Tragical history tour

I exchanged pleasantries with a friend on Shabbat.  He told me that he and his wife were to spend that evening with a friend who had recently returned from a trip to Poland.  Since most Jews don’t visit Poland just to sample the borsht and visit the church where Chopin’s heart rests (his body lies in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris), I asked if their friend had made a Tragical History Tour, a well-beaten path of ghetto remains, cemeteries, and crematoria.  He had.

This leads me to consider one of the knottier issues of bringing up children in Israel.

We are a tiny country.  We can’t visit our neighboring countries on vacation.  It’s difficult enough to travel to friendly countries, given the issues of kashrut and Shabbat.  Our kids traverse nearly every square meter of this country on foot through family and school trips to the North, the Negev, and everything in between.  But when they leave the country, it’s usually to see grandparents and relatives in whatever quiet part of the world we come from, and by the time they graduate from high school, they’ve only seen the outside world maybe half a dozen times (if their families don’t have the means to spend every summer on Long Island).

During a typical senior year (at least in the religious schools in Israel; I’m less aware of what happens in secular schools), kids are offered the chance to participate in school-sponsored trips to Poland.  The itinerary of these trips generally covers Warsaw (ghetto remnants, Mila 18, the main shul and cemetery), Lublin (including the old yeshiva and Majdanek), and Krakow (again, ghetto remnants, Ram”a shul, main shul, and Aushwitz-Birkenau).  Side trips can include Wiszkow (where a large monument was erected to the destroyed community and includes a cemetery with a special walk allowing Kohanim to perambulate around the edges), Treblinka, and any of a number of tiny villages with memorials or vestiges of Jewish life (e.g. Ger, Sandomiersz, Gura Kalwarya, Kielce).  When the Cap’n and I joined a group from the program we’d done here in Israel, we found ourselves meeting up with the same girls’ school group every day or two as we all trudged our way through this dolorous chapter in Jewish history.

Parents in Israel are faced with a difficult decision as this trip looms.  Do we send our kids on it, and let them see with their own eyes the hatred that the rest of the world feels for Jews, and the outer limits of the violence the world has been capable of visiting on the Jews?  Do we allow our kids to confront the shock, horror, and raw emotion that such sights cause?  Do we send our kids, who are still so young and immature, on a trip to visit Death rather than take them skiing at a nice kosher resort in the Swiss Alps?

Or do we decide to send them, preparing them in advance by discussing anti-Semitism and other events in Jewish history that were motivated by similar hatred (though not on the industrial scale of the Shoah)?  We were once at the house of some friends, enjoying a Yom HaAtzma’ut barbeque, when the subject of the ma’apilim (illegal immigrants to British Mandatory Palestine, most of them refugees from the ovens of Europe) came up.  One of our hosts’ daughters asked, “But didn’t the world care about the Jews?  Didn’t they want to see them settled safely?”  Through Herculean effort, I didn’t gasp and splutter at her naiveté.  Clearly she hadn’t yet been on her school’s Tragical History Tour.

When the time comes, the Cap’n and I are agreed that our children should go.  It’s a fact that seeing those sights gives kids (and adults, as we discovered) a feeling of overwhelming anger—so much anger sometimes that we have no place to put it all.  But in time, the anger becomes more focused and gives us purpose.  The Cap’n said that especially since most Israeli kids go into the army when they get back, it is essential for them to know what they’re fighting against.

The world has changed so little.  A French diplomat can call Israel a “shitty little country” and know that he will not be reprimanded, nor even disagreed with.  A Swedish newspaper can print a blood libel against Israel and the world will not cry “foul.”  The president of Iran can turn up annually at the UN and make speeches calling for the murder of six MORE million Jews (i.e. the destruction of the entire Jewish State), and end his speech with people still in the room.  Violence and vandalism against Jews and Jewish property increase steadily around the world.

Hatred of Jews may never result in anything that looks just like the Shoah again, but it’s clear that that hatred hasn’t disappeared, nor the will to act on it lost.  If our children want to live as Jews in the world (and especially in Israel), they need to understand this.

Advertisement