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I loved my grandfather very, very much. But my grandparents had passed away several years before, and whatever little bit of connection to our Jewish roots my family still maintained was eroding. I was no longer an adoring little child. I was a hip college student, quite disinterested in tradition or religion.
Nonetheless, the foresight and self-sacrifice of his parents saved the family's lives. Some years later, when the Nazis rolled into that very village, not one person was left alive. The pictures of my grandfather's lost village, Eisheshuk, now cover the tower of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. They tell the story of a world that once was and is no more.
And then, out of the blue, my fifteen-year-old brother suddenly declared that he wanted to be observant. My reaction was… huh??? That's for grandparents, not for you! Judaism is beautiful, yes--in its place. In the past.
So when the opportunity came up to drive to the country that Friday night with some friends I was tempted to go. But at the last minute I decided to give the Shabbat one last try. I said no.
At night, the children slept on benches in the school. They studied standing up so that they wouldn't fall asleep over the complex texts. All was for the purpose of passing the learning, the tradition, to the next generation in a pure and unbroken chain.

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My Journey Begins
So there I sat, that Saturday night, feeling that I had very little in common with these odd people--but still curious to get one final glimpse into their fasc
The village they lived in was extremely poor, and their school had no budget for feeding the kids. The villagers helped out by opening their homes and sharing what little they had. Often that little was almost nothing.
Hardly any of my friends were Jewish. In fact, I wasn't even sure that I believed in G-d--and I was sure that if there was a G-d He wouldn't particularly notice or care about me.
S. Paul, Minnesota [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], February, 1979
My mother grew up in Chicago in an observant home. Her father, my beloved grandfather, passed away in 1973. When I was little he held me on his lap and told me stories of his own childhood--stories that seemed like fairy tales to me.
I sat in the hall waiting for the program to start. I felt alone in a room filled with hundreds of people. I had missed my ride to the country. Instead [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], I was here, in this hall full of chassidic Jews--a stranger in a strange
A World that Was
But my brother persisted, eventually introducing me to the vast mystical world of Kabbalah and Chassidut. Once I began to study, I was exposed to a profound and fascinating wisdom that was unlike anything I had seen or heard anywhere else. I sensed a truth that I couldn't deny. I began--tentatively--to eat kosher food and observe the Sabbath. But it still didn't seem to feel right. The problem wasn't with the observance itself. It was me. I felt acutely and painfully out of place, caught between two worlds without a solid foot in either one.
My great-grandparents worked hard, and by the time my grandfather was seventeen years old they were able to bring him and his brother to America. When he saw his mother for the first time in America, he was an adult. He didn't recognize her.
I grew up like any other middle-class American. I went to college, dated, had fun with my friends. Although I happened to be Jewish--and was proud of it--my Judaism didn't play a big role in my life.
Although my grandfather's stories told of a life of struggle and sacrifice, when he spoke of his life in the old world it seemed filled with magic and beauty.
When he was six years old and his little brother only five, their parents left Europe for America to build a better life for the family. The two little boys--practically babies--were left in the old country. There [link widoczny dla zalogowanych], they lived and studied full time in a "yeshivah"--the kind of traditional Jewish school that didn't exist in America at that time.