Warsaw – Tykocin – Lopuchowo – Treblinka – Warsaw

We had a very powerful day, and we will spend tomorrow in and around Warsaw taking in the last educational pieces of our week in Poland. This morning, we headed northeast out of Warsaw in the direction of Tykocin, known in Yiddish as Tiktin. Today, Tykocin is a backwater, having lost out to Bialystok when the train line went through the latter and skipped over the former – but a few hundred years ago the rabbis in Tiktin had the authority to not only decide Halachah for all of the Jews in a 150 mile radius, but they were empowered by the Polish and Lithuanian kings even to arrest and imprison members of the Jewish community if they felt it was called for! When we arrived, we drove straight to the Great Synagogue of Tykocin, an imposing 400 year old fortress synagogue that is beautifully painted inside and out. We davened Shacharit and heard Hava Katz’s senior drashah, which was all the more powerful because Tiktin is her family’s ancestral shtetl. We discussed shtetl life more widely, and as much as we celebrated the amazing history of this town and community, we could not avoid and in fact felt obligated to discuss the destruction of the community during the Shoah. As opposed to some of the factory-scale places of murder during the holocaust like Auschwitz, Tiktin fell victim to the much smaller scale EinsatzGruppen, the German mobile killing squads that followed the Germany army as they pushed East in the summer of 1941. The Jews of Tiktin were ordered to assemble in the marketplace, and from there they were marched into a nearby forest, murdered, and buried in three kivrei achim, mass graves. We walked through that marketplace in the falling snow and back to the shul, boarded our buses, and drove to the nearby Lopuchowo Forest. There we encountered a heavy, heavy silence as we visited the graves, and we answered that silence by raising our voices to sing as part of a student-led tekes – גם כי אלך בגיא צלמות, לא אירא רע, כי אתה עמדי. Even if walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear, because you are with me. From Lopuchowo we drove to the site of the Treblinka Death Camp. Nothing remains of the original camp, it having been disassembled by the Germans before their retreat, but we walked the grounds, took in the memorial that exists there today and paid tribute to the 900,000 Jews who were murdered there. Here too, we were led by classmates in a tekes, this time focused on personal family connections to Treblinka and hope – we concluded with the singing of HaTikvah. After finishing our time at Treblinka, we drove back to Warsaw for some free time at the mall next to our hotel, dinner, meetings in our subgroups, and then packing in anticipation of tomorrow. Looking forward to sharing a last update from Poland tomorrow. It has been an honor for me, Marc, Magan, and the madrichim to be here in Poland on this journey with your children.