News & logs
Notes, field updates and things worth sharing.
Glimpse: Biking through Shtetland
Toward the end of our journey, we got to ride bikes around the countryside of Bialowieza Village. The ride was part of a village tour led by Kasia, a non-Jewish memory activist who has studied the Jewish history of the area for many years. She knows more about the history of Bialowieza’s Jews than anyone — down to which homes families lived in — and built…
Glimpse: Border crisis in the primeval forest
At the end of our trip, we get deep time in Eastern Poland… home to hundreds of former shtetls and the Bialowieza forest, the last primeval forest of Europe. The forest, like the Yiddish culture of our past on these lands, extends well beyond these human-made, impermanent borders. During the Holocaust, it served as a harrowing refuge for Jews. Today it’s…
Glimpse from the Journey: Reb Pickle Helps Us Process Our Feelings
Toward the end of our journey, after spending four days in beautiful, forested, eastern Poland, also known as Yiddishland, we had a not-so-typical Variety Show in a retro hotel conference room. This culminating group experience is meant to help us digest our journey through creative expression. Participants sang songs and read poems they love or had written…
Glimpse from the Journey: Yiddish Song Night, Summer Camp Style
Lest you think we only cry and grieve on this journey, I’d like to share a magical evening we had on a lake outside Lublin. On Shabbos, we had a slow morning. Some of us joined a creative, emergent, song-filled Shabbos service led by our wonderful Spiritual Lead, Cyrise Schachter, on a private, shaded patio in Lublin’s old town. Then came brunch at the…
Glimpse from the Journey: “A man should concern himself more that he not injure others than that he…
Toward the end of our trip, we had the good fortune to visit & study Rabbi Aaron Tamares’ texts in his beautifully renovated shul in Milejczyce, Poland through the Hereland Collective, founded by artist-educators Julie Weitz and Danya Voskoboynik. A prescient pacifist and anti-Zionist active at the turn of the 20th century, Tamares teaches us that a central…
Glimpse from the Journey: Processing Plants into Peace
Here we are, happily using our hands to process and chop plants we harvested at the Plaszow Concentration Camp memorial site to make Agrimony tincture and St. John’s/Joan’s Wort oil with an ethnobotanist and a memory activist from Krakow. (If you missed the story behind why we were harvesting herbs at a former Holocaust site, please see the previous post)…
Glimpse from the Journey: Harvesting Medicinal Plants from a Concentration Camp
We walked slowly through the hills of Plaszow, a former concentration & forced labor camp turned vast park-like memorial, with two guides. One, a memory activist and director at @festivaltkrakow, a Jewish arts & activism org that’s worked with the site and the neighboring community for years to engage locals and mediate tensions around the commemoration of…
Glimpses from our Ancestral Journey to Poland
This post contains multiple short stories and powerful images from this year’s journey. I’ll be adding new glimpses at the bottom. *** 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…
Land Relationship Doesn’t Require Land Ownership
Dispelling the myth of Ashkenazi Jews as disconnected from the earth There’s a common assumption that because Jews were often prohibited from owning land in Europe and were forced into professions like merchants, moneylenders, and tailors, that we were disconnected from the earth. As if connection to the earth requires ownership of land. The reality is that…
Ancestral Recovery and Radical Diasporism: Beyond Dispersion to Solidarity
When I first traveled to Poland, I learned about the very intentional effort to transform the ‘weak ghetto Jew’ into the muscular, armed Israeli — pressuring our people to abandon 1000 years of Jewish life in Europe, including their language, for modern Hebrew. Yiddish and Yiddishkayt were suppressed and stigmatized in early Israel — theater groups were…