We arrived in Warsaw around 9:30am and got our first blast of cold air. We gathered our bags, and headed straight to the New Warsaw Museum. Out front we discussed a memorial depicting both Jews defying the enemy, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and Jews heading weakly to their eminent deaths. Both were legitimate ways to face the ensuing horrors. In the museum we walked through, literally walked through, 1,000 years of Polish Jewry. We then went to the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. We discussed what it meant to give divrei torah in a cemetery, and what proper conduct was. Many of us were assigned to talk about specific gedolim buried in the cemetery, whether they were religious heroes or moral role models. Today we focused on prewar life, the former thriving Jewish community, in order to better appreciate the magnitude of what we lost.
