The Saddest Day in Poland's Recent History

We woke up, got dressed, packed our bags for the day and then went to eat breakfast like a normal day. For breakfast I ate dry cereal and put the weirdest sugar on it to try to make it taste better. However, that "sugar" tasted much more like salt to me. Anyways, things were normal until Sherrie came in to deliver a message to us. She explained that the Polish president died about 20 minutes ago in a Plane crash. We were reassured to hear that it was only mechanical problems and nothing terrorist related. However, we then though. While it didn't affect us at all, it was as if Obama died. It was Poland's assassination of Kennedy. Since today was Shabbat, it was a much more relaxed and down day with less structured time. Because of that we were able to see some of the pain in the country.

We did a lot walking today because it was Shabbat. We left the hotel after breakfast and made our way to Kazimeirz again. It was about an hour walk in the cold weather but at least it wasn't raining yet. When we got their we stood at the entrance alley to the Alta Shul (that's the temple I discussed in the last blog as the oldest shul in Poland... I may have spelt it wrong, sorry). Anyways, we all stood there as a community and worked together to conduct a service. It was really cool to stand together as a BBYO family in an area that 70 years ago was the center of Jewish Life in Poland. To hear 100 Jewish teens together as one praying was a very cool experience to show the strength of us as Jewish people. At the conclusion of the service I used my handy BlackBerry to find the parsha and shared it with everyone. Interestingly enough, this week's parsha discussed purity and impurity through kashrut and the mikvah. I found it interesting that we had this parsha and shared it at the location Kazamirz. On our tour around the square yesterday, Ellen shared a story with us of a mikvah which was about 500 feet behind where we had our service. She told us that 70 years ago when the Nazis started their occupation of Poland, they walked into the mikvah where, I believe it was, 20 girls were bathing. The Germans took the girls clothes and said they would be back the next day to have their way with them. When the Nazis returned, the girls had prepared a poison and killed themselves to avoid their fate. At the end our service, like my usual self, I was able to start a song session. Our group sang and chanted in joy for celebrating Shabbat together. However, during our song session we were stopped. A man came up to us and asked "how can you sing like this now when our president died 3 hours ago?". This question made me think. Was the proper reply "how can you live here when my ancestors were shot in this awful country simply for being Jewish?" or was it just "okay sorry". Well we did reply with sorry and stopped our joy but it wasn't happily that we stopped.

After our service, we had some special visitors from BBYO UK. We were able to meet with them and ask them questions about BBYO there. They were actually recent graduates from high school who attend university and are active in BBYO by them and volunteer. The reason they were in poland was a trip to see the past present and future of Eastern European Jews.

We had a little program and then went to a very entertaining lunch at the temple we attended services at last night. Well the food was nothing I would eat, except the fruit which was good. I'm getting a grasp on the concept of not looking forward to meal time. Nonetheless, this was when the fun began. There were 4 other delegations in the temple with us eating. One group of Australians, one of Israeli girls, one from a hebrew day school and one from Boca Raton, FL. The fun began as the Israelis were singing and dancing. The Australians felt the need to join in by chanting "Ausie, Ausie, Ausie. Oy, Oy, Oy". As typical Americans, my delegation and the Floridians joined in chanting "USA! USA!". The fun did not end then, however, we continued singing songs with everyone in the room; hebrew songs, english songs, whatever we could think of. I was the only BBYOer who was outgoing enough to go on the bima in the middle and sing and make a fool of myself. There were a bunch of Boca people on the bima too so at least I wasn't alone. We really made a great time out of this and I met some cool new people.

When we had to leave lunch we had a long walk ahead of us in the cold and rainy Polish streets. Well the weather was gross, but about an hour later we arrived at a market in Poland. It was a huge public square with stores and restaurants all on the outskirts and a temple or palace or something of significance in the center. We had a couples hours of free time here so a group of friends and I wandered away from the square and found a mall about a mile away. It was very Americanized to my surprise. With stores like Nike, Sephora, H&M and the Apple store I almost forgot I was in Poland. We also made a stop at a McDonalds in the mall. All I had was ice cream and french fries. They all tasted the same, but, the fries were interestingly waffle fries as opposed to the traditional Mickey Dee's fries. Well we found our way back to the square to meet with our group and also saw a lot of the other delegations there. I was very excited to see a kid from Connecticut, Brian, who I met in the airport who is going to Northeastern with me next year. I also met up again with the girl from Boca, Bianca, who was singing with me at lunch. Meeting all of these people, all of these Jewish people, from around the world all in Poland for the same thing is so far one of the best parts of our experience. We started walking back towards our hotel and all of a sudden the sky opened up with hail. I have thought I saw hail before, but I guess that was just frozen rain. It looked as if Dip-and-Dots were falling from the sky. It was a long wet cold walk back but we eventually got to our hotel but we made it.

We were given a little free time in the hotel to hang out and then it was dinner time. Dinner was fried chicken which was decent even though the water was not. I must say, the food so far is not really as awful as I had expected. But the water I was talking about, it tasted like sewer water so I passed on drinking that. Anyways we finished our meal and conducted a small havdallah service and split into bus groups for a little debriefing thus far. We preped for tomorrow, which is Auschwitz and Birkenau. Its going to be a very heavy day that I'm sure will start to get to my inner emotions.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry