"In every generation we must see ourselves as if we personally had gone out of Egypt." Jews spoke these words last night when they celebrated with family and friends the start of the week-long festival of Passover that recalls the biblical Exodus.
The first Passover that happened more than 3,000 years ago is perceived in Jewish tradition as a paradigm for the entire history of the Jewish people. What happened then happens again and again.
This time my Israeli teenage grandchildren had an added reason to reflect on it. Not only because for Jews today, especially in Israel, persecution, rescue and immigration are both history and living memory, but also because we had just returned from a trip to Poland.
My wife and I had taken them and their parents to show them where we were born and where our forbears had lived for many centuries: a historical equivalent of the once blessed biblical "land of Goshen" that in the end became a place of slavery and degradation when, again in the words of Scripture, "a new king arose who knew not Joseph." Coming back to Israel felt a little like reliving the return to freedom.
The visit brought to mind also another sentence in the Haggadah, the compendium read at the family table on the first night of Passover. It reminds celebrants that there wasn't only one evil ruler with murderous intentions called pharaoh, but that "in every generation there are those ready to destroy us."
My wife was the victim of one modern pharaoh – Hitler – when age 7 she was taken into the ghetto of Lodz and two years later transported to the concentration camp of Ravensbruck. I as a child lived in comparative safety in Siberia and Uzbekistan, then the domain of another pharaoh: Stalin. We had now come to Poland to remember the many members of our families who had perished in the Holocaust. Their nameless graves are at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka and other death camps.
The sentence cited above ends with the words, "but God saves us from their hands." Though it's difficult to speak of God in this context, it's possible to express gratitude. The two of us inexplicably survived to rear children who are now parents. While paying tribute to those who perished, we give thanks for seeing our offspring live in freedom and celebrate it in the Jewish state.
It's tempting to see Poland as a Jewish graveyard where more than 3 million Jews – a 10th of the country's pre-war population – perished, together with 3 more million from other countries, and, of course, countless millions of non-Jews. Our aim, however, was also to remind ourselves of the cultural and religious creativity of some 700 years of Jewish life in Poland and to witness the stirring of Jewish revival in our time.
Though there are only very few Jews in Poland today, there are again worshipping congregations, rabbis and Jewish cultural institutions. There's a renewed interest in things Jewish among Poles. Poland and Israel have just inaugurated a year of cultural co-operation. Poland's prime minister visited Israel this month and Israel's president has just returned from an official visit to Poland.
Yes, there's anti-Semitism, too, but one doesn't have to travel to Poland to find it. We went to Poland to pay tribute to the dead victims of German Nazism, aided and abetted by some Poles and many others, but also to remind ourselves that, together with the new generation, it behooves us to express solidarity with all who are oppressed by tyranny and who call upon us to help them in their struggle for liberation.
Dow Marmur is rabbi emeritus at Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple. His column appears every other week.