Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Tykocin

What a remarkable piece of serendipity!  Read on for another beautiful example of this being a very small Jewish world.  As Bob Wisnik said to me, if we had arrived ten minutes earlier or later none of this would have happened.

This morning we headed north from Bialystok to Tykocin, a small village dating back to the Middle Ages.  In 1543, under King Zygmunt II, Jews began to arrive.  They quickly became a large community whose presence defined Tykocin's character for the next four centuries.  In 1642 they built a magnificent wooden synagogue with a large central bima, The entire interior was beautifully painted.  Remarkably, it survived WW II, and is today considered the best preserved synagogue in all of Poland.

Pulling up to the synagogue, we came upon a large group of teen-age girls all wearing skirts, a few older women and a few men wearing kippot.  One of the men was explaining to the girls in Hebrew where they were, and that they would go inside and sing some songs.  We started to join them and were stopped by their Polish security guard, who said we would have to wait until the group left.  I approached one of the group leaders, and spoke to him in Hebrew, explaining who we were.  He asked if we were all Jewish, and I explained about the upcoming bar mitzvah in Zamosc.  Incredibly, they had been in Zamosc yesterday, and they had been told about the bar mitzvah.  They could hardly believe it was us!  Of course, they invited us to come in with them.

It turns out that the girls were all from one high school in the West Bank.  They had just graduated and were on a one-week heritage tour in Poland with their teachers before starting national service.  The girls themselves were from all over Israel, and, just like the three boys who were just tragically killed, they commuted from their communities to the school.  In fact, one of the teachers is a neighbor of the family of one of the poor young men.

Once inside the synagogue, the girls made a large circle around the central bima, linked arms and began to sing.  The four male teachers went up on the bima, and invited me to join them.  We put our hands on each other's shoulders and began to dance.  I called Jake to join us as well.  After several songs, one teacher explained to the girls that Jake had decided that rather than have a ceremony in New York, he had opted to become a bar mitzvah at his grandfather's synagogue in Zamosc.  They applauded and cheered.  Then he did a mi shebeirach for the bar mitzvah boy, and the girls threw chocolate gelt which they had quietly distributed during the singing!  Finally, they broke out in a rousing chorus of Siman Tov u'Mazal Tov, as the entire Wisnik family did the hora together on the bima.  The spontaneous joy that filled the room was simply overwhelming.  Tears flowed freely.

It's hard to describe the other emotions of the moment.  Here we were, Jews from New York and Israel in a glorious 375 year-old synagogue, the most beautiful building in Tykocin, singing and celebrating a life-cycle event that must have happened hundreds of times over the centuries on this very spot.  But if not for us, and other tourists who come here, there would be no Jews at all in Tykocin.  The community that lived here for half a millennium was wiped out in one day, August 25, 1941, when the Germans marched the town's 2000 Jews into the forest, shot them and buried them in mass graves.

The building survived, but the people who filled it with life did not.  This morning I was torn between grief for the past and joy in the moment.  Above it all, as I told the students when I thanked them, in spite of what happened here on one day 73 years ago, despite the loss of most of the Jews of Poland and the rest of Europe, our presence here today speaking Hebrew and celebrating reminds us that Am Yisrael Chai - the Jewish people still live.

3 comments:

  1. Alan and I visited this synagogue with my Israeli cousin Joseph. My paternal ancestors were from the neighboring town of Rajgrod. We expect my ancestors worshipped at this synagogue. The Jews of Rajgrod were deported to Treblinka in December 1942. It is an historic event you are participating in.

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    1. Sorry for the confusion. This is Ann Adenbaum.

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    2. Thanks Ann. It's very easy to start seeing the ghosts of our ancestors everywhere I look. And even if I can't put them to rest, I can look harder at the signs of Jewish life that I really do see everywhere. It's small, but it's growing.

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