Next THIS week: The Commemoration.

75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Friends - 

I write this on the eve of my trip to Poland, to observe the 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration. I will be there under the auspice of POLIN Museum. We are expecting thousands of visitors to the Museum as well as a group of approximately 150 VIPs from a variety of American Jewish organizations, including World Jewish Congress, HaShomer Hatzair, YIVO and others. It will be an incredible show of solidarity plus a variety of emotions I cannot even describe.

I will be bringing my copy of The Warsaw Diary of Chaim Kaplan. Here is a link to a description of the man, and to his diary. Kaplan’s eyewitness account of the horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto is as vivid as ever.

The Daffodils campaign and Remembering Together concert

on the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 

My mother had noted that Chaim Kaplan lived next door to her family once her family was “relocated’ to the Warsaw Ghetto from Lodz. As time moves on and away from that terrible era, somehow this commemoration seems to make the unspeakable horror seem closer than ever – as though this just happened, and I am coming to protest the mistreatment of Jews at the hands of their tormentors. As though this happened to someone else, and not to hundreds of members of my own family – including every one of my cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents.

Thus, I will be there to honor the memory of our people. If you can’t be there with me, I will also honor the memory of your family. Of “Our” family.

It is important for me to share that all is not gloom and doom. Please take a look at the attached. You will find information about the events of next week that are being sponsored by POLIN Museum. 

There is a strong and growing voice of Jewish renewal that I will also be there to support. I hope you will consider joining me on this journey – if not now, then in the future.

All the best in the meantime,

Lynda 

(FYI - here's the attachment)

WARSAW: April 6 2018

The Daffodils campaign and Remembering Together concert

on the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

April 19, 2018, marks the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – the biggest Jewish military revolt during World War II, and the first urban insurgency in occupied Europe. On April 18, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews will organize two unique events: the sixth edition of the Daffodils social-educational campaign; and the Remembering Together concert. At 12 noon, Andrzej Duda, President of the Republic of Poland, invites participants to a special ceremony to commemorate the anniversary in the square in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw, across from POLIN Museum.

In the summer of 1942, the Germans began the so-called Great Deportation Aktion of the Ghetto, which was built in 1940. Nearly 300,000 Jews were deported to the extermination camp in Treblinka. On April 19, 1943, 2,000 Germans entered the Ghetto order to carry out its final liquidation. They were met with the resistance of several hundred poorly armed insurgents. In the course of a month that followed, they engaged in combat amongst the rubble of the systematically destroyed Ghetto.

The Daffodils campaign

On April 19, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews will launch the sixth annual Daffodils social-educational campaign. This year, a record number of over 1,500 volunteers will distribute paper daffodil badges - the symbol of remembrance of the Uprising - in the streets of Warsaw.

Why daffodils?

They are related to the figure of Marek Edelman, the last commander of the Jewish Combat Organization which organized the Uprising together with the Jewish Military Union. Edelman was one of the few survivors. After the war had ended, each year on the anniversary of the Uprising, he used to lay a bouquet of yellow flowers at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. POLIN Museum continues this tradition by distributing thousands of yellow flowers and leaflets informing on the Uprising on 19 April. By wearing the paper daffodil on our lapel we demonstrate that we are all united in the memory of those who perished in a combat for dignity.

“We cannot change the past, but we can preserve the memory of the residents of Warsaw who fought for freedom, dignity and life during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” say Ania and Janek Goliasz, campaign volunteers. “The memory is all that we have left of these people. That is why we have to join the Daffodils campaign each year on April 19.”

The Goliaszes say they have met passionate and enthusiastic volunteers in the course of the campaign. “It is a community of people of goodwill, so hard to come across these days. Undoubtedly, we can call them our second family. The growing community of volunteers who remember and do not let people forget is the highest asset of the Daffodils campaign.”

This year, famed personalities from the POLISH entertainment industry - Maja Komorowska, Katarzyna Nosowska, Zofia Wichłacz, Radzimir Dębski (JIMEK) and Dawid Ogrodnik - also joined in promoting the campaign.

The Daffodils social-educational campaign is organized under the National Auspices of the President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda on the 100th Anniversary of Poland’s Independence, and the honorary patronage of the Ministry of Education. As in previous years, schools, libraries and other institutions from all over Poland will join the campaign, organizing various activities related to the commemoration of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This year, over 1,000 institutions are planning to join in, but more can still do so by filling in this form no later than April 17. Teachers and representatives of the cooperating institutions will be provided with special instructional materials.

