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe, shrunken as it is. Not insignificantly, the river is also wide enough — and the docking availability commodious enough — to handle the current explosion in river-cruise tourism. Not for nothing has AmaWaterways increased its fleet to 19 vessels in 2015, while the industry leader, Viking River Cruises, will run 60 river ships with 25 itineraries this year. Along with a handful of others who would become my shipmates, I opted for an organized predeparture extension of two nights in Budapest before we embarked. That way, I could visit the imposing Moorish-style Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest active synagogue in Europe today. (It is, for that matter, the second largest in the world, after Temple Emanu-El in New York City.) As substantial as Dohany Street Synagogue is, though, it paled in emotional resonance compared with the effect of Shoes on the Danube Bank, a memorial by the sculptor Gyula Pauer and the filmmaker Can Togay. This simple, quietly heartbreaking permanent installation of 60 pairs of empty shoes, cast in iron on the Pest side of the Danube embankment, is a memorial to thousands of victims of Hungary’s own fascist Arrow Cross, in 1944-45. Men, women and children were relieved of their footwear, lined up and shot dead so that their bodies would fall into the Danube and wash away. Art puts our feet where they once stood. In the Stadttempel synagogue in Vienna, with the bar mitzvah of Nathan Baranow taking place in November. Credit Akos Stiller for The New York Times. Click HERE to read the full article.
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