Federation CEO Steve Rakitt is currently traveling on the Roots to Wings Mission.

After a restful Shabbat, the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington’s “Roots to Wings” mission continued today with visits to Beit Shemesh and Mateh Yehuda, our Partnership2Gether communities under the guidance of the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI).

We began with a visit to Ein Rafa, an Arab village in Mateh Yehuda, where we were met by 10 smiling Arab and Jewish girls who participate in the Peres Peace Center soccer program.  I was inspired by their commitment to learning about each other, the support they receive from their families and friends and the friendships they’ve created.  Living only minutes away from each other, this program is the only structured interaction they have and each girl recognizes its importance in building a new future for Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel.

We spent time with the professionals leading Mafteach, a program of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) which trains Haredi men to enter the workforce.  Their track record is impressive and is making a real impact for an increasing number of Haredi men who want to work, but don’t have the necessary educational background or skills.

Our group then divided into smaller teams and spread out to spend time with residents of the region for more in-depth conversations and visits.  I was with Stuart Kurlander and Margie Glancz and we were accompanied by Daniel Goldman, resident of Beit Shemesh, businessman and volunteer leader.  We spent time exploring the Haredi community and several innovative projects in the area.  Specifically, we met with…

1.    Shulamit an extraordinary woman who founded a social service organization called Uvneh.  Seeing the most difficult cases of child abuse, hunger and physical and mental disabilities, Shulamit and her team are relentless in creating a safe haven for those in the Haredi community who need help.  She’s a force to be reckoned with, as local rabbis have learned, and she has earned the support and respect of the Social Work Department of the Municipality.  Out of adversity – her father passed away when she was 5 and her mother raised 4 children, refusing help from anyone – Shulamit is a shining light and a rock of strength;

2.    NetSource, an information technology company whose employees are 98% Haredi women.  Providing employment opportunities for community members, with sensitivity toward religious needs, NetSource is a growing (now has 200 employees) resource within Bet Shemesh, offering a welcoming work environment for many;

3.    Rabbi Avraham Kopp, who is a force of nature.  He founded Ezrat Achim, offering aid and assistance to all residents of Beit Shemesh, excluding no one.  They offer an incredible range of services, including interest free loans,  rides to hospitals, help in organizing events and gatherings, aid to travelers stranded on the road and more.  Rabbi Kopp is Haredi, and insists that the organization help everyone.

We met Alior Babian from Beit Shemesh, one of two winners of the 50th International Bible Contest and a resident of Beit Shemesh.  His smile was exceeded only by his mother’s and Stuart Kurlander and I enjoyed extending the congratulations of the Washington area Jewish community to both.

Finally, we joined members of the Ethiopian community in a somber memorial service, remembering the 4,000 Ethiopians who did not survive that long trek across Sudan.  Efrat Mekonen, a mother of 5 and volunteer chair of the Ethiopian National Project Committee in Beit Shemesh, tearfully recalled losing her best friend, who drank contaminated water during the trip years ago. 

Throughout the day, we gained appreciation for the extraordinary and far-reaching impact of the annual campaign of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, which touches many of the programs we saw.  I also came away with a renewed understanding of the complexity of Haredi / non-Haredi relations and how many folks are working hard to create stronger relationships through dialogue and cooperation.  And finally, I shed a tear along with many others while being reminded of the enormous effort it took for Ethiopian Jews to leave everything behind and risk death to come to Israel.

There was no Israel for those who perished in the Holocaust.  We learned that all too well in Poland.  Citizens of Israel – Haredi, secular, religious or not, Ethiopian, European, Ashkenazi and Sephardi – are weaving a complex and delicate tapestry, trying hard to strengthen the fabric of Israeli society, sometimes pulling too hard on some of the threads.  As residents of the Disapora, we owe it to ourselves and our children to support Israel, helping to ensure her strength and vitality.  The discussion about how best to do so is an important one. 

Federation CEO Steve Rakitt is currently traveling on the Roots to Wings Mission in Poland and Israel.

I write this morning from Israel, after our last day in Poland -- a day of reflection about the past and hope for the future.

