3. Emet Poland Experience with Rabbi Kraft

[Music] well first of all you know i just want to say this is the first time that i've the emmett staff has seen each other in over two months so i think we've seen each other on zooms well we're finally looking each other face-to-face of course with social distancing and it's just a a wonderful wonderful things just to see each other live again and keeping the mission of emmett alive and you know i just want to thank also just share bruneberg's words of thanking the whole emmy staff what we've been doing right now you know this last two months has been uh it's been something you know and we haven't stopped we have just been just saying what can we do to touch and affect and and influence the lives of of you know of our students in any way that we can and i think we've been doing it and uh rav runeberg thank you for your leadership and the entire emmett's staff and emma community for for just being part of it and right now of course during our our campaign the community is is responding and just seeing what we're doing and and i thank everybody who's contributed and just been so generous and has just poured out their hearts and saying we were with you in this mission it's a tough time we know that but the mission doesn't stop whatever is doing is too important so you know i have with me jonathan welcome thank you for coming to the studio and uh you know agreeing to to talk a little about the poland trip so jonathan let me ask you a question first of all you've been an m student for how long i think it's already been three years now three years we've known each other about three years yeah in three years and you're a family also part of that right my cousins shelly and esser are the ones who brought me in and in terms of you look at the community your friends you made great friends here and and in terms of your that was the the question you know you know when we went to poland when last summer we went to poland a year will be a year or two years ago almost two years ago in may or august we went down we went in august i think because i remember it being very hot we're on the august trip so let me hear you guys a tough question poland we went to death camps we went to cemeteries we um you know we saw ashes of of in one place in maddenic of jews who were who were how many in that that they don't even know how many tons of ash there are you could have done anything with your summer you've gone to california you could have gone to florida you could have gone anywhere why why did you want to come with us to to poland you know i think that emmett understands one thing which is that and or there are many ways you can plug jews into their jewish identity and one thing that i never felt with emmet is they're not trying to force religion on anyone we want you to come back to hashem on your own way on your own path but the first thing emmett does is it gives you what a jewish identity is and there's very many ways you could do that but by sending people to poland and seeing what happened to jews just for being jewish just for existing as they were you get this understanding that i am part of a group and you know i can change my name i can say i can i could say i converted to another religion i could do whatever thing but at the end of the day everyone's going to treat you like a jew and you know a lot of the times it's not a nice way to be treated but emmett gives you a community a family where you feel welcome and you feel at home constantly and the poland trip just pushes that on you it puts it in your head that you're like i i'm part of this unique people and it's you know you could go to the beach in summer yeah but that's not going to make you feel whole inside that's going to make you feel good a little bit but poland it wakes you up you don't come back the same you come back with the knowledge that you have a job as a jew that's interesting that you said you know when we talk about the trip you know we call it the pollen journey you know we call it a trip we say it's a journey a journey meaning that you know a trip is a place you go and you see and you take some pictures and you send a postcard home and a journey means that you come out a different person and that's what we talk about over the emma journey you know but the biggest question john your your family is from where you're georgia georgia not the state from georgia not not the place where they stop social distancing really early and seems to be very successful ex-soviet union state georgia from from georgia you're from georgia you know and yet you went to paulden with us which is poland is really the story of you know ashkenaz jury yeah you know when people say it emmett you know right right now our staff is diverse right now we have so many we have rutenberg and i both you know ashkenaz and we started ahmed and yet our staff right now is is both ashkenaz and and bukhari and and it's it's a beautiful mixture i think that's what we did emmett were we're one nation we're one one people and we don't make distinctions it's worth noting that when people who don't like jews say that they want to destroy jews they don't say i want to destroy ashkenazis they say i want to destroy jews they don't make a distinction and emmet teaches us to not make that distinction because all too often jews divide ourselves by well i'm not i'm bukharian i'm georgian i'm sparty i'm ashkenazi you're a jew and in the eyes of hashem and in the eyes of the world you're a jew so you feel as even though you have spartak roots you're coming to see the maybe the ashkenaz story it's it's it's your story it's no no difference it's all our story because we went when we were in auschwitz they have a room which is a giant book that stretches longer than the room we're in right now just names of the victims who they know of the holocaust people who they were able to identify as victims of the holocaust and you'll find people there with buhari and last names you'll find people there with george and last names you'll find people there with any kind if you're a jew it was their sacred mission to destroy you and now as a jew it's our sacred mission to make the world