Warsaw Jewish Cemetery - Cmentarz Żydowski

Friends, over the next several days I will be traveling through Poland accompanying my graduating senior class of 2022. As you might know, I teach at a Modern Orthodox Jewish High School in Los Angeles. I am joining them on their capstone high school experience: an in-depth engagement with Holocaust studies and education. Of course, one of the biggest personal challenges with such a trip is the attempt to make sense of what is arguably the greatest tragedy in human history. I am here with students and colleagues who are separated by only two or three generations from the people that perished here and from the places we will visit - and many (if not most) of my traveling companions are descendants of Holocaust survivors.

I’ve done my best to prepare in the only way I know how - asking tons of questions and reading reading reading. I found Saul Friedländer’s analysis of “redemptive antisemitism” in Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945, quite compelling. This is an abridged volume (800ish pages) combining two comprehensive histories, The Years of Persecution and the Years of Extermination, the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize. I had the honor to be one of Dr. Friedländer’s students years ago when I attended UCLA as an undergraduate. His wisdom and vast knowledge of this subject are unparalleled.

In addition, I grappled some of the historiographical debates that I will get more into later in this series. But for now suffice it to say that I do not think the reading prepared me emotionally, and I expect this to be among the biggest challenges I will face, as I visit the places and learn of the people who endured such profound human suffering.

The first day is now in the books, so to speak, and I can take a moment to reflect on our opening experiences: The Warsaw Jewish Cemetery - Cmentarz Żydowski. As I tell my students, we can learn so very much about a community from studying its cemeteries: what and whom they loved, their accomplishments, what they deemed important. In this case, we had a number of conversations about prewar Jewish life in Warsaw, as robust as it was diverse.

And we discussed memories. Cemeteries are not really for the dead, but rather for the living. It’s how we remember, memorialize, celebrate, commemorate. Many of the graves here are weathered or damaged; much of the grounds are overgrown and unkempt. A few of my students were struck with a painful reality: the families of most of the people buried here perished in the Holocaust. No one visits their graves. Some asked me - are the individuals thus forgotten?

This was not the easiest question to answer - and I have to admit…the staggering numbers are difficult to grasp intellectually. How to individualize a tragedy on this scale may be harder still.

I expect this to be a difficult trip for me as a scholar, a teacher, and a human being. And I am not sure I will have all the answers when the trip ends. But sometimes I think definitive answers are secondary - rather, the conversations are what is important.

At the end of the day our Rabbi - the head of our school - asked us what we were most exited about and what made us the most uneasy. To me it is the same thing: the conversations. I am not sure where they will lead - but I am looking forward to sharing them here.

With compliments,

Keith.