Remembering Together concert

At 8 PM, the Uprising anniversary ceremony will end with a special concert organized in front of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. The concert will feature the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and will include, among others, 4th part of the IX Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. In the autumn of 1940, musicians in the Warsaw Ghetto set up a Jewish Symphony Orchestra. Artists who had performed with the National Philharmonics or the Polish Radio Orchestra before the war were amongst its members. 

Despite the ban on performing pieces by non-Jewish composers, the Orchestra performed pieces by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert or Mozart. In April 1942, the German administration suspended the Orchestra’s activity, and yet the musicians continued to perform underground. In the summer of 1942, the Orchestra, together with the 80-people strong Shir (Hebrew for “song”) choir, began rehearsals to perform the IX Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven.

The text of Ode to Joy from the IV Symphony was to be sung in Hebrew. The musicians of the Jewish Symphony Orchestra and the Shir Choir did not perceive Beethoven’s music as an element of German culture. His music constituted part of their music world before the war, and part of their musical identity. Performance of the IX Symphony in the Ghetto was to serve also as a form of protest against the barbarity of Nazism, the forced imprisonment within the Ghetto walls and the symbolic exclusion of Jews from humanity. Alas, the concert did not take place.

On July 22, 1942, the Germans began the Great Deportation Aktion in the Warsaw Ghetto. In the course of the following few weeks over 300,000 Jews, including almost all the artists of the Jewish Symphony Orchestra and the Shir Choir perished in the Treblinka extermination camp. 19 April, the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, is a perfect occasion to complete the unfinished work of the Orchestra under the baton of Szymon Pullman and the Choir run by Izrael Fajwiszys.

The Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic Choir will be conducted by Maestro Gabriel Chmura. In the second part of the concert, the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra under the composer’s baton will perform for the first time a piece by Radzimir Dębski (JIMEK) composed especially for 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The  Remembering Together concert is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland. The admission to the concert is free, but it is vital to arrive no later than 7.45 PM due to the TV broadcast which is about to start at 8 PM sharp.

The press and graphic materials are available here.

For more information on the Daffodils campaign and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising please click here.

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A public service message from Lynda Kraar's Kitchen: Friends, are you looking for some recipes for Passover? Try these: The Popovers of Our Affliction; and the Sponge Cake of Our Affliction.

THE POPOVERS OF OUR AFFLICTION

My mom's recipe. Delicious when warm. Will keep for days in a zip-lock bag. You can double/triple up the recipe to make lots for company.

2/3 cup water

1/3 cup oil1 tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 cup matza meal
3 eggs

Bring oil/water/sugar/salt to a boil in a pot on the stove. Remove and add matza, stirring thoroughly. Let mixture cool. Preheat oven to 375 F.

Once the mixture has cooled, add one egg at a time, stirring through until thickened.

Spoon directly onto cookie sheet or put 1-2 tbsp. per bagel in a muffin pan. Bake at 375 degrees F for 45 minutes. They are done when nice and brown, and they should be hollow and airy inside.

Suggestion: Serve warm with a teaspoon of strawberry jam inside the popovers.

THE SPONGE CAKE OF OUR AFFLICTION

NB - Gluten-free and can be made year-'round. A recipe handed to my mother by our family friend, Lou Orch, who suffered from celiac disease before gluten-free anything was a thing.

Preheat oven to 350 F.
Small bowl for frothing the egg whiltes
Larger bowl for yolks and cake mixture (you will be folding the whites into this bowl)
10-inch tube spring-form

7 eggs
1.5 cups sugar, sifted
1.5 tsp. grated lemon (or orange) rind
1.5 tbs. lemon (or orange) juice
3/4 cup potato starch
dash of salt (not more than 1/8 of a tsp)

1. Separate six of the eggs. Beat the whites with a dash of salt until frothy and nearly stiff. It should make a nice peak.

2. Beat the yolks plus the 7th egg until frothy and creamy yellow. Gradually add sugar, juice and rind. Then gradually add the potato starch and be sure to froth it through the mixture.

3. Fold the whites into the mixture gently.

4. Place in ungreased 10-inch tube pan. Bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees F) about 55 minutes or until cake springs back when touched gently with fingers. Invert pan IMMEDIATELY and cool thoroughly before removing cake.

Greetings from Asbury Park!

"GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK": 

ELECTION NIGHT IN NEW JERSEY.

First, there was this. 

Then, the NY Times photographer saw the crowd divide as Phil Murphy walked from the back of the Asbury Park pavilion, and this happened. In the NY Times.

