This post contains multiple short stories and powerful images from this year’s journey. I’ll be adding new glimpses at the bottom.
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In this moment of collapse, chasm and change within Judaism and globally, we do this ancestral work to plant seeds for a new, liberatory, just and joyful world — even if that world is generations away.
We realize that we can’t do this big change work only from our own minds. We can and must lean on the wisdom and support of our ancestors to help guide us through this portal.
So we don’t go back to our ancestral lands simply to take snapshots to replicate the past in the present. That would not serve; we and the world have evolved. We go back to let the past — especially the parts of our past that have been lost, destroyed, or hidden — infuse, shape, and re-story us, and to let it inform how we move through the world today… rooted in old ways, yet innovating for the transforming world we find ourselves in now.
We do this work on behalf of our ancestors and in service of our descendents.
What follows are images and stories from our second 15-day pilgrimage across Poland this July.
You’ll see us remembering and honoring our ancestors and ancestral lands — not simply through history, traditional prayers and stone monuments (though we do some of that too), but through remembering and creating new stories, re-awakening Ashkenazi feminine traditions, speaking the language of our ancestors, harvesting medicinal plants, singing and praying through our tears, sprawling ourselves on the earth and draping ourselves around trees, baking challah in the former Jewish quarter of Lublin… and working to metabolize instead of weaponize the Jewish historical trauma we encountered.
For more information about the healing framework we’re innovating, check out Ancestral Recovery for Collective Liberation . Or read more about the larger framework of Radical Diasporism that this work is nested in.
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Glimpse from the Journey: Touching the Earth
One of the surprising experiences folks often have when arriving in Poland is their sense of connection with the land itself. For some, a part of them deep inside begins to relax. For others it’s a feeling of familiarity. For others, it’s a desire to feel closer, to lay on the ground, embrace a tree, immerse in a body of water.
The very first thing we do after breakfast on our first day is spend a few hours in an opening ceremony in the lush, green woods outside Krakow. People fly in over the two to three days previous, but this is when we all ground together and take in the reality of being on the lands of our ancestors. Note that I’m speaking more broadly to Central and Eastern European lands, as not all in our group had ancestors from Poland proper. This doesn’t seem to matter!
As we seat ourselves in a circle, we call in the support, wisdom, and blessings of our ancestors, we sing songs, take some solo quiet time with the trees and the earth, and finally get to connect in small groups with each other IN THE FLESH about what it feels like to finally be here. This is especially powerful after six months of inspiring, but entirely virtual, learning and connection.
I truly believe that we can do deeply impactful ancestral recovery work from our current homes.
AND — until you travel here, it’s hard to explain just how powerful it is to bring your body to this place, where our ancestors’ spirits are breathing through the trees, rocks, and rivers.
Glimpse from the Journey: Talking with the Dead at the Tarnow Cemetery ( feldmestn ritual)
There’s nothing like a beautiful, lush, overgrown graveyard. Vined with nettles, tree roots growing around matzevot (tombstones), wildflowers springing up through the cracks… Of course it’s bittersweet, like nearly everything in Poland. But once you realize that the dissonance just IS, you can really begin to fall in love with so much.
We chose the Tarnow Cemetery for our feldmestn ritual because of its numerous beautiful Yiddish and Hebrew inscribed matzevot and grandmother trees. Feldmestn is a nearly lost Ashkenazi women’s ritual that was practiced very commonly throughout Europe, likely for hundreds of years or more. There were even professional feldmesterins for hire.
Feldmestn is a way of communicating with one’s ancestors — specifically, praying for what you want… from blessings of health to money to partnership to peace and justice… as the ancestors are closer to God/Creator/Goddexx and therefore have more access, if not sway.
Measuring is thought to create a boundary between us and the spirit world for safe communication. It also creates a portal to the ancestors for easier connection. And… the thread is charged with the healing energy of your prayers and is then used to make neshomalicht , or soul candles, that used to light up the synagogues in the times before electricity (look out for our candle-making ceremony in the next Glimpse.)
During our six months of online preparation for this program, we were blessed to have Annie Gottfried Cohen teach us about these cemetery rituals of our feminine ancestors. But now we were here, in a cemetery in Poland, to DO this ancient practice together.
No one knows exactly what these rituals looked like, and Annie’s research shows there were probably as many versions as there were people who performed them. So we took some liberties, used our intuition, and measured graves as we prayed for ourselves and one another.
Joy, tears, messages, openings — we experienced it all as we rewove the threads of lost traditions, friendly broad-leafed maple trees standing witness.
Glimpse from the Journey: Rolling Our Prayers into Candles
We left our feldmestn (cemetery measuring) ritual loaded up with sacred wick, infused with our prayers, ready to roll it into neshomalicht — soul candles. The string from a feldmestn ritual is used as wick for candles dedicated to specific ancestors, or to living beings who need healing (the latter are called gezuntalicht ).
This was our task at the mind-blowingly beautiful Łańcut synagogue (pronounced Wine-SOOT, believe it or not). Not only is this place adorned with the most exquisite painted walls, animals alive with movement and color, detailed zodiac symbols and fully written out prayers in perfect Hebrew script — but the acoustics are off the hook.
