Searching for Sarah Schenirer. Searching for our heritage. Searching, just a little, for myself.

Mrs. Zakon is Senior Editor at Targum Press and editor of Horizons. She has written and translated many books, and is currently completing a biography of Dr. Judith Grunfeld for young people.

Poland: Countdown Jerusalem

I’m thinking about Auschwitz: the wickedness, the evil. I’m thinking about the tortures, the beatings, the starvation, the screams. The experiments, the bitter cold, the endless roll calls. The sheer cruelty, the horrifyingly efficient brutality of it. I will be there, standing on its blood-soaked soil, next week. It’s a place of great tum’a, I tell my husband, as we discuss my upcoming trip. He doesn’t agree. More people died al kiddush Hashem in that spot than in any other place on this planet, he says. He’s thinking about the words of Shema echoing endlessly, millions of words going up to Shamayim. He’s thinking about the day-to-day kindnesses, the shared potatoes, the smuggled tefillin, the fast of the hungry on Yom Kippur. It’s a place of great kedusha, he tells me. We go to our rav, Rabbi Nachman Bulman a”jyls, and ask him: “Is this a place of great tum’a? Is this a place of great kedusha?”

He thinks for a few moments.

“Kedusha,” he finally answers. “Because kedusha is eternal. Tum’a is shekker, and has no true kiyum. Kedusha is emes, and it lasts forever.”

I shall remember those words many times in the next four days.

Poland: Countdown Bnei Brak

It’s a warm Thursday morning in Bnei Brak. I’ve traveled to the headquarters of N’shei Agudah for a briefing before our trip to Krakow. Twenty-five strong, we are the Israeli delegation joining women from the United States and England on a unique pilgrimage: a journey to Stanislaw 10, to the original Bais Yaakov Teacher’s Seminary building, where a plaque will be unveiled honoring its founder, Sarah Schenirer.

A strange, almost surreal feeling envelops me as they hand me a neatly packaged ticket. Tel Aviv-Zurich; Zurich-Warsaw. Poland is the land of Jewish death, and I imagine my white sneakers growing crimson as I walk upon earth soaked by blood. I wonder why I am voluntarily leaving Eretz Yisroel for a land that is one vast Jewish cemetery, even if only for a brief visit.

Then, amidst the excited chatter of twenty-five women, amidst the talk of what to pack and how to get to the airport, I hear a name that is repeated over and over again. Sarah Schenirer. Many of the women were talmidos, students, of Frau Schenirer’s students; grandchildren, so to speak, of Momma Schenirer. All of us are Bais Yaakov graduates, and thus all of us have a connection to Krakow. A speaker who joins us at the end of the briefing, Rebbetzin Aharonson, a graduate of the Krakow seminary, shares her memories of those halcyon days and the nightmare years that followed. The classes were all given in Yiddish, she remembers. Girls came for a trial period of six weeks; there was such demand for teachers, only those who showed promise could stay on for the full one-and-a-half-year course. Students came from all over the world, even Palestine. Rebbetzin Aharonson speaks little of the Holocaust years, but remembers the difficult adjustment afterwards. “They could take everything from me, but not the love of Bais Yaakov,” she says. With war’s end, when the enormity of the tragedy, both personal and national, grew clear, she headed towards a deep depression. Then, in Katowitz, a few young survivors approached her, asking for Torah study. She began her “Bais Yaakov” there in Katowitz, with five girls. The black mists of paralyzing depression cleared. She, like every other graduate of the Krakow seminary, had returned to her mission, the Bais Yaakov mission.

Suddenly I’m not feeling so uncomfortable about traveling to Poland. If it was a place of death, it was also a place of vibrant Torah life. Sarah Schenirer, bringing the concept of Torah schooling for girls to a generation that was in danger of being completely lost, has an honored share in that life, a share that must be recognized and remembered.

