I have returned from my visit to Wlodawa, Poland, and want to share my feelings. For a long time, I wished to reach the place of my birth. My goal was to see if my home was still there and to see the synagogue, too. I began planning my trip in 2016 and contacted tour guides in New York, Israel, and Poland. I chose Taube Tours. This trip overseas was not my first. I have traveled for years as a marketing executive to Europe, Hong Kong, South Korea, Iran, and Germany. These days, I travel to Israel where our grandchildren and great-grandchildren live. There, I also visit my mother’s side of the family, the Cybermans, in Haifa, and my father’s side of the family, the Topols, in Tel Aviv. The survivors of the Cyberman and Topol families came to Israel from Poland in 1950. I took my mother to Israel in 1964 and kept in close contact with them. My wife Evelyn came with me on this journey to my hometown, Wlodawa.
We took the train on August 2, 2018 from Baltimore direct to Newark’s international airport, where we boarded the LOT Polish airline. Our eight-hour flight was smooth and comfortable. We arrived in Warsaw on Friday August 3. As planned, a young lady and driver met us at the airport, took us to our rental apartment, and gave us directions to the synagogue. As we walked along Grzybowka Street in downtown Warsaw, we met couples from Australia and England. They had come to attend the 38th International Association of Jewish Genealogy Societies (IAJGS) Conference, held for the first time in Poland, from August 5 to 10, at the Hilton Hotel. I also came to attend the Conference and research my ancestry.
Many of the Conference participants came to the Friday evening service at the Noszyk synagogue. It is the only surviving prewar synagogue in Warsaw. It was used by the Nazis as a stable. Shul restoration began in 1977 and now has a capacity of 600 people. Rabbi Shudrich and the regular congregation were very helpful to the many guests who sat in the main area. The women were seated in the balcony. After the service, my wife and I walked a short distance across the street to a kosher restaurant, where approximately 70 people were served a delightful Shabbat dinner. After 10:30 p.m., we walked back to our apartment.
The next morning, Shabbat, we went to the synagogue, where lunch was served after services for approximately 100 guests. As a note of interest, the synagogue and its surrounding facility were carefully watched by police. The area is gated 24 hours a day. This is excellent security for the congregation.
In the afternoon, my wife and I walked to the Hilton Hotel, where many of the conference participants were staying. A group formed to take a walking tour of the old Jewish section of the city including the Warsaw Ghetto. It was hot walking six miles in 92-degree weather. As a matter of fact, it was the first time I had done this. Our tour guide showed us where the first Jewish community lived in the 1700s. In 1939, the Jewish population of Warsaw was 375,000 people, second only to New York City. We learned that most of the city was destroyed by the Germans, starting in 1939.
After the tour, we returned to the synagogue and davened Mincha. Then we had the pleasure to be among the guests at a sheva brachos. We davened Maariv and Rabbi Shudrich made havdalah for about 75 people.
Early Sunday morning, August 5th, I went to the 8:00 a.m. minyan. Afterwards, my wife and I walked to the Hilton Hotel and registered for the IAJGS conference. It was quite a sight to see 700 people from 30 countries, including six from Baltimore. This conference was well planned, and would not have been possible 30 years ago, when Poland was under communist rule. Today, decades of hard work by Poles, Europeans, and Americans, Jewish and gentile, has led to restoration, preservation, and accessibility to historical Polish Jewish life. In the afternoon we went to the Polin Museum, built on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. It traces 1,000 years of Jewish life in Poland.
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Early Monday morning August 6, our tour guide, Jakub, loaded our suitcases for the 300-mile trip to Wlodawa, a city in Lublin province in southeast Poland. The city lies along the borders with Belarus and Ukraine on the bank of the Bug River. The existence of a Jewish community is first recorded in connection with the Lublin Fair of 1531. Wlodawa prospered due to the granting of a City Charter in 1534. Most of the Polish-speaking community worked in agriculture, but Jews populated most of the city and dominated craft production and trade.
