JRoots Journeys

Day 1 on the The Living Legacy Experience

This journey is taking place with over 160 participants and 2 JRoots educators and Tzvi Sperber, JRoots Director.

They visited the town of Dąbie and what remains of the Dąbie Synagogue, built in 1885. From there, they continued to Chełmno, where approximately 150,000–200,000 innocent Jewish lives were murdered—by mobile gas vans and by shootings at close range.

Chełmno was the first mass extermination camp, where Jews were murdered in makeshift gas vans between 1941 and 1945. Their bodies were then buried in mass graves and later exhumed.

A day of remembrance and honouring all those lives lost before us.

Today, at 10:00 AM, as the siren’s filled the air, I stood in silence. But my mind wasn't only in the past.
Through my work with JRoots, I have spent decades walking the physical places of the Shoah with survivors who shaped my life in ways I never imagined possible. I have seen the killing fields and the ashes, but the crematorium had for many the opposite effect, it lit a fire within them instead of extinguishing it, a fire of resilience.
Today, as that siren sounded, my thoughts also turned to our brave soldiers on the front lines. The transition from the shoah of so much loss of life to our protective wall, that of the IDF. It is not just history it is our current reality.

Listen to this inspirational post from

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/14Y78xrxGea/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Here is the translation for those who desire.

A Letter from Eliezer Shimoni to the Soldiers and Commanders of the 7th Brigade

"I am Eliezer Shimoni, a 97year old Holocaust survivor.
When I close my eyes, I see a 15-year-old boy hungry, freezing, standing at the gates of the hell called Auschwitz. In my mind’s eye, I see Buchenwald. I see the death marches, where the question was not whether we would prevail, but whether we would manage to breathe just one more breath.
There, in the freezing snow of Europe, I was alone. I lost my entire world my parents, my brothers, my sisters, and my home. We were a people without protection, human dust that any ill wind could scatter.
Today, when I hear the thunder of your tanks in Lebanon, my heart does not tremble with fear. It trembles with pride.
You are the answer to all those nights on the narrow wooden bunk in the camp. You are the miracle I did not dare to dream of as I marched through the snow and cold of the death marches. When I see your brigade’s insignia, I see the protective wall we so desperately lacked back then. From a distance of eighty years, I have one message for you:
Our victory is not only in capturing the objective, but in your very existence. Every time you tighten your helmet, every time you carry out a mission, it is not just about the security of the State, it is also the vengeance and the rebirth of millions who never lived to see a Jewish soldier. You are fighting so that my great-grandchildren can sleep peacefully on land that is ours forever.
Dear warriors, watch over yourselves. Look out for one another. You are the tip of the spear of a nation that refused to die, and chose instead to live with its head held high.
I, who survived the inferno and established a magnificent tribe in this land, salute you. You are the absolute victory, mine, and that of all Holocaust survivors wherever they may be. You are the light that dispels the darkness.
Go with this, your strength, and save the People of Israel.
With love and complete faith,
Eliezer

As we continue to fight for our existence and our right to survive as a people, I am reminded of the words of Menachem Begin, which ring truer today than ever:

"The Jewish people has learned... that there is no other way to survive than to be able to defend itself, and to be prepared to do so at any time."

Today we remember. Today we fight. Today we exist.

Undeniable tells the extraordinary and previously untold true story of the only known group of Jewish teenage boys to survive a N**i gas chamber.

Featuring the testimony of six survivors, and shaped by decades of work by co-authors Naftali Schiff and Michael Calvin, alongside leading Auschwitz historian Robert Jan van Pelt, this is a devastating story, but also one of courage, resilience and hope, and of why hearing directly from survivors still matters today.

James O’Brian speaks to Rabbi Naftali Schiff, author of the recently published book ‘Miracle: The Boys Who Escaped the Gas Chamber in Auschwitz’ on Holocaust Memorial Day.

Centenarian Survivor Mr Jacob Zanger OBM eyewitness to the pogrom of Kristallnacht passed away last week in London. One of the last authentic Yekkishe Jews of the Hirshian School from Frankfurt am Mein. A true Mensch BeYisroel. His consistency and principled balanced living of Torah im Derech Eretz is legendary. יהי זכרו ברוך