Micah in Israel 2010 in Logan Airport before we left

Listening to the Rabbi at the Warsaw Cemetery.

Micah in Israel has begun!  On Sunday 24 of us boarded the plane in Logan to begin our journey to Israel. We arrived in Poland on Monday morning and immediately began our trip through the country. We drove to a shtetl called Tikocyn to get a feeling for what Poland was like before the war.  The shtetl gave us an opportunity to learn more about how Jews would have lived before the war. Our tour guide explained to us what happened to all of the Jews after the Nazi’s captured the town and we walked through the forest located next to the shtetl.  Here we viewed a few different mass graves, taking the same path as the Jews had before they were killed. Next we drove back to Warsaw and spent some time learning about the Warsaw Ghetto and viewed parts of the actual area. We finished the day off with a Polish dinner and headed to the hotel for a good night’s rest after a long day of traveling and touring.

Memorial at the entrance to Majdanek.

Tuesday morning we started our day off at the Jewish Cemetery in Warsaw where our tour guide took us through and told us stories about many of the people buried there including many Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as well as famous Rabbis.  After the cemetery we got back on the bus and headed to Lublin to see our first concentration camp, Majdanek.  At Majdanek we walked around the camp and experienced firsthand what the camps actually looked like.  At times it was hard to completely comprehend what had actually occurred at the camp and understand exactly what the experiences had been for those who had been detained during the war.  Being at a concentration camp is something that you have to see to understand and even then it’s hard to completely understand what we saw. We ended our visit of the camp with a short ceremony to memorialize the lives lost. After leaving Majdanek we got back on the bus and drove a couple hours to Krakow for dinner and our hotel.  The synagogue where we ate dinner was the Lubavitch synagogue in Krakow and G Buonomo noticed that there were pictures of the Rebbe everywhere.  We are finishing our time in Poland visiting sites throughout Krakow and experienceing Aushwitz-Birkenau and will post more in the next few days.  

Amanda & Noah