a better place because we're still here and they're not and that's true but when we're looking at that book that must contain over one million names we were supposed we all looked and alphabetically would look to find her name and so many of our students behind students aminos pinhusos matatos they found names yeah it must have been either the grandparent was in either maybe was a prisoner of war or perhaps were living someplace with germans were able to get them so it's really all our story it's always going to be our story and emmet i was telling this to rabbi craft earlier but there is a thing that occurred when we were on the poland trip so people know how emmet helps jews we know we see how emmett helps people like me people like rabbi fazilov and jacob and people who are part of the program but you know when we were in poland we were i think we were in vienna at the time and we were walking through the streets and um there was two people who were following us they were interested and they hadn't seen a group of jews walking through the streets like this before and there was a woman who approached us and i know she spoke to you a little bit and she told you how her mother's mother's mother was a holocaust victim and her mother was her grandmother was given away to a non-jewish family to be kept safe during the war but always there was this line of jewish mothers and we found out that she was still halachically jewish and emma like you wouldn't the odds of that emmet because emmett does the polit journey polling journey and were able to go and do that we found this woman who maybe she would have never have come back to judaism without us being there to help her and now that's one line of judaism that the in the eyes of the world was lost that has been restored yeah absolutely i remember that story very well you know you know just to clarify jonathan saying you know part of what emma does is we part of our trip is it begins in poland you know in this case we started the trip in in i believe we started in warsaw and then we kind of make a circle around in poland and and we have a beautiful shabbat in krakow yeah and then sunday morning we go to auschwitz where we experience you know the the camp and and working out the death camp and then you're referring to then afterwards the way that the trip ends is we actually ride we go we travel to prague yes and this trip we went to prague and vienna yeah and i believe this was in vienna right we met this we met this young woman who was from prague and she came over to us she said she she feels very connected to something jewish in her and and she doesn't really know what it is and she asked us and we she explained that she said her great-grandmother was somebody who was hidden during the war and we traced the line down to her and we realized she was jewish and you know the happy ending of that story jonathan is you know she found us that she said could we should you join us on the bus and we said sure right we said absolutely so she came a little bit on the tour so when i got back to america i started doing some research for her and i invested and she sent me her papers and her story and it was a story that really fit it was really about a great grandmother unfortunately who had intermarried even in the 40s and the great-grandmother and was able to was able to survive with a granddaughter and that granddaughter was this woman's grandmother and we traced it back and we realized it's a story that makes sense and she's jewish and i've been in contact with her and she has plans to go study in jerusalem and so people understand this is what emit is it's bringing jews back it's not just here in queens yes we're here in queens centered out that it's jews from all across the world jews who you would never even think of that we are going to help that's who emmett is coming and bringing back to judaism and that's what emma is it's like the hand of god reaching out and saying you don't have to be lost anymore we have a family here and we love you and we want you to be with us you know it's it's um if you were to think about this journey to poland you know if i would ask you a question jonathan when what changed in you what changed you know we were on this journey together for this journey was about 10 days including poland prague and vienna and those who are very close and everyone on the bus gets we get all the the whole team gets close whole group gets close what changed in you what what how did you come out in some way a different person where you said you know i i came in looking at the world one way i came and looked in my judaism in a certain way i came and look at myself a certain way but when i ended this journey something clicked in me what would you define is that that click that happened in you for me at least the the click that i felt was going there and seeing everything we saw we we saw mass graves of children we buried bones of jewish people that were victims of the holocaust and we saw all this and we saw the remnants of what was once like a flourishing jewish world in europe and what little of it was left and people there trying to keep it alive for me when i came back i felt like an extreme amount of you feel amount a certain unique sadness when you're in poland seeing all this happen but you come back feeling sort of i don't think pride is the right word but like emboldened saying that this isn't all of it like people a lot of the time they like to think of jews as you know when you think of jews they're like they're the victims of the holocaust they're they're a victimized people they're they're wanderers no one wants them and i came back from that trim trip thinking like we're not like that we're one of the most powerful people in the world because you hit us and you hit us and you hit us and we always get back up you know that's you know i i know what you're saying i've i've done this trip now this journey with emmett i think five times and that summer i went twice and and each time i have a similar feeling that there's something about the jewish nation which is just it can't defeat us and there's something about us which every jew matters you know that they're