In some of my work, I have been critical of March of the Living, a program for Jewish young adults that organizes travel in Poland and Israel around the time of the Holocaust Memorial Day (spent in Poland) and the Israeli Independence Day (celebrated in Jerusalem). I have questioned the message of trip, one in which groups tour all the death camps in Poland, march through Oswiecim en route from Auschwitz to Birkenau carrying Israeli flags, and arrive triumphantly in Jerusalem just as the holiday season is gearing up to celebrate the foundation of the State.
The surface implication of such activities is to draw a direct correlation between the events of the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Such an implication is problematic, in my view, because it seems to ignore the sixty-year Zionist project that preceded the Holocaust and laid much of the groundwork for the State of Israel. I have similar questions about the museum exhibit at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem), because it tells the story of the Holocaust, building up to the story of the founding of the State and the eruption of the incredible view of the city from Mount Herzl. I was talking to someone in Israel about this issue and he asked me, "But do you think there could have been Israel without the Holocaust?" I don't know the answer to that, but I think also there probably couldn't have been Israel without all the Zionist thought and plans and Congresses that took place in the early twentieth century. To leave that out of the story is a problem, in my opinion.
Having never participated in the March of the Living, I don't know the details of the material they cover with the students on their trips. I only know the things I have seen on the surface, students marching with flags in Poland, planting tiny flags at Birkenau, planting trees in Israel. I know that in Israeli collective memory, Holocaust victims are referred to as "martyrs for the State of Israel," a distinction that many victims would never have willingly embraced, many of them being ultra-religious and therefore anti-Zionist to begin with. I am wary of drawing these definite connections between the Holocaust and the founding of the Israel, as though the State of Israel were some kind of consolation prize for humanity's worst crime against humanity.
Of course there is a connection, though, and it is an emotional and powerful one. At the end of my summer in Oswiecim two years ago, a group of Israeli soldiers arrived at our museum as part of a program called Witnesses in Uniform. The museum and restored synagogue, usually empty or echoing with the sounds of a few guests looking around, was suddenly filled with more than 100 soldiers, speaking Hebrew, wearing kippot, the Israeli epaulet affixed to their shoulders with the name spelled out in English and Hebrew. After a summer concentrating on the decimation of the Polish Jewish population and the disappearance of Polish Jewish culture, to see the State of Israel walk through the door in the flesh and to hear Hebrew as a living and vibrant language was an incredibly powerful moment. Before I gave a short talk to the soldiers, we were all crowded together in the stairway while the room was sorted out. I touched the epaulet of one of the soldiers and traced the letters in Hebrew from right to left. He carefully unfastened it from his uniform and pressed it into my hand.
Please don't get me wrong; the situation in Israel is an incredibly complicated one, and I am no wholesale supporter of all tactics against the Palestinians or biblical purist when it comes to the Land of Israel. However, I do believe that there should be a Jewish state. I have to pause here, because I can't follow that up with a good explanation why. Standing there that night two years ago with that epaulet clutched in my sweaty hand, I didn't exactly know why, but I felt why. Maybe it's not much different now.
I started off talking about the March of the Living because I am taking this trip with the opposite trajectory, from Israel and the light and the holidays to the rain and cold of Poland. I know now that however much I may disagree with the underlying messages of the program, the Poland-to-Israel heuristic is a powerful one. Coming here after Israel has had a deadening effect, not least because of the weather, which is of course just a matter of chance. To go from Poland's Jewish shadows to Israel's bright Jewish reality must surely accomplish the desired effect of the March of the Living, problematic as it may be. When Tomek and Ola and I were at the flea market last Saturday, Tomek was scouring the tables for old hanukiot, the candelabras used in Hanukah celebrations. I told him, "I wish I had known you were collecting hanukiot, and I could have brought you some old ones from Israel." "No," he answered. "I am not looking for ones from Israel. I am looking for ones from the world that once was."
And that is what Judaism is here, in spite of all the efforts to revitalize Jewish places and culture in Poland. The disappearances are everywhere. Doorframes where mezuzot had been pried away by the Nazis are now preserved and displayed. Jewish cemeteries in ruins and crumbling-down synagogues are marked as such and memorialized. The Jewish Cultural Festival takes place every summer, and this year there was even a new rabbi in Krakow, bringing the national total to two rabbis. (An update: the new rabbi ended up leaving Krakow, so now there is only one rabbi for all of Poland. He serves communities in Warsaw, Lodz, and New York.) This in a country that was once the center of world Jewry, a country that before World War II was home to more than three million Jews, ten percent of the population. Now it is just the world that once was. It is hard to look out the window at the cold, heavy rain and not wish to be standing again under the sun of the world that is.
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