We had a sneak preview of the not-yet-opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a remarkable $100 million project funded by the Polish government, the city of Warsaw and private donors.  The building is magnificent and its aim is noble:  to teach about 1,000 years of Polish Jewish history – the life that was destroyed rather than the destruction itself. We had a private briefing by Curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and look forward to the Museum’s opening a year from now.

At the beginning of WWII, 370,000 Jews were in Warsaw, nearly 1/3 of the total population.  By April, 1941, more Jews were relocated by the Nazis to the Jewish quarter in Warsaw, creating a walled-off ghetto with 470,000 souls in a 2 square-mile area.  The food allotment by the Germans for the general population was approximately 2,000 calories a day; for the Jews, a mere 184 calories a day.  Starvation, disease and death were rampant, even before the dreaded Gross-Aktion of deportations to the Treblinka death camp, when hundreds of thousands were deported.

Warsaw was also the site of the most celebrated act of resistance by any group of civilians against the Nazis – the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  Against impossible odds, small bands of Jewish resistance fighters held off the Nazis for days and gave hope to all living under occupation.  The story is even more remarkable given the fact that each fighter was literally starving and armed with only small weapons smuggled into the ghetto.  Their courage inspired hope in others.

But the reality of the destruction of Warsaw’s Jews hit hard in a visit to Treblinka, a notorious death camp located in the middle of nowhere – and I mean nowhere – about 1 ½ hours from Warsaw.  The Nazis went to great lengths to hide their work.  Each day, up to six thousand Jews would be rounded up at Umshlagplatz, the Warsaw train station, put in cattle cars and taken overnight to Treblinka.  In just 1 year, nearly 900,000 Jews from Warsaw and elsewhere were murdered.

Treblinka is desolate – there is nothing left but a clearing in a forest.  There were no barracks to speak of since the sole purpose of the camp was to kill.  The victims are memorialized by 17,000 jagged rocks pointing at a heaven that abandoned them, representing 17,000 communities from which the victims came.  It was quiet, but not peaceful.  Shame hangs thickly in the forest, the shame of silence, complicity and evil.  It is the shame of humanity that I felt throughout our trip to Poland.

Thankfully, we ended our trip at dinner with young adults from the Polish Jewish community.  They are participating in a program called Minyanim – a partnership between the Jewish Agency for Israel, the DC Federation’s largest overseas beneficiary, and the NY Federation.  These wonderful young adults all went on Birthright Israel trips and are now in a leadership development program to further explore their Jewish heritage.  They are committed to rebuilding Jewish life in Poland, against challenging odds.  A young woman with whom I spoke said that she wanted to learn as much as possible since “it will be difficult to find a Jewish husband and I want my children to be Jewish, so it will be my responsibility.”

After an overnight flight, I am overjoyed to be in Eretz Israel.  From the past to the future, from the Gates of Hell to the Gates of Zion. 

Shabbat Shalom.

CEO Steve Rakitt is currently on the Roots to Wings Mission.

From life to death to life.

That was our day.  We began with a visit to the historic Yeshivat Chochmei Lublin, an imposing edifice built on the vision of Rabbi Meir Shapiro in 1930 in the town of Lublin.  It was a major center for Jewish education whose extraordinary 20,000 volume library was burned by the Nazis.  It was returned to the Jewish community of Lublin in 2003.

We then took a very short bus ride – just 10 minutes from Lublin town center – to the death camp of Majdanek.  The Nazis did not have time to destroy the barracks, gas chambers and crematoria before the Allies liberated the camp, so virtually everything remains intact.  The eerily familiar story unfolded here as well:  deportation, separation, work detail and death.  But at virtually every turn, the city of Lublin loomed large on the not-too-distant horizon.  My perception had been that the death camps were hidden deep in the countryside, but that view was proven wrong today.  Over 78,000 people were killed at Majdanek; 59,000 were Jews.  We talk about complicity, turning a blind eye and plausible deniability, but none of those phrases worked for me today.  Something evil was going on in the death camp of Majdanek – something very close to thousands of people living in Lublin. 