so interested in in every jew you know i remember we were um it wasn't on this trip one trip we started in berlin and we went to wanzi which is where they planned out the final solution and on the board there is a is numbers of every jew all over europe and it said poland you know one 3.5 million soviet union was whatever was 2.8 million france one one million and then it got to finland and it said seven and seven jews they were interested in seven jews it was in their mind we're gonna destroy the seven jews in finland and there it is on the wall to be displayed and i think we're all struck that what do they care about seven jews for it must mean that every jew really matters and i thought to myself you know if they care about jews that much how much more so we care about jews but we have to care about each other most definitely you know they like to say that no one is more discriminatory towards a people than someone who's part of that people and that could be true even about jews but we need to take that discrimination turn it into a good thing it's not that we look at you and we're like well you're a different kind of jew than me look here's like but you're a jew and just like they made their names be forgotten were so interested in getting just those seven jews we need to be interested and be like well i know there are seven jews there who maybe they're not so connected to judaism and we need to make it our goal and our mission to go and bring them back and bring them back that's that's the mission of that's the mission of emmett that's that's what we're all about when this organization that that every jew matters and we're going to rescue you we're going to bring you back you know someone you know peeps made a nice comparison one time you know that as the trains were closing and you know in those cattle cars and and we sat in a cattle car in in lodge we were in that cattle car together and we crammed in there we sat on the floor and we sang and we told stories and we tried to have the experience a little bit what must have been what must have what jews must have felt like but imagine as that cattle car was closing and you could have pulled one jew out and saved that jew to live a jewish life and to be whole how much would we have paid to pull that one jew out just one joke probably given everything we have i if you'll allow me i was once and i actually met this rabbi thanks to emmet sending me on a shabbaton in connecticut to meet him there was there's a rabbi who i know who both his parents are holocaust survivors and he told us a story about his father and his father in the warsaw ghetto hid on the roof of the nazi headquarters in order to avoid being found and he saw that the nazis were rounding up jews to throw in to the um cars to take into auschwitz and he noticed he saw one jew who he recognized who was a father of many children so he got up and he jumped down and he went to that jew and he told him run away straight i'll trade places with you and you know that for the nazis they didn't care they want a thousand jews they're gonna get a thousand jews right and every day he said he's told us his father the way he prayed hashem to survive well he didn't say let me survive every day he said hashem i risked my life for another jew please just give me one day and i think this quarantine and how emmett has been so and deeply involved a lot of people thought if this was going to happen we weren't going to hear from emmett for a while that's a lie i think i'm hearing more from emmett more so than like ever before because every day there's a new program a new online meeting a new seminar a new speech a new share for us to listen to and because our resources have opened up more thanks to the online and you know that's why we're doing this now to keep that programs going but that's what we got to do every day we need to look hashem and say hashem just give us this one day we'd risk our life for another jew and that's what emmett's doing they're risking so much for other jews thank you that's that's beautiful to say i i you know just one more day and and just one more jew and and you know that that's that's i think in some ways the power when we go to poland you know we to see that every jew really matters and and they were interested in every jew we're interested in every jew and you know in a world we live in today of such immense assimilation where here we've been a nation for three thousand three hundred something years and we have a generation that doesn't really know what it means to live a life as jews and you know that we're going to go and we're going to say we're going to pull you out and you know the truth of the matter is you know emmett's reached i mean thousands over the last 17 years we really have and we're we're very proud of that that we we've touched the lives of thousands of jews but the reality jonathan i think it would have been worthwhile even just for one definitely it wouldn't worthwhile just for you i have to say that i do omet so much because three years ago when i came in i was completely irreligious i didn't believe in god i was a self-declared atheist i didn't want to hear about judaism and i came to emmett and you know after my i i did two shabbatons there and then after that i was keeping shabbat on shabbat full-time with my grandmother and step by step wearing tt full-time kippah kosher everything things that i thought would never have happened three years ago you asked me would you do this i would have said you're crazy but emmett finds a way to reach into your heart and show you that because it is emmet it's truth and you see the truth you once it's put in front of you you can't like turn away from it i've yet to meet someone who's come to emmet and tell me it's not for me yeah that's i think i remember the beginning when you first came to emmett yeah i look at you now with with uh with a beard and yamaha but more than that you're the beautiful beat out that you've always had but have really refined through study of torah thank you you know you know it's it's um you know just to jump back to poland for a moment you know for me a place that i've always moved by is when we go to