Lublin – Majdanek – Otwock – Warsaw

This evening we reached Warsaw and our last hotel in Poland, following a less intense but still impactful day. We started our morning with wakeup, breakfast, and making lunches at our hotel in Lublin before a short drive to Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin. At one point, this yeshiva was considered one of the foremost, if not the foremost yeshiva in Poland, if not the world. Founded by Rabbi Meir Shapiro, the yeshiva was very forward thinking for its time, offering students not only advanced level Talmud and other studies, but also a dormitory, meals, and other essentials that allowed them to focus on their learning. It was also here in Lublin that Rabbi Shapiro proposed the idea that Jews around the world could all learn one page of Talmud a day, every day, in a daily cycle that came to be known as Daf Yomi.

The Nazis shut down the yeshiva when they took over Poland during the Shoah, and they used the building for their own purposes, but today the building has been returned to the Jewish community and restored, and we used its Beit Midrash to daven Shacharit, and to learn a bit of today’s Daf Yomi. It was a cool feeling to know that the very words we were studying were being studied by tens if not hundreds of thousands of other Jews around the world.

From the yeshiva we took another short drive within Lublin, this time to the site of the Majdanek Death and Concentration Camp on the city’s outskirts. Here we used survivor testimony to walk through and better understand the camp’s selection process, actual showers, nearby gas, chambers, barracks, crematorium, and the thousands upon thousands of shoes found when the camp was liberated – in many ways, the last remnants of the Jews and others who perished there and in Majdanek’s sub camps. We closed our time with a poignant tekes, following a visit that was slightly shorter than it might otherwise have been, on account of the extreme cold, but in no way less intense.

From Majdanek we drove two hours north to Otwock, a small city just outside of Warsaw. Building on a connection that was forged by my wife Lisa’s grandmother who was born and hidden there, our senior classes have visited Otwock annually for over a decade to meet with local high school students from the city, which is always a hit with the students. This year’s mifgash was no different, as our students had the opportunity to make new connections, find all that they had in common with the local students they met, while also celebrating their differences. After a couple of hours we bid the Otwock students farewell to head into Warsaw for a little bit of free time in Warsaw’s Old Town Square, followed by dinner, checking into rooms, and some downtime to rest and settle in.

Tomorrow will be our last full day in Poland, and the students have expressed both gratitude to be having the experiences they are having, and also their excitement about traveling to Israel in just two days.