MOL 2013: Day One

Hello Dallas,

To all worried parents, I am delighted to inform you that after flying across the Atlantic Ocean on a seemingly never ending flight, the Dallas delegation of March of the Living 2013 has arrived in the land where our culture once flourished, and has already begun to visit and learn from holy sites in Poland.

Despite the jet lag "epidemic," we have had the opportunity to- along with hundreds of peers from places such as Florida, Atlanta, and New Zealand- visit important historical cites in the city of Cracow. Battling cold temperatures, muddy terrains, and hungry stomachs, we first visited Plaszow. Operating between June, 1942, and January, 1945, this Nazi labor camp housed thousands of Jews and eventually became the place where many of them died at the hands of their Nazi oppressors. Aided by knowledge learned from Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, we learned about the atrocities suffered by the Jews there as well as the heroic and miraculous stories of those who survived thanks to their employment by Oscar Schindler.

From Plaszow we traveled by bus to have lunch at Placz Zgoda, or Ghetto Heroes Square, where Jewish residents of the Cracow Ghetto were "processed" for their "resettlement". The rest of our afternoon we walked around the area that used to be the ghetto and the area known as Kazimierz, where the majority of Cracow's Jewish population lived before being forced to move inside the ghetto. From an old shule to a remaining part of the ghetto wall, we learned about the rich and ancient times when Poland fostered the growth of Jewish academia as well as the tragic near-complete annihilation of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust.

As I write this, we are preparing for Shabbat which we will celebrate here in the hotel in Cracow with our new friends, so I will end with one last thought. Today, as we visited the grave of the Rama, Rabbi Tannenbaum taught us one of his father's (Rabbi Yisroel) main teachings: that is that we should live every day of our lives as if we had a king watching our every move. A prime example of this ideology was his own wife as she sought to help the needy to such extent that she compromised her own well-being in the process. Due to her compassion to those in need, Rabbi Yisroel built a shule in her honor, a shule that stands to this day.

From Cracow,

       Shabbat Shalom
Yosef Pressburger