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Our Trip to Poland

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Passport photos of my parents, Lewi (Leo-1929) and Fayga (Fay-1928) Dear friends and family, In the summer of 2019, Carol and I visited the Auschwitz exhibit at the Jewish Heritage Museum in NYC. I realized then that I did not understand enough about what was lost in the Holocaust. I did not understand enough about who I am. Not just millions of Jews but also a rich Jewish world and heritage was destroyed. That is my heritage. It is a treasure, writes Warsaw-born Jewish theologian and rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, that is “now contained in us... the present generation is still in possession of the keys to the treasure. If we do not uncover the treasures, the keys will go down to the grave with us, and the storehouse of the generations will remain locked forever ....”   So, we decided to visit Poland, seeking to uncover those treasures, and to learn more about my family’s roots. And here we are. We hope to physically, emotionally and intellectually experience as much as possible of that
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Memory and Resistance: Oyneg Shabes (Joy of the Sabbath)

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The milk jug on display at the Ringelblum Historical Institute in Warsaw For many Jews, the mitzvah of enjoying the Sabbath (oyneg shabes in yiddish) means eating well, taking a stroll with your family, relaxing, connecting with your children. For Emanual Ringelblum, however, Oyneg Shabes was his secret code for resistance, and for the regular Sabbath meetings in the Warsaw Ghetto of his clandestine group. It’s an incredible story that teaches us a lot about Jewish resistance in general and more specifically resistance to the genocidal intentions of the Nazis. In Warsaw we visited the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, which is devoted to telling this story.  It is a story about a specific form of resistance, spiritual resistance. Knowing the likely fate of all those forced into the Ghetto beginning in November 1940, and realizing that memory and how a people will be remembered is a great treasure, Ringelblum and the sixty other community activists working with him asked,
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Przecław

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Portion of Pshetzlov Market Square, 1912 (my father was 1 year-old) We’ve visited 6 communities where shtetls existed before the Holocaust wiped out everything, and are staying in Kazimierz, the old Jewish part of Krakow, itself virtually also a former shtetl (shtetl is the Yiddish word for town; plural, shtetlekh). One of the towns we visit is Przecław where my father was raised until leaving for America at the age of 18 in 1929.      Those we visited are a tiny sample of the close to 2,000 that existed in the former Polish Commonwealth (including Lithuania, Belarus and parts of Ukraine). The shtetls (small towns with a significant Jewish community living along with Catholic Poles) were ubiquitous and formed a closely connected and interwoven web of Jewishness in Poland. As we travel the countryside, it is amazing that every 10 or so miles another shtetl existed, that they each represented or embodied a vibrant Jewish life, religion, and culture, and that they were often connected to
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Kazimierz

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  Mordechaj Gebirtig Remuh Synagogue today, where services are held; one of 7 standing synagogues in Kazimierz. I start with Mordechaj Gebirtig. I am drawn to Gebirtig, whom I knew nothing about until our trip. He was a bard for the workers and the poor, with songs about Jewish struggles, family life and suffering. One of the greatest Yiddish songwriters during the 1920s and 30s, he was sometimes likened to Bob Dylan. Born to a poor family in Krakow in 1877, he made his living and supported his family as a carpenter. His most famous song, which became “an anthem of the ghettos” was “It is Burning”   (S’brent undzer sztetł, brent),  commemorating a 1930s pogrom in Przytyk where three people were killed and several dozen injured. In 1942, along with other Kazimierz Jews he was forced into the ghetto in the Podgórze district, and then murdered in the street. His wife and three daughters died in the Bełżec death camp. (More on Gebirtig:  http://www.zchor.org/fater/ gebirtig.htm#ralph ; and
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Memory Keepers

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  One of the panels containing a number with the Feuer surname There is a memorial in the city of   Nowy   Sącz   (in southern Poland, not far from Kraków) that has two stories to tell. The first is about the 12,000 Jews from   Nowy   Sącz   and surrounding shtetls murdered by the Nazis in 1942. The full telling of this story took place eighty years later this past August when city unveiled a powerful memorial to these murdered citizens.  Almost 100 descendants of the victims, from throughout the world, attended the ceremony. The special significance of this remembrance is that it   contains every name  inscribed in long columns, and each was read out during the ceremony. The town square where the memorial is located, across from the old synagogue, was renamed Square of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust. (There are a number of Feuers represented on the victim list, but I am not aware of any specific kinship to any of them.) Gathering all the names was no small task, taking a
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Fejga Estera Hochberger

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My mother is 2nd from right sitting in front of the table, in this picture that Carol discovered in a collection archived at Brama Grodska in  Lublin . It was one of a set of negatives found when an Old Town building formerly inhabited by a Jewish photographer was renovated. On June 6, 1928, the 16-year old Fejga Estera Hochberger boarded the SS France in Le Havre, France for the trans-Atlantic journey to America. She was with her mother, Szajndla, and her brothers Pejsach and Szloma.  The journey to New York had taken the family from their flat at 81 Lubartowska St. in   Lublin , a city in Poland’s east. It was a journey her father, Chaim, had taken some seven years earlier. With their Immigration Visas issued April 16, they took the train from   Lublin   to Warsaw, then on to Gdańsk where they took a boat to Le Havre. She arrived in NY Harbor and a new life. No longer a Lubliner, she never looked back, rarely spoke of Poland, and never returned.    But what if Fejga had never boarded
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