The Items: A Long Road Home to Poland

  

The Items: A Long Road Home to Poland

By Lynda Kraar

One day in 1947, Auschwitz survivor Abraham Siedlecki and his bride, Siberian Gulag survivor Chana Frajlich, were informed by the Jewish Committee of Lodz, Poland, that their application had been approved: Their new apartment was in move-in condition. It was on Pietrkowska Street – the charming main drag of Lodz, which, during the war, had been renamed Adolf Hitler Street, and had been inside the Lodz Ghetto. This new living space had been the headquarters of a newspaper during the war, and was now empty and available. Or so my parents thought.

When they arrived at the apartment, they found a squatter. Stunned to see my father, a former boxer, the squatter froze in panic. Within moments Dad realized this guy was a Nazi in hiding – hoping to do what? Escape to the “West?” Go home to Germany? Continue living in this apartment, unnoticed?

My father was not acquainted with anger management. This encounter gave Dad the opportunity to unleash all his rage on this former oppressor who could not now escape Dad’s blows.

“Please, I’ll give you anything I have – money – please!” the Nazi begged.

“I don’t want your money. I don’t want your personal things. What's in the bag?” Dad asked, noticing a small package among the Nazi’s possessions.

"Jude" star, front.
(Lynda Kraar photo)

My parents were stunned to see that the Nazi had meticulously sequestered a few well-chosen Jewish items. He had a neatly preserved “Jude” – a yellow star worn by Jewish ghetto prisoners. He was also hiding a ritual prayer shawl that was carefully folded in a black satin pouch, hand-sewn in the shape of the biblical Tablets of Moses. There was also a timeworn Jewish prayer book, a mahzor, used only on the Day of Atonement. One final left hook to the jaw, and the Nazi fled the apartment, leaving behind the package of Jewish items.

Why the Nazi held on to these items was the subject of much speculation by my parents. The items followed my parents’ itinerary – first to stay with them in Lodz for four years, under postwar Communism, then a six-week layover in Paris while waiting for passage to Israel, then four years in Israel, and then to Peterborough for a few weeks, and finally, to Toronto, where the items made a move several times, from downtown apartments until ultimately settling in the city’s Bathurst Manor enclave. They first lived on Clanton Park Road, where I recall seeing them for the first time when I was about five years old. When I turned six we all moved to a newer section of the Manor, to Sandale Gardens - the items and we three humans. It was during this period that I recall Mom placing all of the items in a plastic bakery bag that had contained pita bread. The items would stay in Mom’s top dresser drawer for 40 years.

From time to time, we would take them out, spread them out on the bed, and wonder aloud, What was a Nazi doing with these things? Was he going to save them as mementos? Did he intend to make money by selling them, after the Jews were extinct? Was he secretly a Jew, or did he have Jewish blood? Who was the owner? Was the owner elderly or infirm? Was he robbed by the Nazi?

Speak to us, Oh, Items. Speak to us. We implore you to speak. Tell us who you are, where you came from, and what happened to your owner!

The prayer shawl. It served as the wedding canopy for
my daughter Miriam's wedding.

(Lynda Kraar photo)

During those years, Mom said she would donate the items to Yad Vashem, but for some reason, despite our numerous trips to Israel, it never came to pass. We kept putting it off.

When Mom passed away and it was time to sell my parents’ home in Toronto, I relocated the items to my own home in Teaneck, New Jersey, where they remained in the plastic pita bakery bag, in the darkened bottom corner of our study. I placed them with some late-19^th century Jewish liturgical volumes, safe from sunlight and humidity. From time to time, I would take them out, and show them to my daughters, asking the same questions – now a ritual – who was that guy? Why did he do it? What about the person who owned these things? What was his fate?

After my husband passed away, and our home was sold, the items took two more trips with me – first to a very sunny apartment in Edgewater, New Jersey, on the Hudson River. To protect them, the items stayed in the mover’s box for two years, and, finally, when I rebuilt my life with my new partner, the items came into a new curio cabinet, in my study in Englewood, New Jersey.

The items seemed frightened and huddled together – awaiting their fate, wondering what was going to happen next. They had been together since at least 1947 – when they entered the lives of my parents -- never having been away from each other. I felt their anguish – or perhaps these items, now much less inanimate to me than in the distant past, were absorbing my anguish.

One of the items would come into active duty as a significant part of a Jewish ritual.

Last summer my daughter got married at her grandmother’s farm in rural Pennsylvania. She and her husband designed an authentic, traditional wedding as would have taken place in a Polish shtetl, complete with a Klezmer band. For the first time in nearly 70 years, the items would be separated: The prayer shawl was summoned to be the wedding canopy. I packed it up and brought it to Pennsylvania to be used on what might have been the rainiest, wettest day of the entire summer.