Poland: Day 1 Warsaw

The journey is uneventful. The unusual discomforts of air travel: missing kosher meals, lost luggage (mine), long waits, short flights. We walk off the plane and head towards passport control. The first sight of Warsaw hits me with the force of a well-aimed Nazi jackbooted kick: a sign on a wall. “Disinfection.” I know that these specially treated towels given to visitors to use on their hands are simply a result of the European fear of rampant hoof-and-mouth disease. Fifty-five years ago, in death camps not far away from here, Jews taken for “disinfection” lived their last few moments of life on this earth in gas chambers. Obstinately, and with a complete lack of logic, I jam my hands into my pockets and determinedly walk past the sign, bringing whatever Israeli germs I carry with me into Warsaw.

We meet the rest of the group, one hundred women in all, at our first stop: the Presidential Palace in Warsaw. The ironies continue. We are greeted here, in this country which killed surviving Jews even after the Holocaust, by the President of Poland. In a massive, beautifully decorated room, beneath a glittering, huge crystal chandelier, he speaks of the 800 years of Polish Jewish life, and warmly welcomes us to his country.

The Warsaw ghetto. Mila Street, where the revolutionary bunker was located. The Umschlagplatz, from where hundreds of thousands of ghetto residents were transported to Treblinka. The most horrifying part of it, today, is the lack of horror. Eighty-five percent of Warsaw was burned down during and after the war, and the city was almost entirely rebuilt in the dull, heavy style of Stalinist architecture. Of the vibrant Jewish city with 350,000 inhabitants, even of the unlivable, overcrowded, ghastly streets of the ghetto, nothing remains but pleasant, open spaces, grassy lawns, and boring blocks of apartments. A large sign tells us that this was the ghetto, and there are several memorials, but they are artificial, unreal. Even the ghosts, one feels, have been liquidated. The city, the ghetto, is Judenrein. Three hundred and fifty thousand souls; today, there is no minyan, unless the tourists bring one.

We arrive at the one place where a Jew can feel at home in Warsaw: the ancient cemetery. The setting sun sends tendrils of light through the tall, green trees, giving an other-worldly aura to the dark stones. A long wall has been built from the remains of tombstones that have been broken down; no one knows the locations of the graves they once marked. This is a huge cemetery, of great antiquity, and we are warned not to stray far or we may get completely lost. Here, I finally begin to feel what my rav has taught me: kedusha is eternal. We pray at the graves of many great men, including the Netziv, Reb Chaim of Brisk, the Radomsker. Their tombs we shall leave here in Warsaw; their teachings we can, and do, take with us, to be studied, discussed, learned eternally.

Poland: Day 2 Gora Kalwaria; Lublin; Lizhensk; Lancut

I board a minivan for the trip from Warsaw to Krakow. I begin to enjoy an unexpected benefit of this trip: the extraordinary company in which I find myself. There is the woman we call “Savta Simcha,” with her carpetbag and endless goodies, shared equally and hospitably with all. There is the warmhearted social worker who can tell me the history of every chassidic dynasty, the elegant Israeli who opened an art gallery in order to give parnassa to ba’alei teshuva, the mechanchos who have educated two generations. Sarah Schenirer, I’ve been told, had the talent of seeing the strengths in every one of her talmidos. According to those who knew her, though never of a frivolous disposition, she had a fine sense of humor. I suspect that she would have been proud of our group; I think, also, that she would have enjoyed being with us.

Our first stop today is the Polish village of Gora Kalwaria. Jews know it as Gur. In the Gerrer beis midrash, where thousands of Gerrer chassidim used to travel to spend Yom Tov with the rebbe, where the Sefas Emes and the Imrei Emes sat at shtenders and pored over sefarim, we now meet the last Jew of Gur. Deported with the rest of the village, he miraculously escaped Treblinka and survived the war. Of the entire Jewish population of Gur, only 17 remained alive, and only he returned to live there. After the war, he found the cemetery of Gur completely desecrated, and he has spent the past half century trying to rebuild it, his gift to his people, alive and dead. He painstakingly collected gravestones, placing them throughout the cemetery. The actual site of the kevorim of the Gerrer rebbes, including the Chiddushei HaRim and the Sefas Emes, were recognizable even after the desecrations because of cement blocks built over them; here we daven and place “kvitlach.” We wash with a hand-driven pump and we turn away, leaving the dead in the hands of the last Jew of Gur.

