Shavei Israel organizes first Shabbaton in Katowice, Poland
Havdalah ceremony at the closing of the Katowice Shabbaton
Shavei Israel held its first ever weekend Shabbaton in Katowice, Poland, at the end of October. Seventy people from throughout Poland (and a few special guests from Israel, including Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund) attended the 3-day seminar, including 40 from the Katowice community itself, some of whom were on Shavei Israel’s recent seminar for young Polish Jews in Israel. The highlight of the weekend was the bar mitzvah of Karol, a 16-year-old boy who only discovered his family was Jewish a few years ago. Michael Freund wrote about the bar mitzvah and the history of Katowice here.
Shavei Israel’s emissary to Katowice, Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis, fills us in on some of the details from the weekend:
“The Shabbaton started with the affixing of a mezuzah on the door of the community building, after the completion of repairs and a remodeling. This was followed by prayers, the Friday night meal and an Oneg Shabbat. On Shabbat was Karol’s bar mitzvah. There were classes given by [Polish Chief Rabbi] Michael Schudrich, Dr. Lawrence Weinbaum, Joel Nowicki, Miriam Gonczarska and Monika Krawczyk. In the afternoon, we toured Jewish Katowice. On Saturday night, the Be’er Miriam group [see our description of this special project here] hosted a party at the community center, with food, a movie and musical performances.”
On Sunday morning, the group met again for prayers, where Michael Freund presented the bar mitzvah boy with his first pair of tefillin (phylacteries). The group then visited the nearby town of Bedzin which has an illustrious Jewish history, two remaining shtiebelach (Yiddish for small neighborhood synagogues) and a Jewish cemetery.
Bedzin was a center for Zionist organizations and Jewish educational institutions from the 1850s until World War II. The first pioneers of the “3rd Aliyah” to Israel came from Bedzin. In 1921, a full 60 percent of Bedzin’s population was Jewish. Indeed, the entire Silesia region, where Katowice and Bedzin are located, was once a thriving Jewish metropolis. That was tragically decimated by the Nazis. And yet, as Michael Freund wrote in his article about Karol’s bar mitzvah:
By every rational measure, I thought to myself, this moment would have been unthinkable 70 years ago, when the very existence of Jewish life in Katowice was in danger of being snuffed out forever. And yet here we were, in a room bathed in Shabbat sanctity, defying history and logic to declare that the Jewish people still live!
We have pictures of the Shabbaton, including the field trip to Bedzin, the Be’er Miriam party, tefillin ceremony, and much more, here in this special photo gallery.