Let me tell you about my trip to Poland.
A month ago, I didn’t even know my great-great grandfather’s name. I also didn’t know that he died in the Holocaust.
It’s not that the information was a secret. It was just never talked about. The way I conceptualized it growing up, the history of my family (or at least my mother’s side of my family) essentially started in 1933 when my Polish-born grandmother (age 8) and her parents left their shtetl of Zuromin and landed in New York. They were the lucky ones—they got out several years before the war, and—looking ahead and not backward—began to build a new life. My great-grandfather, whose name was Avraham Simkha Opatowsky, stayed behind—and so he was not part of that story. As for me, I grew up feeling thoroughly American and not at all connected to the old country. (The other branches of my family are an additional generation removed from their immigration to America.) As far as I was concerned, Poland was the distant past, a kind of mythical place that I knew was “where we came from” but that never really felt real.
That’s beginning to change for me.
I’m writing this article on the plane ride home, somewhere over the Atlantic between Warsaw and Toronto. Over the last nine days, my parents, siblings, partner and I have visited a number of sites across Poland, including Warsaw, Krakow, Auschwitz, Lublin, and several towns where various members of our family came from. In this article, I want to share a few highlights, how they affected me, and how they are starting to change my understanding of my family’s history.
On day two of our trip, we visited Zuromin, the town where my grandmother was born. A tiny town about two hours northwest of Warsaw, before the war about half of its 4000 inhabitants were Jewish. Today, of course, few traces remain. For reasons that are too complicated to explain here, we had the privilege of seeing Zuromin together with some of its current residents—non-Jews who still live there, and whose parents and grandparents once lived a block from my family, working and studying alongside them on a daily basis. They welcomed us warmly into their home, offering coffee and cakes, showing us old pictures. Together we saw the Jewish cemetery, which today is an empty field surrounded by a wall, with no grave markers. We took a picture beside the empty lot where my family’s home, bakery, and general store once stood—and where, presumably, my great-great-grandfather lived after his children had left for America and until he and the rest of the Jews of Zuromin were rounded up in 1939.
Two days later we visited Lublin, a gorgeous, airy, medieval town in the central hills of the country. Lublin was, at one time, the seat of the Council of the Four Lands, essentially a Jewish parliament that operated between the 16th and 18th centuries, governing the huge and thriving Jewish community of the four Polish kingdoms. In later times, Lublin was a Hasidic center, the home of the famed Rabbi Yaakov Yitzhak, the “Seer of Lublin” who was known for his spiritual insight and his ability to see into others’ souls. I had been excited about visiting there specifically to witness this Hasidic legacy, and the city did not disappoint. The Seer’s home has been rebuilt; and, based partly on his reputation, the town is making a name for itself as a place of magic and whimsy—with street festivals and statues of mischievous sprites hanging from rooftops in the old city. The rest of the Jewish quarter, though, is gone. Flattened by the Nazis in 1942, what remains of it is an eternally lit street lamp and a parking lot shaped like an eye—both creative and artistic homages, neither of which is particularly noticeable unless you know what you’re looking for.
The last day of our trip was really special, and unexpectedly so. On this day, we were scheduled to visit Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, a town in the Galician south of Poland which was the place of origin for certain ancestors of my dad. But since they had left for America several decades before the war, we didn’t have any addresses and didn’t expect to find anything specific. The day started with a visit to a Jewish cemetery in the nearby town of Wadowice, where we were met by a kind volunteer who lovingly takes care of this and several other cemeteries belonging to destroyed Jewish communities in the area. On a whim, my father listed off some of our ancestral family names and asked him if he happened to know of any graves belonging to any of them. His eyes lit up. “Seifter? I know Seifter!” He pulled out his phone and scrolled through some records, then led us through the gate, tromping through the tall, wet grass, peering carefully at the grave markers (many of them extremely hard to read) until he gestured at one and called something excitedly in Polish.
Then suddenly, there I was, standing at the grave of my own great-great-great grandmother, Rosa (Rayzel) Seifter. A woman whose name I had never heard before, who died 50 years before I was born and lived 7000 km away, but who—a look at the family tree confirmed—was unmistakably my great-grandmother’s grandmother. We even have a picture of her tucked away in a genealogical file. And in that moment, it hit me: We came from here. This was once our home. My parents’ parents’ parents rode through these hills, walked among these buildings, and prayed in these synagogues. I wondered what Rosa would say to me if she knew I was here. I wondered how she would feel knowing that we were standing at her grave saying Kaddish for the first time in a century, trying desperately to remember what has been so long forgotten.
