Maddie and I ate dinner in the food court of the King of Prussia Mall tonight.  Maddie ordered a pasta dish in a pink sauce that was very creamy – it would have done a number on her lactose intolerant stomach.  Instead of eating it, she ordered a sandwich.  We decided to save it in and look for a homeless person to give it to.  We drove to Philly to see a show at the theater at St. Joes.  On the way there, there was a homeless woman in her 20s with her dog, asking for money near the highway exit.  I asked her if she was hungry, and she said that she was.  We gave her the pasta, and she was very appreciative.  I wished her luck, and I hope that she’s able to get herself off of the streets and somewhere safe.  I hope the kindness of two strangers resonated with her . . .

Yes, I already did a post on Hachnassat Orchim, when I welcomed my Tribe guests to my home for dinner.  This is a different focus of the same mitzvah – welcoming strangers.  Providing hospitality to strangers has its roots in biblical times, when Abraham opened his tent to three strangers.  In Pirke Avot 1:15 we are taught, “Let your house be opened wide and let the poor be members your household.”

From May 6 to May 15, we welcoming two teenagers from Petach Tikvah, Israel into our home.  May and Noy were our guests for the week, and though they arrived as strangers, they left as family.  Madelyn had the brunt of entertaining our guests, but we all banded together to cook meals, drive them to the mall, provide a comfortable space in our home and make them feel welcome.  I hope that we did our job!

(and it’s almost my  half birthday and I’m halfway done with my mitzvot!!)

Today is Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is observed as Israel’s day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany and its accessories, and for the Jewish Resistance in that period.  I commemorated this important day by participating in the March of the Living.

Fifteen thousand Jews from forty different countries made the trek from Auschwitz to Birkenau. As far as the eye could see, there were young people joined by survivors, draped in and defiantly waving Israeli flags, walking along the same railroad tracks that brought millions to their deaths. In the celebrated words of Polish-born Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, we were “praying with our feet.”

Our march, haunting and inspiring, culminated in the singing of Hatikvah on the site of the Birkenau concentration camp.  There were joyous moments – so many young people remembering the dead, thousands of Jews singing and holding hands, and a man from Korea repeating in Hebrew over and over, “I have no words.”  There were many heartbreaking moments – revisiting the selection platform where our accompanying survivor, Anneleise Nossbaum, said her last goodbyes to her favorite aunt, finding my relatives’ names in the huge Book of Remembrance, seeing the remnants of the Jews that the Nazi’s collected, and the raw personal testimony of Edward Mosberg, a 90-year-old Holocaust survivor wearing his striped uniform who, burning with rage, recounted the murder family.  The day alternated between sunny and beautiful, and then pouring rain – a perfect reflection of our emotions that day.

Going forward, as there are fewer survivors and fewer hear the stories of loss and pain from those who experienced it firsthand, it is imperative we think of ways to transmit the memory and lessons of the Holocaust in ways that will resonate for the next generations.  It’s our sacred duty and an absolute mitzvah to carry these stories forward — and bear witness for those who can’t.

Beginning the march

The Korean supporter

The other side of my memory plaque

Birkenau

My memory plaque on the train tracks

Edward Moser and is granddaughter

Anneliese, her daughter and granddaughter entering Birkenau

The path they walked to the gas chamber, entitled “Heaven Walk”

My yartzeit candle and stone

The mass grave

The train station

It says in the Torah that you shall not “place a stumbling block before the blind (Leviticus 19:14)  In Jewish tradition, the Kohanim are not allowed to have contact with the dead as to not become impure.  Historically, the purpose of marking graves is so that Kohanim should not become imbued with corpse impurity by inadvertently stepping or bending over a grave. This is everyone’s responsibility. The mitzvah is to raise a pile of rocks over the grave. Every person who walks by helps maintain the marker by replacing or adding rocks, so the marker is stable across time. Eventually someone thought of adding a big rock with the personal information of the deceased. A further idea proposed cementing the rocks together which made the whole marker much more solid. Today you have the common monument and headstone you see in cemeteries. Maintaining grave markers is considered a mitzvah and adding a rock is the way that mitzvah is done.

On June 10th 1942, my great aunts Elisabeth Betty Leopold (age 49 – my age!), Jetchen Leopold (age 57) and my great grandparents Freida Trief (age 59) and Karl Trief (age 54) were deported from Wiesbaden, Germany. The transport reached Lublin on June 13th, and from there headed to a death camp in the eastern part of Poland called Sobibor. It is widely assumed that the prisoners were gassed by carbon monoxide hours after their arrival and thrown into mass graves.

Today I visited those graves.  My ancestors had no funeral, no proper burial, no one to say Kaddish for them, no one to light a Yartzeit candle, no one to mourn their departure.  My visit to Sobibor allowed me to belatedly honor my relatives.  I had a guide and learned what I could about their final hours.  I said Kaddish, lit a candle and lay a stone on the monument marking their passing.  I cried on their mass grave.  I hope that I had some part in elevating and bringing peace to their souls.