I suspect that more than a few readers wondered why I devoted so much space last week to a five-day trip with my son and grandson to Vilna, Kovno, Riga, and Warsaw (other than the desire to put it all down for the children and grandchildren who weren't with us.) For many, listening to detailed accounts of others' vacations is roughly akin to listening to a vegan friend describe their diet and its benefits for the sixth time.
If there was a point, I would say it was this: Know that for a fraction of the cost of a week in Orlando, it is possible to provide your offspring with an educational experience that will (hopefully) remain with them for a lifetime, especially if you have a guide, as we did in Rabbi Ilan Segal, who is deeply knowledgeable of the history of the places visited but also filled with stories of the great figures who once lived there.
That is not to say that only educational vacations are of value. Some of my happiest childhood memories are of Western car trips to national parks and scenic sights, together with my four brothers in the back of a large station wagon in which the two backseats folded down.
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from an older acquaintance who told me that the money spent on a summer vacation with all one's children and grandchildren together is the best money one can spend. I know that those vacations are the highlight of the year in our grandchildren's eyes and ensure that the grandchildren are as close to one another as siblings. The trips to Europe, with grandchildren of a certain age — next summer, im yirtzeh Hashem, with five granddaughters to Hungary, where my wife's roots are — are a supplement, not a replacement, for just chilling and barbecuing together.
The last two Shabbosos since returning from Lita, I've noticed that both the minyanim in which I daven were at least half empty. The family summer vacation is a ritual in the Israeli chareidi community. I can still remember seeing a family with five thin mattresses tied to a car roof pull up to a literal hole in the wall in the bottom of an unfinished building in Tzfas. But no matter how spartan the conditions, the family was going on a summer vacation together.
And sometimes even Orlando is simply the best place for family members to get together. A few years ago, I interviewed an older couple from Chicago who had recently gathered all their offspring from Israel and America together in Orlando to celebrate their 60th anniversary. The thing they were proudest of was the detailed schedule of multiple daily shiurim given by various children and grandchildren, almost all of them rabbis.
WITH THAT PRELUDE, back to the recent trip to Lithuania, Latvia, and, finally, Warsaw. After the emotionally draining experience of Kovno, we headed toward Riga. Our route took us almost directly through Tzitevian, the hamlet where Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky, the subject of my first biography, served as a rav.
Disappointingly, no act of imagination could conjure up the Tzitevian of Rav Yaakov's day, a century or so ago. The only thing the same is that the beautiful forests surrounding Tzitevian still make it a resort town. In Rav Yaakov's day, the dirt streets were unwalkable without a pair of solid galoshes. Rav Yaakov and his wife had one such pair between them, so when the streets had turned to mud or were covered with snow and ice, only one of them could leave their house at a time. Today, the streets are fully paved, and Tzitevian residents drive the same late-model cars (at least compared to my own) as their fellow citizens in larger cities, like Vilna and Kovno.
Next stop was the nearby city of Kelm, in which Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler, the subject of another biography, spent most of his early life. But the famed Talmud Torah of Kelm is no more. All that remains of the glory of Kelm is a cemetery and the mass grave where nearly all of Kelm's Jews were murdered, with the exception of a handful chosen to serve as waiters at the feast of the local Lithuanians to celebrate their slaughter of their Jewish neighbors, and, in the case of the women, to parade the clothes stolen from the homes of the murdered Jews. (It is through one of those Jewish waiters that we know of the final destruction of Kelm Jewry.)
At the grave of the Alter of Kelm, Rav Simcha Zissel Braude, I could not help but think of the Alter's final instructions to those attending him: Make sure to clean my clothes before they are distributed to the poor after my passing. That deathbed instruction characterizes the solicitude for one's fellow Jews that was essential to Kelm mussar.
With each passing year, I become more aware of the importance of seder (order) in one's life that the Alter so emphasized, and that I am sorely lacking. Someone once entered the Talmud Torah during a shmuess of the Alter's. From the passion with which the Alter spoke, the visitor assumed that he was delivering a hesped. Only subsequently, did he learn the real cause of the Alter's fervent words: Someone had left a pair of galoshes in the anteroom not placed neatly together.
From the cemetery, we went to the mass grave on the edge of the town, which the Jews of Kelm were forced to dig for themselves. At their head was Rav Doniel Movshovitz, the rosh yeshivah, of whom the Devar Avraham said, "I don't know another baal kishron at his level or even close to it in all of Lithuania." But as great as his learning, his middos were even more noteworthy. After the passing of the Chofetz Chaim, Rav Elchonon Wasserman Hy"d, who was older than Rav Doniel, would spend every Elul in Kelm. He applied to Rav Doniel the verse, "The heavens are My throne and the earth my footstool... but on this man will I look: the poor and humble person who is zealous regarding my word" (Yeshayahu 66:1–2).
The men of the Talmud Torah went to their deaths singing, as if it were Simchas Torah, "V'taher libeinu l'avdecha b'emes." At the edge of the pit, Rav Doniel sought and was granted permission to address those about to die. He told them that they stood in the exact same place as the Ten Martyrs of whom we read on Yom Kippur. Just as then the world had forfeited its right to exist, and only their martyrdom could atone for the sins of the world, so it was with the men of the Talmud Torah: Only their martyrdom could atone for the world and cause it to be spared.
Therefore, he urged his students, "Let us be neither confused nor frightened, but rather let us accept upon ourselves this awesome responsibility with love." With that he turned to chief of the executioners and told him, "I have finished. Now, you can begin."