We pass long stretches of beautiful forests, and I imagine partisans, Jewish and non-Jewish, living their lives among the trees. Now we are in Lublin, and we pull up to a large, impressive building. A medical college, this, a medical college with marks on the doorways where mezuzos once proudly hung. This was Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin, accommodating the elite of the yeshiva world, where talmidim had to know 200 blatt by heart to even be considered for admission. Rabbi Meir Shapira built this edifice in order to bring kavod to yeshiva students who had, until then, been perceived as impoverished unfortunates. He spent much of his brief life raising money for the yeshiva; indeed, the mortgage was paid off with the proceeds of his insurance policy, paid out after his untimely death. Like so much else that we have seen, this piece of Jewish heritage has slipped silently into gentile hands; but again, the bricks are gone, but the Torah — in this case, the concept of Daf yomi, brainchild of Rabbi Meir Shapira, along with his published works and the Torah learned and mastered in his yeshiva — lives on.

On to Lizhensk, to the kever of the Noam Elimelech. If one davens here, we learn, he receives the promise that he will not die without doing teshuva sheleima. Surely a good reason to travel to this far-off place, and to negotiate with the Polish goyim who act as caretakers and hold the keys to the building. At our next stop we are not as fortunate: the Poles in charge of the kever of the Ropshitzer Rebbe in Lancut adamantly refuse us entrance to the site, despite pleas and offers of money.

Poland: Day 3 Krakow; Auschwitz

Some years ago, I began researching a biography of Sarah Schenirer. After many interviews and hours of poring over documents in Yiddish and Hebrew, I gave up the project. Frau Schenirer, I found, was too elusive to pin down. The story, of course, we all knew: the seamstress sewing fashionable clothing, aching over the future of Jewish women, teaching the children in her little apartment, head of a mighty movement. But of the woman, her personality, her day-to-day longings and thoughts, I could find no trace. So it is with special excitement that I approach the building on Stanislaw Street where she trained her girls. Gazing at the bricks, perhaps I will get a clue to understanding the one whose efforts built it.

We see a six-story, dark building (the original seminary building had four floors, the other two are later additions), a few signs in Polish obviously announcing the offices within. A doorbell hangs where the mezuza once was; there is a swastika painted on an adjacent building. Stanislaw is a narrow street edged with buildings on one side and a large green area on the other. The Vistula flows tranquilly behind us.

The unveiling of the plaque marking this site, and honoring Sarah Schenirer, is the culmination of a dream. Two years before, Mrs. Shulamis Goldberg of New York had stood in this same place, looked at this same building. Though profoundly moved by the knowledge that this had been the hub, the center of the Bais Yaakov movement, and that along these corridors had walked the women who’d changed the face of Yiddishkeit, she was at the same time disturbed by the lack of any physical commemoration of that fact. Returning to the United States, she contacted Agudah Women of America. Mrs. Aliza Grund, co-president, had herself thought about the possibility of marking the site, and the two women founded the Sarah Schenirer Commemorative Committee.

This ceremony marks more than just the unveiling of a plaque. The Committee plans on creating a memorial room that will focus on the Bais Yaakov movement as it existed in eastern Europe, and as it exists today all over the world. No public relations stunt, this; the project has a serious kiruv and chinuch purpose. Thousands of young Jews travel to Poland every year. Most, as Mrs. Grund tell us, think everything died in the Holocaust. This will be an extraordinarily effective means of showing them that while the Nazis killed Jews, they could not kill Judaism; the Torah world outlived its enemies and, indeed, flourishes.

At the end of the ceremony, we meet a young Polish Jew who has come to this ceremony who seems to symbolize all the hopes for the future of lost Jews everywhere. Yohanna’s mother was born in a labor camp after the war, and didn’t find out that she was Jewish until she was ten years old. Raised under the communist regime, Yohanna’s mother and brother are atheists. Yohanna came to Krakow for university, began a course in Judaic studies, was enraptured by what she learned. She now is a member of a school for ba’alei teshuva run by the Lauder Foundation, learning Torah in morning and evening studies (her favorite, she tells me with a shy smile, is Chumash with Rashi; they’re studying Shema right now). Sarah Schenirer, I think, would be pleased. But not surprised: she knows well the power of Torah to transform hearts and souls.

