On March 21st, we traveled to the city of Lublin. We began at the Yeshiva Chachmei Lublin, which was built by incredible rabbi and great thinker Meir Shapiro. In the 1800’s Lublin was 70% Jewish, and even as the city’s population greatly expanded the Jews still remained 1/3 of the population. At the time of Shapiro’s birth in 1887, Lublin had a rich Jewish culture. Shapiro became a rabbi by the young age of 16, and published his first book at the age of 23, titled “Words of Wisdom.” In 1922 he was elected as a Jewish representative of the Polish Parliament, and much of Jewish society followed him as their leader. Shapiro came up with the idea of a Yeshiva that was not only for study, but also served as a place for its students to live and practice Judaism around the clock. In his Yeshiva they could use his new method of studying Talmud, the Daf Yomi, which was a seven and a half year cycle where a page of Talmudic text was studied each day. Shapiro began to travel around the world, fundraising and collecting unique Jewish texts for the Yeshiva he hoped to open. His dream became a reality in 1930 and flourished with the best and brightest students for a few years. However, Shapiro died in 1933 and the Yeshiva ran into financial difficulties until September 1939, when it was shut down and turned into Nazi headquarters. 25,000 Jewish texts were publicly burned, and years of thousands of Jewish authors was obliterated. Although Shapiro’s dream was dead, it is important to remember the dedication of Shapiro, and all the other scholars who devoted their lives to studying Judaism.
We then traveled to the Old City of Lublin where we entered the Jewish gate and visited a Jewish museum. The museum is run by Poles who are trying to preserve the once rich culture that existed in Lublin before the Shoah. They have stories, documents, and pictures of peoples life, as well as a model of what Lublin’s Jewish area used to look like.
The museum also put on a performance of Yiddish theatre, which wasn’t quite what I expected. The play, was really a reading of Jewish poems set to music. The poems, however, were in Polish rather than Yiddish. The Yiddish aspect was simply the fact that the poems were all about Jewish life in Lublin before the Shoah, which could perhaps be described as Yiddish culture. Either way, the poems were beautiful and the haunting music took the subject matter to a new level of meaningful. After the play, the performer answered some questions about why they continued to keep up the museum, even as non-Jews. His answer was that it was important to preserve Jewish life because of the atrocities that happened. Some felt that those working at the museum were doing it out of guilt, and others felt that they were simply doing what they felt was right. After we exited the museum, we got to explore the Old Town, which was absolutely gorgeous, although almost barren of any signs that Jewish life once thrived there.
My question is: Would you rather live a regular shtetl life in Lublin or rigorously study at Shapiro’s Yeshiva?
I would rather live in a regular shetl because, even though I love to learn, I could never imagine doing nothing but learning every day. I believe that the shetl would add more variety also because you are more in control of your schedule.
ReplyDeleteI would definetly rather live a regualr shtel life because I would not be able to handle the rigours work load of the Yeshiva. I would not want to denote my life to studying the Talmud eveyday. Living in a shetl would allow me to engage in Jewish culture.
ReplyDeleteI would rather live in Shtetl life in Lublin because I would love to grow in a community full of people who I share the same religion with. I also could never spend everyday of my life for four or more years studying Talmud. I do not have the concentration span for the amount of work needed to be memorized and my biggest fear is being stuck doing the same thing everyday. Living in a shtetl would allow me to connect with people over common interests.
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