I did not experience my educational trip to Poland as a high school student, as is the norm in Israel, but as a young mother of a baby. We toured Poland and walked from the ghetto to the death camp, all the while my mind conjuring images that made it difficult to breathe. I wasn't able to go on my high school trip to Poland, and ever since, I had looked for an opportunity to go. One does not leave for Poland on such a trip willy-nilly. This is not a vacation or time off but a painful experience for both the mind and the heart.
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I would like to shine the spotlight on those same important journeys that simply vanished with the outbreak of the pandemic. There was no official decision or declaration by the education minister, but there was a heated debate in the Knesset or some other heated public debate. Someone decided to phase them out of the education system. Now, too, in the post-coronavirus era, everything is done at a very low level and on the basis of private initiatives and not a systemic, comprehensive line. And the worst part? It doesn't seem like anyone really cares.
For years, a debate has been waged over the necessity of these Poland trips, in particular for high-school students. This is an important and serious debate, and we should contend with the arguments at hand and create additional, parallel frameworks. But in Israel, as in Israel, the tradition has passed and an alternative has yet to arrive. The tradition of the Poland trips is fading, and of all the grand alternatives proposed, nothing has been implemented on a national level: not the adoption and study of Jewish life before the war, not organized projects with Holocaust survivors, not trips inside Israel or the creation of joint programs with institutes for Holocaust education. Nothing.
"The trips are an important agent of memory that forces schools to focus on the issue," Ori Meiselmann, a Poland tour guide, told me. "Despite the criticism and the problematic aspects, they have no substitute."
National projects that focus on the Holocaust are necessary for all of Israeli society, in particular the youth. The Poland trip enterprise is a magnificent and veteran enterprise. The Education Ministry's disconnect from this asset, in the absence of any appropriate alternative and without any thought or public debate, is a disgrace. Ben-Gurion International Airport was packed with people heading overseas during the Passover holiday, and the Poland trips, which came to an end during the pandemic, are still stuck?
The Holocaust is growing increasingly distant from us, and we are pushing it further away. Years pass, memory is eroded, survivors die, and the second- and third-generation Holocaust survivors who grew up on the stories of Shoah are already moving on. Because the Holocaust is difficult, a superhuman catastrophe that is difficult for us to bear, and that sometimes, we prefer to repress. And so, instead of improving and perfecting the focus on the Holocaust, we simply run from it. Alternatives to the high-school trips could have been considered, the trips to Poland could have been improved or integrated with other activities, but we are simply phasing them out.
The Jewish state is shirking itself of the past and hoping that no one notices. But the phasing out of the Poland trips is just a symptom of a deeper problem. The Holocaust necessarily leads us to contend with national questions, and we just can't be bothered.
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