that children's grave yes do you remember the children's grave where we um we start the day and we trace the journey of really what happened to a community and we start in this little town we see the synagogue which is destroyed and we start stop we stop there and we look at it and talk about we dance and then we go to a square where the jews were rounded up and and then we sit in the square remember we saddle was in the sun like where the jews had to sit for hours waiting and then we traveled to a grave which is unfortunate i mean a sad thing to say about a mass grave of thousands of babies that were murdered by the nazis and we sat there and we we we i remember we all wrote letters to people who we love and we said what can we what would we tell them in our last moment right now what do we want to tell them did you write a letter to somebody i sent a i wrote a letter to my parents and my grandmother on my phone and you know it's a very it was a very intense moment because you know different people express grief in different ways and it hit me in a way where it's you know i wasn't there crying but i was there and i was just like the pressure of the moment was weighing down on me and i was sitting there and thinking like how could something like this how could other people have let it happen how could people do it and how could it be that god forbid if it was us there 70 years ago it would have been us in that grave you feel how real how real it is and you know it's thank god there hasn't been anything like the holocaust in the last time but you know anti-semitism remains and we feel it especially here in new york we we see a lot of sometimes the people get very hateful towards jews but there i was sitting there and i was thinking and i was like these children were probably terrified wanting you know just to be with their parents just to have their mothers and their fathers hold them and you know it makes you think every little squabble and every little fight you get into with your family you're like what this is the point of it at the end of the day it's when god forbid something like this is not just something that could happen but it's something that has happened to us as a people and while the holocaust is the grandest scale it's ever happened on it's happened so many times before with the pogroms the spanish inquisition the crusades and just it's nothing new for us it's nothing new for us but it's important for us to realize that people like to say they're like well it's 20 20 now and i'm like back then they were saying well you know it's the 1900s now this isn't going to happen and they no one thought that would happen we need to keep in mind this constant head state poland teaches us this that that's right that we have to remain alert and we have to remain connected to hashem because he is our magen we say in the in amidah he is the shield of the jews that's right that i think you know i think that's the message that we really want to convey on the trip that that there's something different about us as a nation and anti-semitism doesn't go away you know and in this stark reality of the holocaust we see it and and a vast grave of babies and the question we say what makes us different there has to be something so special about us so unique about us and our survival is miraculous every every generation they wanted to call dorvador and you know something i always think about also that children's grave you know i listen to myself in their eyes who was the enemy little children were the enemy they believed in the power of little children we can't let these little children grow up if they grow up they're going to be strong jews and that's our enemy a jew they're almost reminding us and telling us who we are you know sometimes you want to learn about who you are you know ask your enemies what they think about you our enemies look at our babies and say we're scared of your babies well we must be a nation of such immense power and holiness yeah you say that rob i am reminded of a thing that i once heard i can't remember from where there was a holocaust survivor saying that he one time saw in auschwitz there was a man on his knees praying and he goes up and he says what are you doing he said i'm thanking god and he looks around he's like what could you possibly be thanking god for right look where we are look what's going on and he said this man says he's like i'm thanking god for not making us like them right for making us different that's right because if the roles were reversed it wouldn't have no that wouldn't have happened but it's just it for not making us like them for making us different for making us special we're a different people the world looks at us differently than they do anyone else that's a beautiful statement i i hear that you know and i i think we all felt that that if we were to have to change our place to be the victim or the perpetrator we would never do what they did and and there's something different about us as a nation and i think that's the specialness of the trip i think you know we walked away from that journey i shouldn't say a trip we walked away with that journey just saying that wow i i feel a different connection to who i am as a jew and such pride and such pride and such awareness that we are like no other nation and we're like no other nation it means we have a mission and what's that mission you know and that's what we're doing at ebitda yes the goal of that trip is well you come back down to new york and next next trip we try to say okay jerusalem next stop is jerusalem you have to get back through shalom now get the yeshiva get to seminaries and and learn what what's the mission what's it all about but that that's i think the power of this journey that and you know truth of the matter is jonathan you know it takes a lot of planning yes the whole staff behind the scenes right goldberger brother you know robbie ruttenberg the celia mrs muscat sarah b you know the whole team is working on this for the 40 students who come they're all working behind the scenes and and we say this is all worth it because the change that takes place in a person that realization of that uniqueness of who i