Cleaning out my office, I have been journeying through the 25 years that I have spent in the Temple Sholom community. As I will be travelling with our current Confirmation class this upcoming weekend, I have been thinking back over the many different classes, and our journeys together.
When I first interviewed at the Temple, in the Levine Room in Plainfield, I was asked what I thought of the Temple’s trip to Eastern Europe. I started by asking why the class did not travel to Israel, and the tension in the room rose. Then I said that I would have to go on the trip to find out why it was so unique and compelling, before I could make a judgment. What I discovered (even before the days of the free Birthright trip) was that everyone thought they would eventually make it to Israel, so that trip - in so many other congregations - did not attract a large percentage of students. Temple Sholom’s trip, which gave the chance for a teen to travel Europe with their peers, visiting sites they might not see on another type of class tour, was a draw which kept our students going through 8th and 9th grade, just to make it to Confirmation in the 10th grade.
The Temple owes a great debt to Marilyn Flanzbaum and Rabbi Goldman, who first put the trip together. It went through many iterations - to Amsterdam and Western Europe, to Prague and Budapest, and eventually - the trip I inherited - to Poland. I met with Jerry Flanzbaum, who walked me through his experiences, including the adult trip that he also attended. It was not easy to imagine taking those steps - to bring high school students to Auschwitz, to places of such imaginable horror, but I was encouraged by the parents and chaperones who had gone before. I did make a few changes. Rather than just visit sites of destruction, we added in learning about Jewish life before the Holocaust, and Jewish life that still exists. We looked around for a Progressive (Reform) Jewish community where our students could meet peers - and that is how we began our 25 year relationship with Congregation Szim Salom in Budapest.
I remember particular moments from each trip - of the conversations that we had each night reflecting and processing on the day’s events, of the pierogies consumed, of the moments of companionship and even laughter and inside jokes; the joy of waking sleepy teens and getting them to board a bus and ask questions of an adult - even if they were a guide paid to answer their questions; the incredible insights as they saw sites that I may have seen a dozen times, with new eyes; sharing impressions from their predecessors; and even tutoring math on an overnight train. The first year, I took pictures of all the places that we visited. Soon after, I realized what was more important was to capture the students, their presence, and their reactions. I tried to make sure that I had a photo each day of each student, not just to prove that they were there, but to show how important their individual experience was. We also took group photos - in front of the menorah in the graveyard at Terezin, the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the dragon in front of the castle in Krakow, and seated in the sanctuary of the great synagogue on Doheny Street in Budapest. (I also have a bunch of pictures of students passed out asleep on buses and trains.)
Mostly, I remember stories of transformation. The first class said that they were disappointed, the Sunday after they returned, because they did not feel different. Then, as they presented on their experience to the Religious School assembly, guiding by questions from Principal Norman Pianko, they shared what had moved them the most (the urn of ashes at Majdanek, the service in Hungarian, English, and Hebrew in Budapest), and shared how they had changed. I learned the lesson that experience is only truly appreciated when there is opportunity to reflect. I remember the student who said they would not be turned into a superJew like their older sibling, but ended up changing their life, discovering a cause, and have since dedicated their lives to helping others.
Parents and students made great sacrifices to go on this once in a lifetime experience - missing a week of school, spending time raising money, spending their own Bet Mitzvah money, spending hard-earned savings, as did members of the congregation who contributed to the scholarship fund. I was able to tell each family that cost should not keep them from the trip, because it was so important to the Temple that every student who wanted to go would be able. Chaperones gave up a week of vacation to spend time counting teenagers - making sure we returned with the same number that we left with - and paid for the trip themselves.
We have raised generations of Temple Sholom Confirmands who have had this incredible opportunity - it is a bond that connects them across time. I am often amazed to look at those pictures - whether from Rabbi Goldman’s trip that are now hanging on the walls in the lobby, or those in our electronic archives. Different students stand at the same locations. Their clothing, their hairstyles, even their cameras (now phones) are different - but they are also the same, experiencing what might be an unfathomable moment of Jewish connection, with the same looks of puzzlement, of awe, of understanding.
[Pictures from various Confirmation trips across the years will follow in attachment, if you want to include them.]
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