A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [132]
The day after the Umschlagplatz ceremony, Gebert and some of his group participated in a small private memorial over a ghetto hero's grave in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery. This was not a large Solidarity show but was planned for a few local people. As the group was arriving at the cemetery, the official Jewish Community, which was sponsored and controlled by the regime, had the solid steel gates to the cemetery closed. Unable even to see past the rusting metal, they laid their wreaths on the gate. There were not even ten Jewish men, a minion, to say Kaddish for the dead. Some of the foreign Jews came to the cemetery in tour cars driven by Orbis, the state travel agency, and shot photos without getting out of their cars. Gebert tried to see their faces through the closed windows of the air-conditioned cars, and for the first time he did not feel proud to be a Jew.
NINEL KAMERAZ AND HER HUSBAND were part of a small group of Solidarity supporters who produced pamphlets and books on taboo subjects, often contradicting official versions of history. Printed on a hand press, each sheet of four pages had to be placed in the press, printed, and then lifted off. It was a common process in the Solidarity movement. Geberfs overfed black and white cat was named Offset after the piece of equipment they could only dream of getting.
The pages had to be collated and stapled and then clandestinely handed out by the thousands. To Ninel, it was a fight against the system that had broken her family. “Jews would come and say to me, why are you involved in all this? Why do you have to fight this? There are no Jews. Why is this your business? This was my business because Communism destroyed so many Jews. It was terrible in my own family. It was my business, and I'm glad I did it.”
In 1983, Jaruzelski allowed Warsaw's one remaining synagogue—the spacious, decorative turn-of-the-century Nozyk Synagogue, which had survived the war by serving as a stable for German horses—to be reopened. Ninel started going to services for major Jewish holidays. A hard core of a half-dozen elderly Yiddish speakers formed the beginning of a minyan. One of them, Moishe Shapiro, approached Ninel and asked if she wanted her two sons to learn Hebrew.
Ninel had already come to the conclusion that she would never be able to adapt to a Jewish way of life. It was too alien after two generations of Communism. The one thing she could do was pass Jadaism on to her sons. “But there was nothing Jewish around. It v/as up to me. This was my responsibility,” she said. “For me, the most important thing is that my children know that they are Jews. What they do with it, that is their business. But they have to know, and then they will have to choose.”
Lukasz was already 13 and Mateusz was 11—Luke and Matthew. Mateusz immediately loved the idea, but Lukasz was not interested in religion. His mother decided he had no choice: They both had to study Hebrew for one year. “How can you say you don't want it when you don't know anything about it?” she argued. After a year of study Lukasz was still certain that he didn't want it. But Mateusz continued. He had spent his childhood delivering his parents’ underground literature through the Warsaw streets— “between the tanks,” he liked to say. He had grown up with the idea that Poland was his country and that it was his responsibility to make it a country that still had Jews.
Mateusz asked Ninel if he could have a bar mitzvah. It was what she had wanted, but having never in her life done anything religious, she had felt she could not talk about it. “I didn't feel I could dare to tell him to do it. But if he came to me and said I want a bar mitzvah — it gave me such happiness.”
A bar mitzvah marks the moment, on the thirteenth birthday, when a