Members of the Temple Sholom confirmation class trip visit the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin: from left, Justin Scholar, Jen Schwarz, Julia Van Etten, tour guide Heiko, Emily Nagourney, chaperone Mark Nussenfeld, James Leitner, Rory Szeto, Lane Darwin, Jeff Marks, Will Kempner, Adam Monzella, and chaperone Felicia Sussman.
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The students visited Europe’s largest synagogue, the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest.
Photo courtesy Emily Nagourney
May 28, 2009
Emily Nagourney was certainly familiar with the Holocaust from her studies. But when she visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland, she said, “it made everything more real.”
Emily and members of her confirmation class at Temple Sholom of Scotch Plains/Fanwood last month traveled to Germany, Poland, and Hungary to get a firsthand lesson in European-Jewish history — as well as a look at how Judaism is practiced in those countries today.
The visit to the camps “was really intense,” said Emily, 16, a Scotch Plains resident. Particularly powerful was seeing the gas chambers at Auschwitz. “It made everything more real.”
The students, accompanied by Temple Sholom’s Rabbi Joel Abraham, visited the New Synagogue in Berlin and the city’s Holocaust Memorial, Checkpoint Charlie — the name given by the Allies to the famous crossing point between East and West Germany — the Brandenburg Gate, and the Jewish Museum.
They also visited the site of the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution to exterminate the Jews was drawn up, and both the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.
In Poland, they went to Cracow and Kazimierz, a suburb where Jews settled when they were expelled from the city in the 15th century. The group of teens moved on to Budapest, where they visited Jewish sites and celebrated Shabbat with Temple Sholom’s sister congregation, Szim Salom (Sim Shalom). The synagogue is Hungary’s first Progressive congregation, the equivalent of Reform in Europe.
For Mark Nussenfeld of Fanwood, a trip chaperone whose children had gone to Europe previously with the temple, it was enlightening to see the sites through the eyes of the next generation.
“It was a lesson in these things that they learn in school and see pictures of,” he said, “a lesson in life.”
The annual confirmation trip to Europe began under the leadership of former Rabbi Gerald Goldman and has been continuing for over three decades, Abraham said.
This year’s confirmands will lead a Shavuot evening service and speak about their trip at the JCC of Central New Jersey in Scotch Plains on Thursday, May 28, at 8 p.m.
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