The following was written on Friday, December 5th, 2008.
Movement and migration have been important parts of human life since the first communities made their way out of Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. Though today there are still several nomadic cultures around the world, nomadic movement as a human institution became all but entirely obsolete thousands of years ago as the agricultural revolution made way for settled civilizations and the establishment of nations and states. Still, especially in developing countries, every year millions of people in search of opportunity migrate from rural areas to the closest cities. Of course immigration policy is a constant issue for governments trying to balance economic stability, social order, and population growth sensitivity. The entire growth model of humanity’s movement, physically from place to place and developmentally from nomadic wandering to settled civilizations—not to mention the movement of culture and ideas—is evident today across the world. It continues to progress and increase in complexity with new dimensions emerging every day as technology allows for increased communication and cultural diffusion.
Still, the truth is that while mass movement has been a common thread in human history, international travel experiences have always been rare. I have never felt so lucky in my life. This is saying a lot, considering that I’ve already been on this program for almost two months. As if it wasn’t already clear to us that Kivunim is a unique program that provides unique opportunities, as we traveled from Athens up to Sophia we met people who have never left their country of origin, and visited places that have never seen a tour bus. Just the sheer beauty of the natural world was enough to make us feel closer than ever to who we are and where we live. Yet, that was just the beginning. We experienced some of the oldest and most well known pieces of history in the world as well as some of the most obscure ones. We read street signs and learned some rudimentary vocabulary in new languages. We met with Jews who remember Jewish life before the Holocaust and those who are trying to resurrect Judaism after half a century of communist rule. We prayed in synagogues that haven’t held 51 Jews in decades and have probably never housed a service of 51 Jewish youth alone. We tried new food and new currency, and were able to explore and navigate new cities. In so many ways, I have never been further from home in my life, and yet I have never felt closer to my roots, nor to how far they extend.
When we landed in Athens, the first thing that occurred to me was that it was more foreign than anywhere I had ever been. Before this trip my international travels had amounted to Israel, England and Canada. Greece was the first place I had ever been where I couldn’t speak or read the language. Even Hebrew, with its own alphabet, is familiar enough to me, though I will admit that I didn’t read the French on the signs in Canada. One of the ulterior goals behind Kivunim’s international travels is not just to open us up to some of the lesser known threads of Jewish history but also to take us to places where we would not necessarily go if we are fortunate enough to travel later in life. Case in point: although we did go to Greece, the islands were not a stop on our tour. To have distinct mental images, smells, sounds and feelings tied to Bulgaria, a country that would be very easy to simply lump into the “Eastern Bloc,” is very powerful. The feeling of replacing a generalization or a fixed image in one’s mind with a fluid and enticing taste of reality is something that simply cannot be replaced, but must be built upon.
If as one of the cradles of civilization Greece was an appropriate first trip in our series of international travels this year, then it was all the more fitting that the first thing we did in Athens was climb up to the Acropolis. Being in the presence of such old and significant structures, I found myself shocked by how real they were. Besides being reminiscent of meeting a movie star, it reminded me of visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem. There are parallels simply in how the “Old City” of Athens has been preserved at the center of a modern city. Of course I didn’t connect to the Parthenon on a Jewish level directly, but a large part of Kivunim’s goals, especially on the international trips, is trying to balance our Jewish and broader human identities in order to learn more about where they intersect.
After visiting the Acropolis we went to the Jewish museum and main synagogues of Athens, and had an audience with the chief rabbi of Greece. One particularly incredible part of a visit we made to one of the synagogues was hearing Torah be chanted there; the reader chanted the Torah with different voices, speeds and intonations—as if to portray a dramatization of some kind. This was shocking on the one hand, because most American Jews, besides being unable to understand the biblical Hebrew of the Torah, are used to hearing it chanted with one particular set of tonal inflections that masks the dramatic quality of its verses. How appropriate, we all thought, for Greek Jews to chant the Torah like an ancient Greek epic poem...
We spent Shabbat with the local Jewish youth, and were given ample time to roam the city. Moving on to Chalkida, we had the sobering experience of visiting a Jewish community that will in all likelihood cease to exist within the next hundred years. Our director Peter Geffen led us in a prayer for the leaders of the community that felt truly appropriate. I really appreciated Peter’s use of prayer in these circumstances, to bless the leaders of the Jewish community in Chalkida, and then to show appreciation for the wonders of the natural world when we got to Delphi and Meteora. Although I’ve never been particularly religious, being able to pray out of feeling a connection to the spontaneous meaning of what a prayer stands for in the first place—beyond the age of the tradition itself—is a very moving experience.