The questions raised on this trip far outnumber the answers given.  I’ve been wondering how I would have handled it all as a Jew in Poland.  Would I have sought to survive at all costs?  Resisted?  Run – if possible – to fight with the partisans?  None of us really know until put to the test, and none of us has the right to judge others in such a situation.  The less theoretical question, however, is whether we intervene when confronted with the wrongs of society.  Ten minutes or half a world away, what do we do?  That question deserves an answer each and every day.

While we were walking through the camp, we came across a group of teens from a local school.  They were studying literature and the impact of “historical fact” on poetry and writing.  We asked (in English) what the students’ perceptions were.  One girl said, “It’s horrible how they treated people like insects.”  Yes indeed.

We ended the day in Warsaw, meeting with Jewish young adults involved in the international Moishe House program.  Their enthusiasm and dedication to rebuilding Jewish life in Poland was infectious.  They are taking responsibility for creating innovative and engaging programming for their peers out of an apartment in Warsaw, made all the more amazing by the fact that most have just learned from their parents that they are Jewish!  We have two Moishe Houses in the DC area – in the District and in Montgomery County - and plans are underway to open a third in Northern Virginia. 

From vibrant life before the Shoah, to an enormous pile of ashes in the Majdanek memorial to a commitment to renew Jewish life in Poland.  It’s been a long day.

Reflections from Steven Rakitt, CEO

Today, I walked in hell.

Auschwitz, or more precisely, Birkenau, was the largest of the Nazi death camps.  Its size is mind-boggling, covering 250 acres – as far as the eye can see.  And as I walked the grounds in silence, I imagined that I could hear the victims’ prayers, pleas and screams.

Auschwitz has become the iconic representation of the Holocaust and its systematic process of degradation, dehumanization, separation, ghettoization, starvation, transport, deception and death.  But before it became “Auschwitz”, it was a small Polish town called Oswiecim, whose 8,000 Jewish residents were the majority of the 14,000 who lived there.  Relations between Jews and Gentiles were good and there were 20 synagogues.  Today, only one remains due to its use by the Nazis as an ammunition depot during the war.  Before the Holocaust, there was a vibrant life; before Auschwitz, there was a promising future.    

Then it all changed forever.

Birkenau was built to accommodate the Nazi’s insatiable desire to exterminate all 11 million European Jews.  Auschwitz is the name for a system of work and death camps that spread out over the countryside.  When the order was given, Birkenau was expanded from several barracks that were designed to hold 52 horses to over 300 barracks that held up to 500 prisoners – at its height – a total of 90,000 Jewish prisoners.  Its cold efficiency and sheer size is nothing like I’ve ever seen or experienced.  As Jews were transported from ghettos and towns throughout Europe, laden with suitcases for their anticipated stay, they were met with brutal strength and disarming terror.  The selection process, sparing only the able-bodied, resulted in nearly 75% of Jews being taken directly to the gas chamber. 

Today, I saw the remains of Birkenau, with its innumerable chimneys reaching for the sky, mute testimony to wooden barracks destroyed by the Nazis in the final days before the war ended.  But the impending Allied victory only served to speed up the slaughter, reaching an unspeakable level of 25,000 deaths per day in late 1944 and early 1945.

The victims – over 1.5 million in Auschwitz/Birkenau alone – were not nameless.  They are our family, our roots, our people snatched from the living and taken straight to the depths of humanity. 

There is an educational dictum that if you tell me I may remember, but if you show me, I’ll understand.  Today, I saw, but I still don’t understand.

Shortly before this trip, a colleague of mine came to my office.  She tearfully asked me a favor.  She lost members of her family – on both sides – in Auschwitz/Birkenau.  Her grandfather, who survived and moved to the United States, was especially fond of the ocean.  Each year, she told me, he would go to Florida and scour the beach for seashells.  Her beloved grandfather passed away last year and she asked me to take something with me on the trip.  It was a seashell, lovingly inscribed with her family names.  She also handed me a list of all 27 family members who were killed in Birkenau. 

Today, in their names, I gently placed the seashell on the shore of a pond near the remains of the crematorium, a pond that contains nameless ashes of untold victims.  Today, victims were lovingly remembered with Kaddish recited by our group and their names are etched in our collective memory forever.