We took in the vaulted ceilings, sang, and danced a full-bodied Horah around the room. It was not lost on us that in the orthodox synagogue’s heyday, only men sang in that hall. And here we were, with our range of gendered selves, trans, nonbinary and cis, belting out prayers from the bimah, unbound by mechitza. Part of our work here is to honor our heritage and past while we also update it — making room for all bodies and genders to sing, dance, and take up space in that room.
We settled down in a circle with sheets of beeswax and our ritual wick while spontaneous songs were offered, resonating through the building, our bodies and souls. It touched deep. Something about the space, the ritual, the song, the company, the intention of healing…
And the song I still can’t get out of my head… A gorgeous layering of two tunes that nearly brought us all to tears… Mo Washburn’s “I believe, I belong” meshed with Adam Gottlieb’s “Palestine Will Be Free.” Mashup by group member Yesh Salz 😭💚🙏🏼
Glimpse from the Journey: This is What We Mean by “Metabolizing Trauma”
The scale of Holocaust trauma is truly impossible to grasp and not something we can expect to fully heal, individually or as a group. The question becomes how do we face the pain? And what do we do with it?
According to Reb Tirzah Firestone, the possibility of healing trauma, individual and collective, comes from the *metabolization* of trauma, rather than compartmentalizing, repressing or dissociating from it — or at the worst, weaponizing it, as it is done everyday against Palestinian people in the name of Jewish safety.
A belief we hold is that the metabolization — instead of weaponization — of historical trauma can crack open our hearts, deepen our empathy, and strengthen our resolve to create a Judaism of Never Again for Anyone — instead of letting it reenforce eternal Jewish victimhood, fear, and defensive and violent attempts to control our safety.
So what can trauma metabolization look like? When we visit Holocaust sites like Majdanek, pictured here, we do it with great care, intention, and slowness. We invoke spiritual protection as we enter and ritual metabolization and cleansing before we leave.
Our tour through the site is a slow and meandering journey with a sensitive guide sharing the history, horrors, and personal stories of this place. We normalized wandering away from the group and the flow of facts and information when we needed to process differently.
When we reached the massive monument at the far end of the site, a giant mausoleum housing some of the ashes of the 80,000 people murdered at the site, part of our group sat waiting in the grassy area for the others where a spontaneous ritual arose.
As folks leaned on one another in the grass, bundled in their raincoats on a cool, drizzly day, we began to sing the songs and nigguns we’d been learning and carrying with us since early in the journey on our Zoom calls. As more people gathered, someone led us in shaking and releasing movements, there was a group sounding that morphed into a primal scream, and then more song and softness. Someone offered one of our neshomalicht , a soul candle that we had rolled a few days previously. The breeze created a need to guard the flame from going out, so we took turns huddling around the candle to keep it lit, holding one another’s hands around the flame, while folks on the outer circle sang, prayed, shook their bodies, and held one another. We created an altar at the flame, adding rocks we’d found, wildflowers, and cloves of garlic.
After about an hour, when the candle burned down to nothing, we felt complete. The energy had shifted. People were lighter, full of gratitude — even joyful. This intuitive multi-modal ceremony allowed us to move heavy, intense energy through us and metabolize it into something different.
We returned to our hotel rooms, long hot showers were had, and a nourishing meal. We woke up the next morning to sit in Council, ready at that point to debrief our experience with words. And then we were off to bake challah and bialys for Shabbos… 🍞🕯️🕯️🍷
Glimpse from the Journey: Knead to Laugh
After five days of cemetery measuring, soul-candle making, historical touring, concentration camp visiting, grief metabolizing, herbal medicine making, and an intensely powerful photographic archival theater of Jewish life in Lublin, we were ready for a release.
So we baked. And OH, the palpable joy of kneading dough. The laughter echoing around the room. The singing and stomping in rhythm with the old-school standing onion smasher, hakmesser in Yiddish, (see video). This was the somatic practice we needed most :)
For three generations now, a wonderful and welcoming family has owned a bakery that is housed inside the borders of what used to be the Jewish quarter of Lublin. They bake everything from scratch, have maintained many old baking traditions, and as with so many Jewish and Polish foodways, the histories are intertwined. For example, non-Jewish Poles eat chalka, which is similar to challah. And the delicious cebularz we made, similar to a bialy, and also known as onion board or pletzel , is a famous Lublin-specific Jewish baked good that is now made today by non-Jewish bakeries such as this one.
After snacking on wild-foraged bilberry pastries and fresh squeezed cherry juice served by our hosts (yes, it was berry season, and yes they are as good as they sound) and coffee of course, we packed our many loaves of funkily-braided 6-strand challahs into our bags and headed off to get ready for Shabbat.
And for a great video of our somatic onion chopping release dance, check out this post on Instagram .
Glimpse from the Journey: Glorious Lake Mikvah
A member of our group led a spontaneous mikvah on a gorgeous day at a lake outside Lublin on Shabbat. So special to do these ancient rituals here. Such gratitude for the water that cleanses us and supports us to metabolize and move through our experiences here.
More than one person said this place felt like their summer camp. The ecology of Poland is very similar to the midwest and east coast of Turtle Island.
Later in the evening we sang Yiddish songs around the campfire and roasted marshmallows. More on that soon.