At Delphi we visited the old site of the Oracle, which is where many Greek rulers went to seek advice from the god Apollo through his Medium. Part of what made Delphi so meaningful was that, unlike Athens, which is a modern European capital, Delphi is all but unadulterated. You can easily look out on the mountains and imagine that you are living in any time period. Even the town itself has a sort of quaint antique vibe. In Meteora we took our bus to the heights of the mountains that rise out of the plains of central Greece, to visit a different time period. The monasteries there were built into the mountains during the early years of Orthodox Christianity.
Delphi and Meteora were two of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Needless to say, our hotel in Delphi won the award for best room with a view. Even (or, dare I say, especially) the bus rides were absolutely breathtaking. The earth in these places is so vibrant and far from mundane. There is something about the natural world in Greece, whether it’s the Acropolis in Athens, the Oracle at Delphi, or the monasteries of the Meteora mountains, that makes it easy to connect to the organic energy that inspired the societies in these places to develop. My roommate Jason said it best when we got off the bus at a lookout point just outside of Delphi during sunset. As the sun was bursting through from behind the clouds, while other clouds rolled down the mountains behind us, Jason exclaimed, “If someone told you that Apollo was behind that cloud, you’d have to believe them!” Truly, it didn’t require very much imagination to understand why the monks chose to live and pray in those mountains.
Accordingly, I found myself connecting to these places on an almost religious level. I found myself inspired to write and invent. I find it very interesting that these places, which inspired creativity and innovation two weeks ago, are also the places where people felt closest to their creators thousands of years ago. My peers and I could have read a lot more and studied for years about Greece to enhance our experience before visiting, but ultimately the natural energy and meaning of these places required very little preparation to perceive. In short, I would posit that if someone didn’t tell you that Apollo lived behind those clouds, you would say it yourself. At a time when I feel my childhood slipping away each day, these places made me appreciate that the heart of human imagination truly is our oldest tradition and it can never die. I don’t just mean Ancient Greek mythology; I’m talking about something as basic as the ability to plan a hunt before one is too hungry to think straight. The frontal lobe is most literally what sets us apart as human beings, and as far as memory is also included in that biological phenomenon, it is only appropriate that these places of such profound historical significance made me feel closer than ever to that fact.
On our way to Salonika—really the curricular highlight of the trip as far as Jewish history is concerned—we stopped in the town of Veria to celebrate Thanksgiving. I’ll just say that it was very heartwarming, but somehow the decorations alone couldn’t disguise the fact that we were still eating spanicoppota (spinach pie) and pasta. Veria was one of the most powerful places that we visited, as much because of what is there as what is missing. The town of Veria used to be home to hundreds of Jewish families. Today there are only about ten individuals. I found myself really wrestling with what it must be like to identify as a Jew in a place where the community is so limited and the access to the major centers of modern Jewry are so distant. As far as the northeast United States is concerned, I come from a pretty small Jewish community, but even compared to some Jewish communities in the Deep South, Veria is a whole different ball game. However, combined with the eerie silence of the Jews of Veria is a really hopeful and positive story of a municipality that is doing wonderful things to preserve the old synagogue in town and not let it fade away like the people who used to use it. As Kivunim held a short mincha (afternoon) prayer service in the synagogue, Peter emphasized the historical significance not only of the synagogue itself but of our presence inside it. Never in its history, he proclaimed, had this synagogue housed a prayer service exclusively made up of so many young Jews—let alone Americans. We had received a similar reception from the people of Chalkida, but again Veria was all the more powerful because no one was there; we literally brought the synagogue back to life as we chanted the prayers. As solemn as they are, it is places like Veria that empower us, reminding us that the processes of history and society that transcend us all as individuals really would not happen if we weren’t here.
The next and final stop on our tour of Greece was Salonika, or Thessaloniki, the capital of the north. Before World War II Salonika was home to 90% of Greek Jews. The city was actually 60% Jewish, making it one of the most vibrant communities of the Jewish Diaspora. Unfortunately it is exactly this vibrance that made it a prime target for Nazi destruction during WWII, when 90% of its Jews (approximately 70,000 people) were killed in Auschwitz. Most of the survivors moved to Athens after the War because it was too expensive to rebuild their homes in Salonika. Being in this city and realizing how little Jewish influence is left in everyday life was really heavy. Again, almost as powerful as what we did see was what we didn’t see, according to the history that we learned about what had once existed there. We spent Shabbat at the local Jewish Community Center and prayed in their synagogue. Although it is small, Salonika’s Jewish community is certainly not in as dire straits as those of Chalkida or Veria, but it was striking how underdeveloped it seemed. Salonika was the perfect transition from Greece to Bulgaria, because we began to connect to the spirit of revitalization that exists in some of the more promising Jewish communities.
