April 30 2008 / 25 Nissan 5768

122 Jewish Agency Aliyat HaNoar students journeyed from Israel to Poland to walk through the streets where Jews once enjoyed a vibrant community life. The students then proceeded forward to bear witness to the horrors of the death camps where millions of innocent Jews were murdered and to affirm Never Again. 

The Jewish Agency Aliyat HaNoar students’ visit to Poland was part of the Hadassah women’s delegation. This is the 15th year that the journey takes place on behalf of the Hadassah Women headed by Ms. Barbara Goldstein, deputy director general of Hadassah in Israel.  The students accompanied by counselors and teachers, as well as Ms. Leah Golan chairwoman of the Jewish Agency Israel Department and Mr. Moshe Carrasso a businessman, who serves as chairman of the young leadership of the “Israeli Spirit”,  first underwent a lengthy preparatory program in Israel.  In Poland they experience everything that they learned on Israeli soil.

The students felt the greatest impact of their trip during their visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp where the delegation conducted a joint ceremony with the IDF’s "Witnesses in Uniform”.  Together the students and soldiers marched along the railroad track to the sound and blaring trumpets and rams horns. They held a ceremony comprising youth immigrants from the entire Diaspora and officers and NCOs of the IDF. The recitations of texts and poetry and by the occasion itself were very moving for all involved.

The journey continued at the Maidanek death camp, Treblinka, and the route of heroism at Auschwitz that we concluded at the Rapoport Memorial.

We returned to Israel on Passover eve filled with experiences, insights and emotions, and we all sat down to the Seder table with a profoundly different feeling about the significance of our “Festival of Freedom”.