Limmud is a Co-ed, experiential, 9-month study and Israel immersion program for the Southern Hemisphere. The program aims to develop 5 circles of “identity” including: Jewish, Zionist, Spiritual, Communal & Personal. Within this framework, participants spend time at Yeshiva/Midrasha, and experience Israel with a wide array of activities and educational modules, as well as a meaningful journey to Poland. Limmud culminates with a 3-month collaborative with our Mechina Olamit, together with Israelis, and participants from the Northern Hemisphere.
Shalom!
Limmud spent a meaningful Shabbat in Krakow, full of ruach and remembrance
after two fully packed and intense days in Poland:
Poland Day 3:
On Thursday we visited some graves of influential people before and during the Shoah. We visited the Rebbe of Kotzk and learned about some of his Chassidic teachings and his students' commitment to his way of life. We stopped on the side of the road and walked into what looked like the middle of nowhere only to see three massive mass graves. This shocked many of us as who would think there would be mass graves here in the middle of a forest. At the same time, Rabbi Raphy made us think about how something so evil can be present in a place of such beauty as the forest in Poland.
Poland Day 4:
Friday
The privilege that I feel to be the first one in my family to walk into the dark and bloody place of Auschwitz and walk out alive is something that I struggle to put into words.
As I walk through Auschwitz with my Israeli flag wrapping around me I feel a sense of safety. When I took it off the safety then that was a whole Jewish nation behind me was gone and I felt cold and lonely in this dark and morbid place that was the last place my family would enter. Rabbi Raphy says to us “wherever you scratch in Poland there are traces of Jewish blood”, because as much as there is Jewish blood in Poland each of those people whose blood has been spilled has a story, and each story is as important as the next. The only way that the Jews of today and the world of tomorrow will learn from the Holocaust is if we learn about six million as individual names not as numbers.
By Jeremy Azoulay