am as a jew that's transformative another person says now what do i do with it and so many came back and he said uh we have to learn we have to discover who we are i like to call it and because it's none anyway what it sounds like i like to call it aggressive judaism not because it's aggressive it's because now we're gonna be much more vigorous about it i came back from poland thinking well you know i'm gonna be the most like loud and proud jew in the world no one's gonna keep me down and no one's and i'm gonna make sure everyone knows who i am and what my mission is and that's the mission of mf i think it is and sometimes that loudness doesn't have to be loud externally but it's loud inwardly yeah that there's a feeling of confidence i know who i am and i know what my mission is and i'm going to spread that mission with others you know i just um you know i remember we had uh we had two girls who we met at stony brook an interesting story about these two girls that they grew up in the soviet union and they were so distant from their judaism they didn't they never knew their grandmother had gone through the war has a hidden child the grandmother and the she never told the mother that she was even jewish mother didn't really know that she was jewish i knew it but barely knew it the mother never told these two girls that they were jewish they emigrated to america and in america these are just maybe as the immigrant soviet union they started asking questions and they started realizing we're jewish and they're already 18. and they came to america and we've discovered them on one of our universities and we started getting to know them and they started connecting to emmett in a very deep way and both of these young women started to see the beauty of who they were started making changes in their lives keeping kosher keeping shabbat and a very beautiful story that these two girls one friday night were lighting candles and in their hell in their home and their mother who never really knew she was jewish came over and said i'd like to light candles with you and she took two candles and put them next to these two girls and then the grandmother who was borough hashem also with them came a grandmother who grew was a hidden child during the war she said i'd also like to light two candles so you had grandchildren a mother and a grandmother all together lighting candles friday night how can we explain this you know emmet the youth of emmett you know young people like you jonathan and others you're bringing back your parents you're bringing back up a generation before you and we've never seen anything like this in history that the youth are getting so excited about who they are as jews i think emmett's lighting that spark in them but it's coming from you too it's coming from you rabbi keagle from emmett one of our great emmett rabbis told me he met my grandmother once we were at the same wedding for an emmett student two emmett students were getting married i happened to be related to one of them so we were at the wedding and we saw ravi keagle there and he started speaking to my grandmother in russian and she went to him and she started thanking him plus blessings like thank you for making my grandson religious and he said to her something that i feel like it's the essence of what you're saying now it's like i didn't do anything he already had it in him and that's what emmett's emmet it does so much but at the end what emmett's doing is it's opening the potential in the people who are already we're not changing anyone we're not making you different we're just waking up what's already inside of you that's a beautiful way to say it john that's it that's it we're there you know you don't take you don't take a branch and bend it yeah you know you don't want to break something yeah we touch the neshama we blow on the nisham a little bit but those that come to us want it they're available and then they're teaching their families and that's not the beauty of it how many brothers and sisters and cousins and parents and you know are affected by what so many our students like you are doing and you know the last prophecy in the torah in navi it says before meshech comes the last prophecy we're going to see is something a beautiful prophecy says the children will bring back the hearts of their parents and before she can explain what does that mean the generation of children are going to turn to their parents and say come join me in the path of hashem and that's what we're seeing right now so in many ways i feel the work of emmett is this is the the precursor to the messianic era yeah we're right here and the the generation of youth coming back like yourself saying to your grandmother look how beautiful this look how beautiful terrorism judaism is we're seeing nothing less than than then the description of what the messianic time the pre-messianic time will look like yeah and it's important to note that all the work emmett does and the people who support emma you're part of that mitzvah too so truth that everyone who supports emmett we thank you we thank you we're out there we're teaching and we're creating programs and we're involved with students and we're connecting but this is a partnership and it's a beautiful partnership and i want to thank from the bottom of my heart all of our supporters our main supporters small supporters and the love that we feel and the support these rabbi i want to support you why we ask rabbi how can i help so gladly want to give donations we want to be part of it and that's what hashem wants hashem wants that beautiful unity that beautiful partnership we're all part of this mission together and that's the beautiful you know maybe that's what emmett means you know aleph is the first letter of the hebrew alphabet and meme is the exact middle of the hebrew alphabet and tough is the last letter amid means you put it all together that's true those who teach those who support we all come together in truth and what's the truth the truth is to just get close to aveeno shibashimai jonathan thank you for joining us thank you so much for having me around thank you everybody thank you everybody for uh join the program tonight