Poland Pilgrimage

by Talia Hirsch,     11^th grade,      NJ

The Sages of Lublin Yeshiva

We started off the day at the esteemed Sages of Lublin Yeshiva. The yeshiva was in existence from 1930-1940 and it was one of the most prestigious and competitive yeshivot in the world. Rabbi Meir Shapiro, the leader of the yeshiva, trained the elite there so they became teachers knowledgeable in the Torah and able to teach it well by learning personal skills. It was in Lublin because it was the center of Torah scholarship in Europe. Meir Shapiro had to raise a lot of money for the yeshiva. Money was used for all the students needs such as: room, board, studies, etc. because the students did not pay to go. Secular Jews donated a lot of money.

the beit midrash in the Lublin Yeshiva

The דף יומי (daf yomi)- one page of Talmud each day was created at the Lublin Yeshiva and is still used today. The method is to ensure everyone in the world is on the same page on the same day. It takes 7 1/2 years to complete the whole Babylonian Talmud using this method. To get into the yeshiva you had to memorize 400 pages of Talmud ahead of time and you were tested. You had to be a scholar before you got in. The yeshiva also included a library with 25,000 books and a model of the Beit Hamikdash. When Nazis came and took overtook it, they made the men put all the books outside and the Nazis had a book burning that lasted 3 days. Before we left we studied a page of Talmud from Tractate Ketuvot with Rabbi Sykes in the yeshiva, it was very interesting. 

Majdanek

Next we went to the concentration camp Majdanek. Death camps were in Poland because the largest population of Jews were in Poland and it is in the center of Europe. Poland’s flat land made it easy to lay down rail roads which were used to transport people easily to the camps.   Majdanek opened in the summer of 1941, it was originally for prisoners of war. The majority of people that came and that were murdered at the camp were actually Poles. The first Jews came in October 1941. It was also the first camp to be liberated in July 1944. The building to the right when you first walk in the camp was a sanitation building and also contained the first gas chamber.

barracks containing tens of thousands of shoes from prisoners at Majdanek

Then the buildings along the road were used for holding the possessions taken from the prisoners who entered. The Germans who ran the camp used Jewish tomb stones to pave the road. This was very hard to see because tomb stones are very sacred and using them as a road is repulsive. There is a statue with three eagles on top that represent the Third Reich. The prisoners were forced to salute the statue as they passed so the prisoners came up with a solution instead of saluting the Third Reich: the prisoners would dig holes under the statue and bury ashes of their family or friends and when the guards would make them salute they would be saluting their loved ones. This story was very meaningful and showed that the prisoners were still witty even through terrible circumstances.

fragment of a road the Nazis paved with Jewish tombstones

statue of eagles at Majdanek that prisoners secretly saluted their comrades

The crematorium building was split into seven rooms, all used to dismantle the bodies, search them, and then cremate them. The thing at the camp that really hit me the hardest was the huge mound of ashes of the prisoners, under a large cement dome. It was crazy to see.

Going to the yeshiva and the camp showed two very different sides of the Jewish people, from life to death.

crematoria

a memorial with an enormous pile of human ashes under a dome