As we boarded the train for a six-hour ride to Bulgaria, we came to terms with how little we actually knew about this place. We had learned the basic story, which happens to be very inspiring, but our brains were fraught with post-communist Eastern European imagery and little else. Bulgaria didn’t have anything very distinct associated with it for most of us. But as with Salonika, we were soon asking out of equal parts wonder and outrage why we had never learned about it before Kivunim. One can imagine how those students with twelve years of formal Jewish education felt when they found out that there was a city called Salonika, which they had never heard of despite the fact that it had been one of the major centers of the Jewish world at one point. This sentiment became all the more potent in Bulgaria.
When we got off the train, I immediately felt I had reached an even higher threshold of feeling foreign. Aside from the cold and the faint smell of smoke, I remember looking at my first Bulgarian sign and wondering where some of the non-Greek characters had come from. Such is the sliding scale of familiarity! The capital city of Sophia was beautiful. It had all the trappings of a European city, with its squares, churches and Roman architecture. Perhaps the most striking piece of the skyline was the synagogue, which, resembling a castle, is the second largest Sephardic synagogue in Europe. We also visited the second largest Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, which showed the vestiges of communism a little bit more. In Plovdiv we were able to meet with some elderly Bulgarian Jews, who told us their stories. This was a great opportunity for those of us who know a little Spanish, because the first language of Jewish communities in Greece and Bulgaria before the War was Ladino (a hybrid of Hebrew and Spanish), dating back to the culture of the Jews who were expelled from Spain and moved into these Mediterranean countries in the 16th century, ultimately taking dominance over the culture of the native Romaniote Jews.
The story of the Bulgarian Jewish community is as uplifting as it is intriguing. Essentially, before WWII the Jews were much more assimilated into society in Bulgaria, and were less conspicuous and centralized than the majority of Jewish communities across Europe. Aside from the public good will concerning the Jews, because Bulgaria was allied with Germany, its government had more leeway than that of France for example, especially in dealing with Jews. In the end the Jews of Bulgaria were saved from the death camps, though many were sent to work. Although they were not killed, the anxiety of being Jewish in Europe at that time, sure that it was always only a matter of time before they too were taken to Auschwitz, incited about 90% of Bulgarian Jews to move to Israel after World War II, so the community’s numbers still decreased just as much as other more tragic ones across Europe. Then communism pushed an already inconspicuous Jewish community further into dilution as religion was forbidden.
Today Bulgaria has one of the most progressive and vibrant Jewish communities in the world, yet it is almost entirely unknown to the majority of the Jewish world. Since anyone younger than sixty was raised without any concept of what it means to be Jewish, Bulgaria has a Jewish community run by the youngest generation of professionals, a group of twenty-somethings who came of age during the fall of communism and are intrigued by this lost piece of their identities. They are determined to resurrect and reconstruct what it means to be Jewish in Bulgaria, and they are doing a really fantastic job. They have a well-attended summer camp and even a school. Leagues beyond Salonika’s Jewish community in terms of cultivating leadership among the youth, Bulgarian Jews are a community that is struggling but thriving. Indeed, in terms of numbers they are millions behind the United States, but in terms of percentages they are disproportionately more successful in developing Jewish identity and increasing numbers. When this point was made in a presentation made by the thirty-year-old president of their community, Kivunim reached its peak of shock that this place is left out of the mainstream Jewish narrative—and frankly, I think some of us were ashamed that America takes so much of the spotlight! Granted, their small size probably doesn’t hurt their ability to organize each other, and my first reaction was that they didn’t have the freedom and comfort (et cetera) of the American Jewish community that can lead people to drop out and interpret out. Yet, being at the crossroads of Mediterranean, European and Asian culture, Bulgaria prides itself on being very diverse (which is all the more impressive in the Balkan region where diversity is so often the root of violence), so even with such a small Jewish community, nurturing pluralism is a high priority.
This was a fitting note to end the trip on. Broadening our conception of the world and what it means to be Jewish is at the core of Kivunim’s mission—especially when it comes to the international program. Like many American Jews, I am all too aware of how my sense of Jewish life has been constructed around an image of a people with just two foci, in America and Israel. This brings us to the rhetorical question of our time: why settle for simplification? After two weeks in Greece and Bulgaria, I feel I have taken another small yet nonetheless significant step towards uncovering truly how much more is behind that question than merely rhetoric. Being on Kivunim, it becomes increasingly clear to my peers and I that as the world is globalizing and calling on a new generation of people who can realize their connections to others on an international level, the Jewish people have the seeds in the geography of our history and our present day to take on this global identity that we talk so much about. The story of the Jewish people can be a model for the story of humanity, of a group with an endless of amount of diversity and fragmentation combined with an ultimately common story and core identity. For the first time since we arrived in Israel, I feel that I am actually seeing the reconciliation of my Jewish identity and my concern for the world. I always knew that these two pieces of me could coexist and even play off of one another, but truly wrapping my mind around how inextricably intersected they are is a process that has only begun to unfold.