WE DID NOT ARRIVE in Riga, Latvia, until late at night. The next morning, it took us awhile to find the lovely Chabad beis medrash, which had a full minyan, not reliant on tourists. As I was removing my tefillin after davening, Rabbi Segal engaged Rabbi Mordechai Glazman, the builder of the Chabad Center, in conversation. His conclusion after a few moments with Rabbi Glazman, who is both a talmid chacham and an intellectual, was that if he got ahold of me, we would be in shul for another hour. And so it turned out to be.
Prior to our visit, I could have only named with confidence two great rabbis who lived in Latvia — the Rogatchover Gaon and Rav Meir Simcha, both of Dvinsk. But to lessen our ignorance, Rabbi Glazman provided us with copies of his own thick sefer on the great rabbis of Latvia.
I have been to many Holocaust museums, but each one offers a slightly different emphasis and perspective. What I found most interesting in the Riga Holocaust Museum was an exhibit of German propaganda after the Russian army retreated in the face of the German advance.
In the propaganda, the Jews were inevitably portrayed as the allies of the Russians, who had ruled Latvia. One newspaper cartoon, for instance, went so far as to assert that Josef Stalin was Jewish. The point of all this propaganda was to whet the appetite of the local population to wreak havoc on Latvia's Jews. And it struck me that the focus on alleged Jewish perfidy in much of the press today similarly creates a permission structure for violence against Jews.
The rest of our day in Riga was devoid of specifically Jewish content. In the market square is the House of the Blackheads, a reconstruction of a beautiful Gothic building, originally built in the 14th century, and destroyed in World War II. Blackheads does not refer to a dermatological affliction, but to the hair color (i.e., not white) of the founders of a medieval guild of unmarried merchants, who felt themselves shut out of the traditional guilds and much commercial activity by older merchants and craftsmen. The day concluded with a pleasantcruise on the Daugava River, which joins Riga to the Baltic Sea, and runs from Russian through Latvia.
At best we would have had four hours sleep prior to our departure for the airport and flight to Warsaw. Unfortunately, our hotel rooms were located just above what turned out to be the main drag strip of Riga for motorcycle and car races, and I did not manage a minute of sleep.
Standing in line at the Riga airport, I noticed that the boy in front of me was carrying a green kippah in his pocket. Both parents looked Israeli, so I started up a conversation. It turned out that their son was on the way to Israel to celebrate his bar mitzvah at the Kosel. (There are no direct flights to Israel from Riga, so they were flying through Warsaw.) I was genuinely surprised to learn that both husband and wife were from families who had lived in Riga for many generations.
I did not have time to extract the story of how their parents and grandparents survived the war. But I did learn that both were lawyers who had given up their careers after October 7 to create an organization, JewUnited, to defend Israel in the local media and to present Israel's case in Latvia. Another one of those chance meetings while traveling that I would like to pursue further someday.
At the Nozyk Shul in Warsaw, we encountered Reb Hershel Lieber, a longtime activist with the Vaad L'Nidchei Yisrael in the FSU and Eastern Europe, with his extended family, as well as a young family of four children under ten, who turned out to be neighbors of one of my brothers. The wife asked me whether I thought Theresienstadt would be too traumatizing for their young children. (The father is a social worker, who has worked extensively with victims of October 7 and those traumatized by the war.)
Over a quarter of a million Jews are buried in the Warsaw Jewish Cemetery, including the Chemdas Shlomo, rav of Warsaw, several of the thirteen children of the Chiddushei HaRim whom he buried in his lifetime; and the Netziv and his grandson-in-law Rav Chaim Soloveitchik, co-rosh yeshivos in Volozhin, side by side in one ohel. Rabbi Segal seems to have a story about each one of those 250,000 Jews, but because this was my third visit to the cemetery with him, I was able to skip part of the long walk and try to recuperate near the gate from the sleepless night.
From there to the Polon Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is in my view one of the best designed museums in the world. But again, because I had been there twice before, I spent the first two hours sleeping outside on the grass doing an imitation of a homeless man, much to my son's embarrassment.
The museum does not focus on the end of Polish Jewish history — the camps, the Warsaw ghetto uprising — but on a long and varied thousand-year history. It was gratifying to see so many young Poles moving slowly and attentively through the exhibits. My reaction upon my first visit to the museum was that I wanted to rush back to Warsaw together with my wife to introduce her to it. That was subsequently done, together with another grandson, and to bring my son and grandson there this time was also a thrill. But I doubt I'll be back.
The museum is located with walking distance of the Umschlagplatz, on the edge of the Warsaw Ghetto, from which 300,000 Jews were dispatched to Treblinka and their deaths. Nothing about the now-empty square, however, hints to the horrors that took place there. At a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Rabbi Segal took out a famous photo of Rav Herscjel Rappaport, the leader of a group of seventy Gerrer chassidim who never registered with the Nazis in the ghetto and who retained their beards, kept learning, and even made a final Seder, even as every building around them was aflame.
In the photo, Rav Rappaport is staring straight into the face of the Nazi SS commander, Jurgen Stroop, who was charged with putting down the uprising. Rav Rappaport is unbowed, even contemptuous, as he looks at the much taller Stroop. The latter told him, "Because of you, I've had to fight here for three weeks."
I'll JUST END on a short personal note. That entire final day, every time I put on my backpack to schlep it, either my son or grandson immediately grabbed it from me and added it to their own backpack. Like any such trip, this one was not just about what we learned but about bonding together. And their solicitude for their father and grandfather was one of the high points of the five days for me.