Former chief rabbi of Israel, Israel Meir Lau, a close friend of Keren Hayesod, never missed the March of the Living. He has gone every year for the past 31 years, marching and remembering that moment at the Piotrków train station in Poland when his mother thrust him from her arms at the last second before the doors of the train closed. “That was the hardest moment of the six Holocaust years of my childhood”, he says, “the moment of separation from my mother…” That was the last time he ever saw her and he wasn’t even able to say goodbye. He was 7½ years old. “When my mother saw that they were making a selection on the track – men to one side, women and children to the other side – she understood that the men had a better chance of surviving. At the last second before I was pushed into the freight car and the doors closed, she thrust me toward my brother Naftali, who was 18½ at the time. She called out to him, ‘Take the boy’, and in doing so, saved my life. I cried bitterly”. Rabbi Lau has taken part in every march since the March of the Living was instituted in 1988 with a few thousand young Jews. They walked from the Auschwitz concentration camp to Birkenau, the adjacent death camp, where one million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. The March of the Living has evolved into week-long events to commemorate the Holocaust. Tens of thousands of young people from around the world take part; they are joined by Holocaust survivors, heads of state and other dignitaries from the Jewish and general world. Keren Hayesod delegations take part in the March of the Living every year. From there they often continue on to Israel for an empowering and inspiring visit.
Photo: Rabbi Israel Meir Lau with the Israeli delegation to the March of the Living, 2016