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 Jewish restaurant (slightly kitschy, 100% delicious, with everything from chopped liver to borscht to matzah ball soup).
After some free time, we hopped on the bus to Zemborzycki Lake, about 15 minutes from town. After a spontaneous mikvah on a gorgeous late afternoon (I posted about that earlier), we ate dinner and gathered around the fire.
We were blessed to spend the evening with Yuri Vedenyapin, a Yiddish singer, songwriter, and storyteller based in Lublin who embodies the spirit of the old country and our ancestors in the way he shares his passion. He taught us songs like “Bulbes,” about our Jewish ancestors who ate potatoes every day of the week, cooked a different way each day (mind you, the Poles seem to do the same), and the liberation song “Der Yokh,” which was translated from Catalan into Polish, where it became part of the Solidarity movement that helped bring down communism, and then into Yiddish.
Sitting around the fire by the lake, singing, roasting marshmallows, making havdalah… we were in summer camp heaven (once a camp counselor, always a camp counselor). Before the war, Jewish children went to summer camps all over Poland, probably not far from where we sat. Today, as part of the renaissance of Jewish life in Poland, Jewish kids are going to camp here again, for the first time since the war.
That night was something different. We celebrated the culture of our ancestors, singing their songs and, I believe, feeling their joy. The naches we received doesn’t erase the loss, but it reminds us of the beauty that existed and can exist again. That, too, is a form of resistance and resilience.