In 1765, Wlodawa had 630 Jews. The 1773 census record Jewish physicians, butchers, millers, barbers, goldsmiths, tailors, furriers, and merchants. There were 2,236 Jews in 1827 and 6,706 Jews in 1907. Wlodawa’s first Zionist Organization was formed in 1898. The town had the Bund, Agudath Israel, and Poalei Zion organizations. There was also a Bais Yaakov school for girls. There were 5,650 Jews living in Wlodawa in 1939, 70% of the population.
Most of the roads we traveled on were well built, but there were no speed limit signs. This was suprising! As we approached Wlodawa, the roads became bumpy and narrow. We arrived at the Great Synagogue Monday afternoon. I noticed that repairs were being done to the outside of this elegant, baroque-style synagogue. During the Nazi occupation it was converted to a warehouse. In the 1980s, it was thoroughly renovated and anchors the Leczna-Wlodawa Lake District Museum, which was opened in 1986.
When I approached the open doors of the synagogue, my heart started to throb and my eyes teared. In this synagogue my great-great-grandfather prayed. It took me three-and-a-half hours to walk through and take videos of the beit midrash and the Judaica. The Wlodawa synagogue was built between 1764 and 1771 by the congregation, with and support of the Czartorskyski family foundation. One hundred years later, a second story and two corner annexes were built.
I was introduced to the director of the synagogue restoration. He wanted to know who I was and what brought me there. He sat me in the front of his camera and recorded my presentation. I told him my name and address in Baltimore, Maryland. I was born in Wlodawa on July 27, 1936 to Dvorah and Moshe Stal in their home at 216 Ulizah Katlarski Street. I told him about my sister Sonia, born in December 1939, when we left Wlodawa. My brave and smart father of blessed memory carried his wife, son, and infant daughter across the Bug River to the Russian border, where they walked more than 50 miles before they found a train to take them deep inside Russia to save our lives. After our conversation, the director thanked me.
Afternoon came, and we found 216 Uliza Katlarski Street. We found no single homes, just box-shaped apartment buildings. I was very disappointed and tears fell down my face.
We proceeded to travel about 50 miles to Sobibor extermination camp; no other vehicles were on the road. Wlodawa Jews were mostly deported to Sobibor, but some were able to escape and join the partisans in the forest. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 170,000 people were murdered at Sobibor. We found railroad tracks, a fence, and a metal wall with pictures of the Sobibor Ghetto; they were the only identification markers at the site.
Early evening we departed and reached the Elan Lublin Hotel. Above the grand entrance, I saw the words Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva in Hebrew. Here Rabbi Meir Shapira began Daf Yomi and founded the Yeshiva in 1931. He died in 1933 but saw his Yeshiva completed. We had dinner in the hotel’s kosher restaurant. We toured the old city and walked around the Lublin castle, once the center of a Jewish neighorhood. We entered the Library of Testimony, an archive with pictures of Lubliners who visited after the war. Our next destination was Lancut, where, every year, chasidim come to pray at the grave of the Grand Rabbi of Ropshitz and the Grand Rabbi of Zolyni. The brick synagogue was built in 1761, and the Hebrew wall plaques were re-created from pictures preserved from before the Holocaust.
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On Wednesday, we continued our journey. I felt happier when we arrived in Krakow, one of the most unique cities in Eastern Europe. The duel-lane highway leading to Krakow was well designed, and traveling was smooth. Going into the Kosher Cheder Café, we were told by its owner that there are more kosher restaurants in Krakow than in any other city in Poland.
I had an interesting experience while walking through downtown Krakow. I lost my video camera and was quite upset. By coincidence, a family from Israel found it. They saw me from a distance and somehow realized that I was the owner of the camera. I ran over to the family and thanked them for the good deed and kindness they showed us.
