Dear Friends,
On June 26, I’ll be participating in the annual Ride for the Living, a 60-mile bike ride from Auschwitz Birkenau to Krakow, Poland. I’ve never been to Poland before, yet have been haunted by its spectre, the spectre of Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp and the site where the most Jews were killed.
The day before the ride we will “visit” the camps; then, we go back early the next morning and ride away from these sites of horror to the Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Krakow, the heart of Jewish renewal in Poland.
The ride is an annual fundraiser for the JCC Krakow, an extraordinary organization that’s been revitalizing Jewish life in Europe for the past twenty years. It has 1,200 members, including 56 Holocaust survivors, Jews in Poland or with ties to Poland reconnecting with their ancestry or just discovering their family's long-suppressed Jewish heritage. JCC Krakow also supports more Ukrainian refugees than any other organization of its kind in the world.
I’ll be riding as part of a team of 18 people from my synagogue in Providence, and we’ll ride alongside hundreds of participants from around the world including Holocaust survivors, one of whom walked from Auschwitz to Krakow at ten years old after the camp was liberated in 1945 by the Russian army.
When living in or visiting European cities over the years, I often felt a palpable absence, a deep sense of lack—Jewish lives, culture and spirituality were such a rich part of these places and their missingness lingers. I felt I belonged to that vacancy as well as my own aliveness in the now. And I wondered how Jewish identity can carry unimaginable loss, current presence, and future promise all at once. The ride appeals to me as an embrace of that possibility.
I hope you will be able to support my ride for this cause. It will be nice to have your funding and good energy behind me in Poland.
Best wishes,
Linda