W

e made the trip eight years apart. Back in seminary, we did a 20-hour excursion to Prague. Five shuls, a cemetery, a picnic on the Danube, a forgotten park on the hill, wide-eyed teenagers tumbling into a piece of the past. And out of it. This was, this isn’t, this will no longer be. Go make sense of that.
The next year we did several days in Poland, in Hungary.

I didn’t want to go back again.

My Canadian husband did. He’d never been to Eastern Europe, and now that we lived a hop away, why not go, discover, explore?

I resisted. I was haunted by the world that was. A world that had burnt, frozen, starved to death, or fled to distant shores. And while the remnants were beautiful, they ached with emptiness, with a rusting and crumbling grandiosity that was rusting and crumbling. I never wanted to go back. It’s the kind of thing you need to see once. Why again?

I made my point. End of discussion. Until the next time. I held firm. Eventually my husband flew out on his own, to daven at Reb Shayele, to the rebbe Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk on his yahrtzeit. Never really a tour, just the tziyon, a bite in the “Rebbe’s house,” and back home.

And then his kollel arranged a trip to Prague. Just one day, but a full itinerary, like I’d done way back. The shuls, the cemetery, the river. He set off at dawn. A couple of hours later, I was just starting my day, and my phone pinged with pictures. Memories exploded in my mind. The shul with the names of those who’d died in the Holocaust painted onto a wall, family names bold and large, first names smaller, so what hit you were the families, entire clans destroyed together.

The pictures the children of the ghetto had drawn. Scenes from their bounded lives, unbounded imaginations. I remember one with a tiny, twirly signature — Esther. It had two dancers, one white, one black. A bride and groom perhaps. But there were ominous undertones: The black figure was bigger, scarier, an animal-man growing out of the shadows. A dance with the devil by nine-year-old Esther.
The golem figurines everywhere, furry ones hanging in tourist shops like little teddy bears, cute and cuddly, a warped take on a legend. And the shul, the Altneu shul, quiet grandeur, golden candelabras, aron kodesh of stone, and there, somewhere, up in the attic, the real golem was purported to be.
My husband was singing in that shul of echoes. He sent a video of their kumzitz, he and his friends sitting under the sculpted ceilings, reaching back to the past through song.

“Hey, I think I remember something about that shul,” I messaged. “The tour guide told us that where the chazzan stands, a part of the floor is carved out of the ground, so when he davens it should actually be ‘mimamakim kerasicha Hashem.’ ”

Two minutes later, my husband sent a picture. The floor hollowed out and carpeted, noticeably lower. It was there, sure as stone. I looked at the image again. A square of carpet laid over the chiseled-out stone. The fringes of the amud cover swaying over the abyss. From the depths I call to You, Hashem.
I’d know that picture anywhere. I remembered standing around that little carpeted space, craning over shoulders to see, the dramatic American cadence in our Jewish history teacher-turned-tour guide’s voice, as she explained the congregation’s literal, scrupulous fulfillment of the verse. Looking down, I’d felt a long way from that innocence. My shoe only inches away.

From the depths…

(Excerpted from Family First, Issue 621)