Our guide showed us the magnificent Wawel Castle in the center of the city, where King Casimir III the Great lived in the 14th century, surrounded by Jewish homes. It is well known that King Casimir loved the Jews. He encouraged them to settle in Poland, confirmed privileges previously granted, and refuted blood accusations. He even devised punishment for the false accusers. Interestingly, we also learned that, at the time of the Black Death, Poland was the only country saved from the plague. Hashem promised to Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you, I will curse.” (Bereishis 12:3)
We continued our tour and visited seven synagogues. One of the oldest continuously-used synagogues is that of Rabbi Moshe Isserles, the Remah. The synagogue has Friday night and Shabbat services. The Remah cemetary is behind the synagogue. Yearly, the Remah’s yarhzeit on Lag B’Omer is visited by Orthodox Jews and chasidim.
After I davened Mincha and Maariv with a minyan, we again ate at the Kosher Cheder Cafe. We met many people, mostly Israelis. (The flight from Tel Aviv to Krakow takes less than four hours.) We went to the town square. It was lively with klezmer and instrumental music in Hebrew and Yiddish coming from open-air restaurants.
Our last destination was the Taube Ringelbaum Museum. Between August 1942 and February 1943, Emanual Ringelbaum led a secret operation in the Warsaw Ghetto code-named Oneg Shabbos. Ten of his close friends collected newspapers, photos, drawings, diaries, and notes that documented conditions in the Ghetto, which they buried in three milk cans. In 1946, Rachel Auerbach, one of the three survivors of the group, said, “We must find the archives.” Two of the cans were found. Among the contents was the following note by Abraham Lewin: “We want our suffering, these birth pangs of the Messiah, to be described for the sake of future generations and the whole world. We meet every Sabbath to discuss our task, and while doing so we tell each other what the new-old Amalakites are doing to us, the Jews. These stories always weigh on me and my head starts to ache as if a heavy lead mass is pressing down on it.”
We awoke early in the morning of August 8, 2018. I davened before breakfast, and our tour guide came to take us for the final sightseeing tour of Krakow. She took us to a synagogue which was located at the end of the bench where we sat the evening before listening to the music and singing. Outside the synagogue was a cemetery, where many Jews were buried, but the headstones (8,090 pieces) were hung on the walls of the cemetery. This was quite a sight to see.
Though it is true that Jews were already present in Krakow’s old town in the 13th century, by the end of the 15th century, they were expelled. They were to return only in the second half in the 19th century, after securing citizenship rights.
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We finally went back to our hotel in Krakow and picked up our suitcases for the two-hour train ride to Warsaw. In Warsaw, we were met at the train station by our tour guide, who took us to the Marriot Hotel, located next to the Hilton Hotel in downtown Warsaw. We were able to go back to the Hilton and walked around the Convention floor. We talked to Helise Lieberman, director of the Taube Center, who is dedicated to the renewal of Jewish life in Poland. With her help, we were able to see the structure of Yiddishkeit in Poland. My observation is that Poland is the cradle of a rich Jewish history. There were many highlights in the hundreds of years of Jewish life in Poland, from the time the Jews came until Hitler arrived. Unfortunately, the Poles also allowed the destruction of 3,300,000 million Jews.
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The trip to Poland to see my birthplace and the country was rewarding. I saw the grandeur of the Wlodawa Synagogue and mourned the loss of my parents’ house. I learned about Polish Jewish history and saw a little of contemporary Jewish life in three big cities: Krakow, Warsaw, and Lublin. Except for these cities, there is no large Jewish community in Poland.
Our family was fortunate to survive the war. The years 1945 to 1949 found us in a DP (displaced persons) camp. As my father loved music, he managed to purchase a violin for me and found a violin teacher outside the camp. He convinced me to learn to play the violin. After arriving in America in 1949, I was able to play my violin, but I also wanted to sing. After my bar mitzva, Cantor Glinkowsky, at the Agudath Achim Congregation, asked me to join the choir. I continued my vocal study with other cantors in the Baltimore and Philadelphia area for a number of years. In 1972, the Winands Road Synagogue Center, located in Randallstown, Maryland, asked me to become their cantor. I conducted services there for the next 35 years.
