As someone whose home runs on a well, I appreciate rain. Of course, like most people, I would rather not see precipitation while I’m traveling and certainly not while I’m touring outside. With one exception.
Thursday evening in Budapest we took our entire group of 12 Beth Tfiloh and 24 Scheiber Sandor students to see the Shoe Memorial on the banks of the Danube River. The memorial honors the over 3,600 victims of the Terror of the Arrow Cross in 1944, 95% Jews and Jewish sympathizers, who were taken to the river bank, forced to undress, and then shot, some still alive as their bodies fell into the freezing water. The shoes, cemented onto the sidewalk next to the river bank, represent the victims who left those shoes behind before they drowned in the river.
As our group lit Yahrzeit candles, recited Kaddish and sang Acheinu, a cold, steady rain fell, prompting those of us with umbrellas to huddle closer, protectively, to those without them. On any other type of tour the rain would have been, at best, an annoyance, and, at worst, a reason to postpone, but on this night, in this place, it was neither. Instead, the cold rain offered a fitting setting for the scene of our commemoration, a pathetic fallacy of sorts, the natural setting reflecting the personal sorrow we collectively felt at that moment.
The Shoe Memorial was the last activity we did as a group that night, the BT students returning to their hotel and the SSG students to their homes or the Jewish Community Center hostel where some of them boarded.
The next morning when we set out for SSG, we brought all of our belongings with us, as we would be heading directly from school to Leaanyfalu Camp for our Shabbaton. The air was crisp and fresh after the evening rain, the sun warm on our faces. I thought about our BT seniors, who were in Poland, waiting to travel to Israel on the next leg of their senior trip, the culmination of their education. It struck me that both they and we were simultaneously, bearing witness to a European Jewish community that had been devastated, yet not vanquished. As our seniors joyfully enter the land of Israel, we will step into Shabbat bringing our BT ruach (spirit) and kavanah (mindset).
