[by Cantor David Lipp]
I never really thought I’d want to go to Poland.
But there I was, walking through the Warsaw Jewish cemetery, one of the only locations in that city that hadn’t been flattened during World War II by the Nazis; strolling through Krakow during its annual Jewish culture festival, the largest such gathering in Europe in a city with a Jewish population of around 200 (the JCC is kept alive by the city’s Catholic residents); walking through righteous gentile Oskar Schindler’s factory; or leading the Torah service in a courtyard between the barracks of Auschwitz just 50 feet from the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
Unlike most teen trips to Poland and Israel, my exposure to over one thousand years of Jewish life in Poland was far more extensive than my endurance of the intense death toll inflicted upon us in less than a decade of the 20th century.
Whether or not you followed my Facebook journey or heard my reflections last Rosh HaShanah or read about them in the Community paper or AJ’s Messenger last year, there will be another opportunity to see these experiences from a more professional perspective.
As we traveled, a documentary film crew was with us, taking down a record that would last perhaps even longer than my Facebook posts and photographs.
On Tuesday evening September 21, at 7 p.m. the premiere of 100 Voices: A Journey Home will be shown on roughly 500 screens nationwide. In Louisville, that will include Stonybrook and Tinseltown. To buy tickets at Tinseltown, you can go to http://www.fathomevents.com/originalprograms/event/100voices.aspx and enter your zip code; or, for Stonybrook, where I will most likely be watching, go to https://www.movietickets.com/purchase.asp?perf_id=615523627.
I don’t guarantee you’ll see more than 5 seconds of me in the film, but I hope you’ll join me to see just a small but professionally edited version of what I saw and felt.
L’shanah Tovah Tikateivu.