Restoring a Polish Cemetery, Jewish Youth Reconnect with their Heritage

The time I spent in Poland with a group of American, Israeli, and Polish students was a memorable experience. Bound together by the thread of Judaism, we all came together for this special journey. Our American group of college students was sponsored by JDC; the Israeli group, sponsored by the World Union of Jewish Students (WUJS), was attending university and had completed their military service; and the Polish group, sponsored by the Polish Union of Jewish Students (PUSZ), ranged in age and experience from high school students to young adults.

We spent the first few days together touring Krakow – one of the only Polish cities left intact after the Second World War and the fall of Communism. Among other sites, we visited the city's only active synagogue, Remu, in the district of Kazimierz. However, it was not until we reached Czchów – the town where we stayed while restoring the cemetery – that our group successfully began a dialogue about our respective sense of Jewish identity.

During the trip, I recorded the following entry in my personal journal: "It is a phenomenon that Poles, Americans, and Israelis – who are all Jewish – are spending this time together and are trying desperately to learn about each other. In a lot of ways, the Poles are struggling to shed light on the situation of their lives." I attribute the most fascinating aspect of our discourse to the Polish participants. Many of these youth discovered their Jewish heritage in their early teens. Baptized and having grown up Catholic, many learned they were Jewish from a grandparent, near his or her death, who had kept the truth of his/her identity a secret. For these young Jews, it is a constant struggle to maintain the connection with the local Jewish community, let alone the global community. Their numbers remain a miniscule percentage of the entire Polish population (only a few thousand people in Poland actively recognize their Judaism), and there are few places in which they can safely nurture their Jewish identities. In addition, they are often challenged by anti-Semitism.

Ultimately, our group was able to unite and support each other despite our vast differences in background. We spent five days working together to clean and rebuild an overgrown, neglected, 19th Century Jewish cemetery in the city of Brzesko. Each day, we cleared the plots of empty beer cans and trash items, sheared bushes, hauled debris, painted over graffiti, and raised fallen matzevot (tombstones). For me, helping to lift each matzevah was a beautiful and simple way to revive the memory of an ancestor who had lived in this small community two centuries earlier. Working in the cemetery, there was no thought or concern of our differences; we were young Jews cooperating to breathe life into the memory of our forbearers.

As a group we visited the death and concentration camps of Auschwitz in the city of Oswiecim. This experience was beyond powerful and emotional. We had the unique opportunity of being guided through the camp by Heinrich Mandelbaum, an 82-year-old survivor of Auschwitz. During his time in Auschwitz, Mandelbaum worked as a zunderkommander, a Jew whose task it was to burn the bodies of his fellow Jews in the crematoria. A humorous and friendly man with a warm disposition, Mandelbaum recollected with precision the operations of the camp. He showed and described to us the process that Jews underwent to meet their death: enter en masse in trains, strip off clothes and hang them on hooks outside the ‘showers’, be gassed in twenty minutes, shaved of all body hair, appropriated of gold teeth, and charred in crematoria. We sat on the broken bricks of the crematoria as we listened to the translation of Mandelbaum’s words.

We spent our final days together touring Warsaw, Poland’s capital city, which was one of the most pivotal centers of world Judaism before the war. As our trip neared its end, the Poles conveyed to us how important this experience had been for them, how much they had enjoyed getting to know us. For some of them, the experience of these two weeks was their only opportunity to connect with other Jews. However, while they may have limited contact with other Jews, I think it is important to reassert that they hold fast to their Jewish identity in a way that is admirable. During this time, we had celebrated our Jewish identity together. We had established a bond with them that substantiated a relationship that would not weaken with time or distance.

This is an experience that will stay with me. The people that I met in Poland have occupied a place in my heart that is theirs alone. They are my heroes, and they cannot be forgotten. This project is fundamentally valuable; we acknowledged death and we revived life. We are all survivors; we are responsible for each other; we are a family.