The Mahzor, a prayer book used on the first day of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
(Lynda Kraar photo)

It then travelled back to Toronto with my daughter – in a bag, but without the black satin cover, which had been safely albeit inadvertently left behind in a bag in the trunk of my car.

A few months later, in a snowstorm that lasted nine hours, I drove it back from Toronto to New Jersey, and returned it to its rightful place alongside the book and the star, tucked safely into the pita bag, and placed in my curio cabinet, under lock and key.

They were getting tired. I was getting tired. How long could I continue to shlep around these precious, historical artifacts – these witnesses – without risking damage, or worse? I considered where to donate them. Israel? The United States? Canada?

Poland?

Not a bad idea. Both of my parents had always told me stories about Polish people whom they knew - friends, neighbors, business partners. What ultimately landed my father on his path to Auschwitz was arrest by a Jewish police officer in the Lodz Ghetto in 1942 after he was caught smuggling with his non-Jewish Polish partners on the German side of the ghetto. My mother's brother - as well as my mother - were turned in by Jews in Siberia. Mom's brother died of tuberculosis in a gulag at 18. Everything got transferred to me.

Earlier this year the University of Haifa announced its superstar lineup of honorary PhD conferees in what would truly be a banner year for academia. Amongst the honorees was Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a luminary in the world of Jewish-Polish studies. Curator of the core exhibit of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. A landsman from Toronto who, like me, grew up in Bathurst Manor - the Holocaust survivor enclave a few miles north of downtown Toronto. Known to her army of adherents simply as "BKG."

Miriam Borden, left, and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (BKG) examine the prayer shawl.
(Lynda Kraar photo)

I reached out to offer BKG my congratulations. From the minute we heard each other's shared Canadian accent, a friendship formed. Soon we were talking about Poland, and I felt it coming over me: Was it possible that the items would be going back to Poland, land of their origin? Would I be skipping over handing them to a Holocaust institution in Israel in favor of a Polish history museum? 

Yes. Yes, I would.

It was not a hard decision to make. My daughters and I collectively reached the conclusion that it was the right home for these items, which for at least half a century (judging by the wear and tear on the little mahzor) had enjoyed and celebrated ritual life in Poland - the land that had been the cradle of at least 70 percent of Jewish civilization for 1,000 years. In Poland the items would be displayed and counted as part of a community of witnesses - a kehilla of artifacts whose narrative arc is drenched in the history of the country’s Jewish life.

The items would take one more journey before returning to Poland. They would stop in Israel, where I’d be spending a few days at the University of Haifa board of governors meetings. On the flight they were safely tucked away in my big leather backpack, which remained on my lap for the entire 12-hour flight. And, God, they felt so heavy. I brought them to the University of Haifa, to visit Dr. Marcos Silber, senior lecturer at the university's internationally renowned Department of Jewish History. He was overcome with emotion. I let him touch the items. I sprawled them out over a table in his office as we spoke. It was good. It was giving me closure. It was making me comfortable with my decision.

My next stop was Poland. The morning of my departure I packed up the items, and they flew, once again on my lap, the short trip from Israel to Warsaw. The items felt even heavier than before. I was feeling a profound sense of loss at the thought of not having the items with me for the first time in my entire life.

The next day, June 27, my daughter and I engaged in a humble and informal act of charity at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. In the presence of BKG I handed off the little plastic bag of items to the archivist. I filled out a few forms. Together we all beheld the magnitude of the items. It was not until I saw the reaction of other people to the items that I realized how important this moment was.  I suddenly felt lighter. I was certain that this was the right decision.

I was informed by BKG that these items were especially meaningful, because the collection did not contain many artifacts from the Nazi era. BKG informed us that the Jude star would be come part of the core exhibit. I only requested that we could borrow the ritual prayer shawl for my younger daughter's wedding, thus completing the circle.

Some people leave and never say goodbye. Some people say goodbye and never leave. Maybe there's a third kind of people - the kind who are both.

The Mahzor, a prayer book used on the first day of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
The word "Mahzor" is written in the biblical semi-cursive Rashi script.
(Lynda Kraar photo)

Detail from the spine of the Mahzor, a prayer book used on the first day of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
(Lynda Kraar photo)

The satin pouch that contained the Mahzor, a prayer book used on the first day of Yom Kippur -(the Day of Atonement).
Note the shape - the tablets of the Covenant.
 (Lynda Kraar photo)

The prayer shawl. It served as the wedding canopy for my daughter Miriam's wedding.
(Lynda Kraar photo)

Dining room  set (w/ 6 chairs) and sideboard for sale