This year, when it came time for my son, the youngest of 12
children, to register for the class trip for Poland, I was ready. I sat Asher
down for a talk and explained that he wasn’t going, that even if we had the
money for such a trip, even if the school were to give him a full scholarship,
he wasn’t going. I wasn’t going to allow my son to become a source of income
for a country of antisemites.
And that was that.
Asher understood. More than that, he agreed. At 17, he is
politically “woke.” He gets it.
This was before the whole business with Poland’s new
legislation became big news. I didn’t need Poland to pass a law to understand which
end was up. They don’t want us to connect Poland with the Holocaust? So fine,
let us not send our children there to see the remnants of Auschwitz and the
Warsaw Ghetto.
So what if the Holocaust couldn’t have happened without
Germany, without the Nazis?
Does that whitewash the long history of Polish Jew hatred,
the pogroms?
Does it make Poland pure and innocent compared to
Bulgaria
and Denmark, that did so much to help the Jews?
So what if Poles were killed, too. This too, does not erase
the antisemitism that Poles imbibe with their mothers’ milk.
Moreover, why, of all countries, should the Jewish State be propping
up Poland’s economy with these trips that have become a rite of passage for
Israeli high school students? We’re talking some
30,000
children, spending at the very least, a few thousand shekels each for this “privilege.”
To my mind, this is one thing we can do:
not support people who hate us. Just as
we shouldn’t be using
Israeli
tax money to help the PA pay stipends to terrorists who have spilled Jewish
blood.
What of the people who say the experience of visiting Poland
is moving, and a good way to teach the Holocaust?
I say hogwash. I never traveled there and I have an acute
understanding of the Holocaust and so do my children. In fact, I’d say that
boycotting the place is every bit as powerful a teacher as going there.
Which is why I was raised to check labels, to not buy items
from Germany or Spain or from companies that are known to be owned by antisemites.
I was proud to express my heritage in this manner. Always was. Even from a
young age.
We are lucky enough to have survivors still among us. Let us
bring them into the schools to give testimony to our Israeli children. Let us
teach the children about the horrors through books and museums. It was enough
for me, and it is enough for them.
A friend very involved in Holocaust education told me that
my attitude only reinforces the antisemitic trope that Jews turn everything
into a matter of money. My response? Do I really care if by refusing to spend
money in their country, I look “Jewy” to the Poles??
I couldn’t care less.
Let me tell you a little story: some years ago, I studied my
family tree. Politics were off-topic for all the genealogy forums so I started
a little yahoo group for this purpose, for people who wanted to speak about
Lithuanian politics, in particular as they pertain to the Jewish people. We
weren’t a huge group but we had some really interesting members, for instance, the
late
Prof. Dov
Levin, who was a partisan in Kaunas (Kovno) during the war, and who wrote
hundreds of articles and at least 16 books on the subject of the Holocaust.
At the same time, I remained active in various genealogy groups,
including one for those researching my ancestral shtetl of Wasiliski
(Vashilishok), Belarus, in what used to be Lithuania. Our Vashilishok group was
approached to clean up the centuries’ old cemetery, which was in a deplorable
condition. It wouldn’t cost very much, we were told, since the locals could be
hired dirt cheap to do the job. It would take a few weeks at most to get it
done.
 |
| My maternal paternal great grandfather Haiman Kopelman in Egypt in 1914. He was born in Wasiliski Belarus. |
One of our group was going out there anyway for a roots
trip, so he took a look and reported back to us. It seems the locals had plowed
under the Jewish cemetery, claiming they were preparing to build a strip mall
there. But years had gone by, and nothing had been built. Instead, the
residents were grazing their cattle in this spot.
Our landsman looked, but could not find a single legible
fragment of stone, so thorough had been the destruction of our ancestors’ final
resting place, now a place for cows to eat and crap.
We were essentially being asked to build a fence around the
area, using local labor, to keep the cattle out, and to put up a sign marking
the site as a Jewish cemetery.
As we discussed this issue in our forum, I found myself
really not wanting to do this thing. I knew that more Lithuanian Jews had been
murdered by Lithuanians than Nazis during the war. Why would I want to support
their descendants? Not to mention, I’d seen recent photos of what used to be
the Jewish matzoh factory and was now
a school. Covered with antisemitic graffiti.
Nothing had changed.
I sought counsel from a local rabbi on behalf of our group.
The rabbi saw nothing wrong with fencing off the cemetery. Nor did he find it
to be something we must do. The ball was back in our court.
I was going to see Prof. Levin in his Jerusalem home on a
different matter. I figured I might as well ask him what he thought. Prof. Levin’s entire family had been murdered in the
Holocaust, including his twin sister. He was from the same country as my
ancestors, and like me, had made Aliyah. I figured that if anyone could give us
an informed opinion, a response touched with the pain of having lived through
the Holocaust, it would be Prof. Levin.
I put my question to him. Prof. Levin said (with some vehemence),
“Your ancestors would not want you to spend a single shekel on restoring that cemetery! Save your money and spend it in
Israel on a suitable project, where it helps the Jewish people. This is what
your ancestors would want you to do.”
I felt relieved and comforted to hear Prof. Levin say this.
I knew that our collective conscience could now rest easy not doing this thing.
We didn’t have to do it. Moreover, we should NOT do it.
We all of us contributed, instead, to a local project that
spoke to us.
And that was the last of that subject.
Now you should know that a lot of pressure was brought to
bear on us by the local Belarussian Jewish community to do this thing. But we
said no.
And that is as it should be.
The trips to Poland by Israeli high school students must
stop. Instead, let us invest our money in their education here in Israel. Because
our ancestors would not have wanted us to be sending our youth to Poland. They
would want us to be building our
own
country, the Jewish State, with all our might and resources.
One more small story: back in the 1970’s, it was the fad for
Jews to bring blue jeans and
matzoh
to the Jews of Russia. The refuseniks, in dire straits, could sell the jeans on
the black market and have money to live on. The
matzoh was for them to eat on Pesach, something unobtainable in
that black hole of repression. One couple came back from Russia to tell my
youth group about their trip, how they knew their hotel room had been bugged,
and how dangerous it had been.
I told my late great uncle, Morris A. Paul, all about it. Uncle
Morris was president of the Pittsburgh ZOA for years on end, honorary vice
president of the national Executive Committee of the ZOA, and on the national
budget and finance committee of the ZOA. He also served on the national Executive
Board of State of Israel Bonds. Hearing about this couple’s trip to Russia,
Uncle Morris commented, “I don’t know why anyone would go to Russia. I was glad to
leave.”
Uncle Morris sent all my cousins to Israel for their 16th
summers. He knew where he wanted to put his consumer dollars. Right in the
hands of the State of Israel.
Morris A. Paul, or “Map” as he liked to be called, would never
have financed a high school student’s trip to Poland, and he sure as shooting
would have been downright irritated
to hear about Israeli high school students traipsing off to Auschwitz.
This is something our children do not need. And it is
something we should not do.
We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please
donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.
Saturday, March 10, 2018
Elder of Ziyon
![By Dnalor 01 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 at (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/at/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5l6FJylNMkwAbvz61MHNxiiMVN90svkSC5yANLsG_e9iHv-4FshfJy58wlnUX1BiU9z2aEnIjGVDq87YJkYmTGwtuNM6bY1hr_H1RXcMoElMOFcS1w6L9C_gpuixRoCafyDLhXw/s1600/Auschwitz-Birkenau%252C_Bahngleise_der_Entladerampe%252C_Blumen_zum_Gedenken.jpg)
