Poland Pilgrimage #2

Julie Wolk and I and our crew of courageous journeyers are leaving Krakow today after two very full days beginning our pilgrimage. 

Yesterday we visited the forced labor/concentration camp of Plasow. 

Poland has a very complicated relationship with its Jewish past that is still in the early stages of healing and acknowledgment and reckoning.

This particular concentration camp has pretty much become a grown over wild land of herbs and trees. Only recently are there new memorials here indicating what the ground we are walking on really contains. Strangely there are paths throughout the wild space and folks come here to walk their dogs. At the base of the entrance stands a Shell gas station.

We were guided through this place by Karol,a master ethnobotanist/herbalist and Magda Rubenstein, director of an amazing artist/activist group in Krakow, called Festiv/Alt. 

We walked the land, some screamed and all wept. Others spontaneously laid their bodies on the earth and prayed into the great planet body. 

Karol showed us how rich the land is with healing herbs of all sorts, We found a place to harvest St. John’s Wort and Agrimony. We sang “Todah Rabah Adamah” a chant that spontaneously flowed through.

We returned to the city where, stationed at the Festiv/Alt offices,we processed the herbs and made them into tinctures and oils. I can absolutely imagine using this St. John’s Wort oil to anoint myself and my friends for seasonal rituals during the year, alllowing it to carry and convey  the essence of the land, her healing powers, and the energy of the ancestors of that place.

Plasow.

It was my first time visiting any kind of site like that and I’m going to be integrating it for a long time.

We are truly here in an alchemical process. We are receiving and transmuting the experiences of the Jewish people who lived here, our own ancestors, and our individual and collective soul

With tinctures in tow, the afternoon found us on a tour of the old Ghetto of Krakow led by the amazing scholar Adam Musial. He took us to stand before what’s left of the Ghetto wall.  So tall. No way over.  I’ve had “Why Do We Build the Wall” from Hadestown looping through my head all day. If you haven’t heard that song, run to listen to it.

Right now, I am on a bus with the group heading toward Tarnow, a much smaller town to the north to do a cemetery measuring ritual called feldmestn that our ancestors surely practiced for hundreds of years.  This practice was all but lost along with many of the rituals that were held by women like midwifery, mourning, and actively tending the souls of the dead. Thank goodness they were recorded in memory books (yizkr bukhs) and that wise souls like Kohenet Annie Cohen are excavating and sharing them.

In the Tarnow cemetery we will pray and make soul candles/neshome licht for our individual ancestors, for our own souls, for the collective needs of humanity and our beloved Mother Earth.

I have done this ritual three years in a row in our little cemetery in Ashland, but the thought of doing it here in one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Poland today has got tingles running up and down my spine.

After that we will visit the old synagogue of Lancut one of the incubators of vibrant Chasidism, to sing and pray together, and then a visit to Ulanow, the ancestral village/shtetl of one of the women in our group, and then onto Lublin, where we will stay the night in a hotel that used to be the grand Yeshiva.

Thanks for staying tuned and holding me in your prayers