Szydlow & Dzialoszyce

The Talmud refers to Rosh HaShanah not as two days but as one, 48 hour, very long day. That is what ‘today’ has felt like. Because of our flights and travels, it feels like we woke up in New York (and NJ, and CT) in the morning, and are now going to sleep in Krakow at night, at the end of one very, very long day. But a great day.After driving south from Warsaw, we made our first stop in the small, medieval walled city of Szydlow. Here we learned about how and why Jews came to Poland some 700 years ago, and more importantly why they stayed, and how they prospered.We visited Szydlow’s imposing city gate and stopped into the surviving synagogue, built in the fortress style nearly 500 years ago. As in so many towns and cities across Poland, there are no Jews in Szydlow today, and very few Jewish visitors make it this far into the countryside, so it was a privilege to daven Mincha and fill the space with the sounds of Tefilah, however briefly.From Szydlow we continued on to Dzialoszyce. Here too we found a city that was once three quarters Jewish yet no longer has a Jewish population – a quiet echo of the Shoah nearly three generations later. Most importantly for us, Dzialoszyce is where Caleb Zelman’s grandfather grew up and it was to here that he returned after somehow surviving the Shoah and being liberated by the Red Army. He found his community gone and his synagogue a shell of its former self, the roof destroyed, and so it stands today. It was here that Caleb chose to deliver his Senior Drashah, to honor his grandfather’s survival, as snow slowly fell within the shul. To say it was moving is an understatement.From Dzialoszyce we finished our drive to Krakow, enjoying a catered dinner and brief orientation with Marc in a rented room at Kraków’s Galicia Museum, before checking in to our hotel.