If the morning celebrated a triumph of vision and Torah, the afternoon was dedicated to tragedy. I traveled to Auschwitz carrying three yarhzeit candles and a yellow pad. On its clear blue lines were lists of names, line after line of them. Thirty-four of my blood relatives were deported from Munkatz on one black day. Thirty-three died al kiddush Hashem as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz; only my mother, may she live until 120, survived that first bloody night. Including my husband’s relatives, deported from Poland and killed in Auschwitz over the six-year-long span of the war, I brought over 80 names to this place of kever avos. As I sat alone in a darkened room, the only area in Auschwitz dedicated solely to Jewish remembrance, surrounded only by the light of flickering yahrzeit candles, I felt a tangle of mourning, pride, and connection to the past that I will never forget.

The words of the Nesivos Shalom that I had recently learned came repeatedly back to me in that beautifully landscaped, tranquil place of nightmares. “Shir hama’alos, beshuv Hashem es shivas Tzion hayinu k’cholmim,” “When Hashem returns the captivity of Tzion we will be like dreamers.” The dreamer, says Nesivos Shalom, is, of course, Yoseif HaTzaddik. Yoseif suffered. Oh, how he suffered: betrayed by his brothers, cast into prison, forever a stranger in a strange, idolatrous land. Yet when he faced his brothers in Egypt, he realized that all his suffering had been for a reason, had a vital purpose — and all his suffering had been part of Hashem’s plan. In the same way, says the Nesivos Shalom, when we return to Tzion we will see clearly the reason for all the suffering, all the tragedy, and we will understand that it was necessary. I repeated that d’var Torah over and over again, as I stared at gallows, at lagers, at mounds of shoes and mountains of human hair. Hayinu k’cholmim: we will be like dreamers.

Poland: Day 4 Krakow

Naomi Grunfeld, daughter of Dr. Judith Grunfeld, Sarah Schenirer’s colleague during those early years, has participated in our journey, speaking eloquently of her mother and sharing her mother’s stories of that special time. On this, our last day in Krakow, the two of us walk through the streets of the Jewish Quarter, the Kazimierz. It’s quiet in these early morning hours: the Poles are celebrating some sort of May Day vacation, and only the trams break the silence. First we find the Hotel Royale. More than 70 years ago, young Judith Rosenbaum, a German-Jewish teacher, came to this small stone building, arriving late at night after a long journey from Frankfurt. The next morning, Agudath Israel representatives met the Fraulein fun Deutschland and sent her on to the Carpathian Mountains, where Sarah Schenirer and her students were spending the summer. Standing in the small pension, I can almost see her, a young Jewess, travel-weary but still, as always, elegant and neatly dressed, wondering about the idealistic Polish seamstress she would be meeting the next day.

Our next stop on this walk into history is a small street, almost an alley, off Krakowska Boulevard. With some difficulty we manage to locate it: Katazyny 10. A narrow brown door in a long row of unimpressive, unremarkable stone buildings. We open the door slightly; everything is silent, dim. The stone steps are worn away, and suddenly I can almost see a dark-clad figure walking up next to me, her shoulders slightly hunched with weariness. It is Sarah Schenirer — and this is the apartment where Bais Yaakov began, where the young students sat, crammed together, sitting on boxes hungrily taking in the simple lessons in Yiddish. I hold my breath in awe, willing the moment to continue: Here it was where Sarah Schenirer’s warm heart and fiery soul kindled the bright light of Torah in generations of Jewish women.

I am an English-speaking, Brooklyn-born woman living in Jerusalem, and yet some bond, some silken skein, invisible but unbreakable, attaches me to this impoverished alleyway in Poland. I came here to find Sarah Schenirer, and in a sense I did; but I found a piece of myself here as well.

Tum’a, as my rav said, cannot last, but kedusha, holiness, is eternal. Of eight centuries of Jewish life there is little, so little, left in Poland, but the kedusha that one little seamstress helped to bring down to this earth remains. I’ll be seeing it again soon, as I watch the young girls, with their sparkling eyes and modest dress, walking down the streets of Yerushalayim, on their way to Bais Yaakov.

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