I want to pause at this moment to make clear that I do not only associate Poland with the Jewish past. One of the meaningful experiences of this trip was sharing moments with the current Jewish community. Yes, there are Jews in Poland, even today. We shared a Shabbat dinner in Warsaw with an energetic group of BBYO leaders, who excitedly described their plans for the upcoming programming year, and who sang Birkat Hamazon (the blessing after the meal) with a spirit that brought tears to my eyes. We also visited the JCC in Krakow (see image), which serves everyone from elderly Holocaust survivors to recent Ukrainian immigrants, where one can pick up PJ Library books in Polish and Ukrainian, and where the doorway is emblazoned with a sign reading: “JCC Krakow: Come Saying Kaddish, Leave Saying Shehecheyanu.” In these places, I felt the joy and energy and hope of thriving Jewish life and resolved to help build it in the ways that I can. I highly recommend that my fellow North American Jews explore Poland through the eyes of these organizations, and consider supporting them if you are so inclined.
And at the same time, one of the themes of this trip was a deep sense of absence. We spent much of our time visiting towns, cemeteries, and old synagogues; looking for plaques in ghettoes; searching—often in vain—for traces of a civilization that simply no longer exists. No matter where you travel in Poland, the Jewish story is similar: there was once a large, thriving civilization here, and now there is not. And not only are we not there; many have forgotten we were ever there. People walk down formerly Jewish streets, past old synagogues and mikvehs, mostly unaware of the ghosts of the Jewish community.
But not everyone has forgotten. Everywhere we went—literally, in almost every town we visited—there was some dedicated soul, usually not Jewish, who has committed themselves to honoring and keeping alive the memory of the Jewish community. It looks a little different in each place—Warsaw has a large, well-funded museum; Bialystok is home to a tiny, quirky one-room exhibition crammed full of information and photos; in Zuromin it is simply a local teacher whose students have conducted interviews with the population about their Jewish neighbors. But in each place, they are there, trying to remember us. They are often doing so in isolation, with minimal knowledge of Judaism and little contact with the descendants of the Jews they are remembering. It seems to me—and this is, at this moment, an unfinished thought—that this is a place where we can help. I am currently contemplating how it might be possible to work with local communities in places like Zuromin and Wadowice, to add our photos and stories to theirs and create something together, so that Poland can do more than “love dead Jews” (to quote a popular book): it can build real relationships with the living Jews who continue to connect with the communities their ancestors called home.
Last Tuesday, the day before we left Poland, my family and I visited Auschwitz. If you’ve been there, you know that walking amongst the old bunkers and the ruins of the crematoria is a painful and emotional experience. But what has really stuck with me is a small exhibit in Block 27 simply called Shoah. Designed by Yad Vashem (Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum), its focus is on life and remembrance, and it features a Book of Names—a listing of all the names of Holocaust victims that have thus far been gathered. That’s where I was able to find the name of my great-great grandfather, Avraham Simkha Opatowsky. By then I knew that he had died in the Holocaust, but seeing his name listed there made it all the more real. And it also made me ask an important question: What is Avraham Simkha’s legacy? What can I do to ensure that his name is known, that his memory is alive.
I’m not sure the answer yet, but it seems to me that it has something to do with building a meaningful and vibrant Jewish life—filling my life with Jewish learning and living, with blessings and rituals and sweetness and spirituality. My work at Laasok is part of that—I’m proud of the way we connect with Jewish text and tradition, keeping Jewish practice alive and vibrant. My participation in synagogue and in home ritual is part of it as well.
But I think Avraham Simkha’s legacy might also ask something more of me: to help tell the stories of the people and communities to which I belong, even those I never knew. To help ensure that the people who remember the Jews of Poland don’t have to do so alone, and that the history of Jewish life there is connected not only to the past but to the living Jewish communities of today.
A month ago, I didn’t know Avraham Simkha’s name. Now I do. I can’t bring him back, or restore the world in which he lived. But I can say his name. I can tell his story. And I can try to live a Jewish life worthy of the generations that came before me—both the ones I knew and the ones I am only now beginning to discover.