On Bearing Witness in Auschwitz-Birkenau

Between 2013 and 2019, I returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau—first as a participant in a Bearing Witness retreat, and later as Executive Director of Zen Peacemakers International—often alongside its founder, the Jewish Zen teacher Roshi Bernie Glassman, and many other Zen teachers and clergy. I helped organize and co-lead the multi-faith, multi-day retreat there, guiding hundreds of individuals and families through barbed-wire paths, the barracks of children, men, and women, around the ruins of the crematoria, and among the tall, thin birch trees. There we sat—in silence, in prayer. “Auschwitz is the teacher here,” Bernie would say.

During these retreats, I facilitated sharing circles among participants from many countries—across Europe, the U.S., and Asia—including descendants of SS officers, Holocaust survivors, Syrian refugees, survivors of the Syrian civil war, as well as Israelis and Palestinians.

I am a third-generation survivor. My grandparents were survivors from Poland and Hungary; many of their relatives were murdered in Auschwitz. It was there that I first heard the Shema and Kaddish, and where I experienced Kabbalat Shabbat—moments that transformed me and ultimately led me to the rabbinate.

In the years that followed, I bore witness at Majdanek death camp, at the Radegast train station, and in the hometown of my ancestors in Przemyśl, Poland. I accompanied families on visits to ancestral homes and concentration camps, both in person and remotely.

Below is an interview on bearing witness at Auschwitz that I gave with Rav Kohenet Taya Ma Shere on the Jewish Ancestral Healing Podcast, recorded during Elul 5780 / September 2020.