Avi Frankiel, a Moshe Aaron Yeshiva High School junior, delivered a shiur — lesson — at the memorial to those who died at the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland during the school’s father-son trip. Instead of flowers the group left “words of Torah” — the actual shiur — at the site.
Photos courtesy Moshe Aaron Yeshiva High School
Junior Naftali Nagar and his father, Avshalom, outside the Oskar Schindler factory at Plaszow.
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April 14, 2009
Five students from Moshe Aaron Yeshiva High School in South River and their fathers spent an emotional four days in Poland, mourning the millions who perished there in the Holocaust and gaining a deeper understanding of Jewish suffering during that tragic period.
Accompanied by Rabbi Avraham Krawiec, the school’s dean of students, as well as the grandfather of one of the five boys, participants prayed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, commemorated the yahrzeit of a renowned hasidic rabbi, and bonded across generations.
“To be with my son in an environment like that was priceless, a once in a lifetime opportunity,” said Eric Frankiel of Elizabeth, who was accompanied by his son Avi and father-in-law, Eliezer Flint.
“I felt like a kid again,” he acknowledged. “We learned so much about Jewish life before the Holocaust.”
And, he said, he learned a lot about his son.
“I saw a whole different side of him that made me extremely proud,” said Frankiel. “I hope he will appreciate the trip even more as he grows up, realizing he experienced it with his father and grandfather.”
Will Lubarsky, a sophomore at the yeshiva, said that although he had learned almost everything that was covered on the trip, “it was still a life-changing experience.”
Sophomore Morey Katzourin said that walking through the concentration camps made an indelible impression on him.
“Everything was untouched,” he said. “You have to be there to know and comprehend how terrible it was. Every step you take, you can assume somebody else, somebody who died there, also took. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
Cousins Tulie Meyer, a sophomore, and Naftali Nagar, a junior, said they went to gain an understanding about what their grandmother had gone through in Auschwitz.
“She always told us stories,” said Naftali. “Once I was there, I really felt what I had always heard. It really made it real for me.”
The March 16-19 trip began in Warsaw with a marathon series of activities that found the group sleeping in a van the first night as they traveled between destinations.
Reciting Psalms
The trip included visits to the Warsaw Ghetto memorial and to a bunker where Jews holed up as they fought the Nazis. The group recited Psalms at a deportation site and took a tour of Lublin’s famed Chachmej Lublin Yeshiva and the city’s newly renovated synagogue.
Students Morey Katzourin, left, and Avi Frankiel outside the gates of Auschwitz
Krawiec said he took the group to a Jewish cemetery — an open field. “We know hundreds of thousands of people are buried there, but there is not one tombstone.”
He explained that the Nazis had ripped out the stones and piled them outside the cemetery. After the war, because authorities had no idea where they belonged, a wall ringing the cemetery was made using the headstones.
The group went to the Majdanek concentration camp only to find it had already been closed to visitors that day.
“I didn’t want to come from America only to be told I couldn’t daven there,” said Krawiec. “So we scaled the fence and said tehillim and davened until the police came and threw us out. The kids were excited about that.”
During a three-hour layover in Prague on the way home, they visited the gravesite of the 16th-century sage Rabbi Judah Loew and prayed in the last synagogue in the city.
Krawiec said the students’ and their fathers’ reaction has been so overwhelming that the school is planning another trip to Poland after Passover, this time for mothers and daughters.
A personal highlight for him, the rabbi said, occurred as the boys gathered with thousands of others to recite Psalms in honor of the yahrzeit of Rabbi Elimelech Weisblum of Lizhensk, an 18th-century hasidic rabbi, commonly known as Noam Elimelech after his popular book of Torah commentary.
An older hasid seated nearby came up to Krawiec after the MAYHS group davened to say how impressed he was watching the young men recite the prayers.
“He told me he himself was quite uncomfortable, so how long could these kids last, 20 minutes, a half hour?” said Krawiec. “They never moved from that spot for more than two hours.”
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