May 9, 2025
Before I begin my Shabbat email message, I want to let you know that I have been notified several times this week that our members have received emails using my name, connected to a strange email address, asking for help with special projects. If someone responded to those initial emails, the follow-up was a request for gift cards in very high amounts. Please know that I would never ask for something like that via email. If the email seems weird, it probably is!
As first-year students at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, Debra and I worked together with our beloved teacher, Paul Liptz, to plan a trip to Poland for our classmates. While I do not quite recall how the idea came up, we convinced Paul to lead us on this journey through Jewish history during Passover. We walked the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto, visited the platform where the Kindertransport left the city, and learned about Janusz Korczak (pronounced Ya-nis Kor-jack) and Mordecai Anielewicz. We met the modern-day Reform Jewish community called Beit Warszawa. We also visited the Treblinka Death Camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the city of Krakow.
Thinking back to that trip in April of 2002, two moments stand out. First, we visited a town called Jedwabne, whose story is told in the book Neighbors. The town was divided relatively evenly between its Jewish and non-Jewish population. They lived together; the children prayed together. Prior to 1941, it was a beautiful place to coexist. However, in July of 1941, the non-Jewish neighbors turned on their friends. They gathered them in a barn and burned it. There were 1,600 Jews and 1,600 non-Jews living in the town. Only seven of the Jews survived. I will never forget the spot where the barn stood, which now bears a plaque. As you read the story, you learn that the descendants of the non-Jews live in denial of their ancestors’ actions. The story teaches us that it was not the Nazis who perpetrated this evil, but people who were friends and neighbors. It is a painfully dark story in Holocaust history that helps us understand how ordinary people were caught up in evil.
I also remember walking through Birkenau, beholding the barracks, entering the gas chamber, and then reaching the crematorium at the back of the camp. It is impossible to describe what it is like to walk through a gas chamber where more than a million of our Jewish family members were murdered. I recall feeling a hollowness whose depth reached the center of the earth. It was as if my soul became disjoined from my body. I felt so empty, unable to connect to anything. I remember sitting by the crematoria, and our teacher, Paul Liptz, picked up a small piece of human bone to show us. I asked to hold it; to this day, I cannot explain why. Perhaps I was hoping I’d cry. With the bone in my hand, I still felt empty. But I wondered who that person was, and how I would never know their story. For years I thought something was wrong with me—why wasn’t I in tears? Why couldn’t I feel anything? Years later I realized nothing was wrong with me. Sadness is not the only emotion one can feel in a place of unimaginable death. One can feel numb, hollow, empty.
Fast forward to May of 2024—I arrived in post-October 7th Israel with our group from Beth Tikvah. We had traveled to the Nova site—another place of death and evil. It is a park, a field, that was set up for a music festival. I felt hollow inside, but I recognized the feeling. I had only felt it once before. It was the same one I had felt 22 years earlier inside the gates of Auschwitz.
History echoes within our minds, stirring emotions that echo within our souls.
As a people, we return to the places of death and destruction because we are storytellers. We stand in those fields, and in the barracks, to bear witness and to emphatically say: we are still here.
Tonight, at Shabbat services, you will hear from Michelle Lee and Ben Reinicke, who recently returned from the March of the Living. Together with Jews from around the world, Holocaust survivors, and October 7th survivors, they marched on Yom HaShoah from Auschwitz. They visited many of the same places I did. Michelle and Ben will graduate high school in only a few short weeks, and they will carry this experience with them as they go off to college. Join us this evening to hear their insights.
In many ways, the March of the Living captures the essence of Jewish tradition. In each generation, we tell the story of our people. Whether we journey to Spain to learn about pre-expulsion Jewish life, or we visit Eastern Europe and immerse ourselves in a history that emerges through the ashes—wherever our people have traveled, the stories of sadness and reemergence follow us.
Another story is emerging this week. The Eurovision Song Contest is once again upon us. If you have not yet listened to Israel’s submission by Yuval Raphael, called New Day Will Rise, it is a must. Yuval Raphael is a Nova survivor. It is a powerful song that blends English, French, and Hebrew and is built on the story of the aftermath of October 7th, which echoes the story of our people.
Whether we listen to Michelle and Ben’s reflections tonight or Raphael’s beautiful song, we will rise, we will dance again, we will continue to tell the stories—because that is what we do as Jewish people!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Rick Kellner