“I became Miss Jewish Pride,” comments Sarah Guzick, succinctly explaining the initial result of her 1992 trip to Poland and Israel with the March of the Living. Guzick, a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, recalls that she broke up with her non-Jewish boyfriend after returning home Jewishly “charged” from the two-week program. From there, the Houston native “set [off] on a Jewish journey,” becoming extremely involved in Holocaust education both within the Jewish community and at her own, primarily non-Jewish, high school. Over time, however, Guzick reached overload; the Jewish charge within her could not survive on a diet of tragedy. She was becoming more Jewish not because of what she found beautiful in the religion, but because of the destruction which had befallen her people. The March “was simply too much Holocaust,” without enough of anything else, Guzick told New Voices. More than six years after her trip, she acknowledges the role that her experience played in bringing her closer to Judaism and still believes that a well-planned trip to Poland is “generally worthwhile,” for the important lessons it teaches about humanity. But Guzick has rejected the “cult of persecution” which she says the March of the Living promotes in favor of “exploring the more positive reasons to be a Jew.”
* * * Since its inception in 1988, 40,000 Jewish teenagers from around the world have participated in the March of the Living. The program takes high school students, accompanied by Jewish educators, Holocaust survivors, and community leaders, to Poland for a one week tour which includes visits to the Nazi death camps and the destroyed Jewish communities in Cracow, Warsaw, and Lublin. On Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, participants retrace the steps of the “March of Death” as they walk together from Auschwitz to the nearby Birkenau death camp. The group then flies to Israel and commemorates Yom Hazikaron, a day of remembrance for fallen Israeli soldiers, and Yom Ha’ atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, in the Jewish State.
In only ten years, the March of the Living—its simple moniker, “the March,” is instantly recognizable to most young Jews—has already become a highly visible and popular institution within the Jewish community. According to Yosef Kedem, Executive Vice President of the International March of the Living, while the first March only attracted 1,500 students, mostly from Israel, 8,000 participated in the most recent trip, which took place from April 19 to May 3, 1998; 2,500 of these were from the United States and Canada. These figures establish the March of the Living as the single largest Jewish experiential trip in which North American high school students participate. The program is so oversubscribed that in some communities less than one-third of those who apply (local Boards of Jewish Education or regional youth group offices are responsible for selection of students and staff as well as some pre-trip logistical and educational components) are admitted to the program. Current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel number among the many prominent Jewish leaders who have assumed honorary positions in leading memorial ceremonies in Poland on Yom Hashoah. The enthusiasm of “Marchers” has spawned international and regional reunions and alumni who eagerly proclaim, as did one 1998 New York participant, that the trip helped her “see the light.”
Many view the March as a true Jewish success story, a proven tool for increasing the Jewish identification and commitment of its young participants, and consequently, a comforting reassurance to parents and community leaders who fear that their grandchildren will not be Jewish. But even as the March continues to grow in size and prominence, an increasing number of alumni are speaking out, asking difficult questions both about the techniques utilized by the March’s organizers and the role which such trips should play in the education of Jewish youth.
“My experiences do not resemble the accounts that you hear about in synagogues or read about in Jewish newspapers,” says Jeremy Richler, a graduate of McGill University and a 1992 participant in the March of the Living. The students who shared their stories with New Voices participated in the March over a four year span, from 1992 to 1995, and represented communities as disparate as Montreal and Houston, yet the striking similarity of their analyses reveals that their critiques are hardly idiosyncratic. In contrast to the glowing reports of those who claim that the March “changed their lives,” these students describe a program ill-suited to teenagers, one that urges emotional responses at the expense of intellectual understanding, fosters an irrational fear of anti-Semitism, and uses the Holocaust to bolster Zionist sentiment and Jewish identity.
That those most critical of the March are by now in their early twenties raises a pressing question: Having participated in the March before they graduated high school, why has it taken them so many years to process and think through the impact of the program? To Cindy Friedman, Program Director of the Department of Overseas Students at the Hebrew University Hillel, the continuing need of college students to discuss their Poland trips is clear. A panel discussion facilitated by Friedman entitled “How Do We Remember the Holocaust?: The Role of Travel to Poland” has attracted twenty to thirty students, many of whom expressed serious concerns with the March, each of the last two years.
Explaining students’ delayed reaction to the March, Richler says that the emotional intensity of the trip precludes any critical distance during the March itself: “I spent two weeks moving in a fog,” he recalls. Jennifer Goldman*, a recent graduate of Columbia University and a 1994 Marcher, concurs that it was not until she began to learn about Judaism in an academic setting during her first year of college that she started to re-examine her own experience. To Goldman, it makes perfect sense that the program is designed for high school, rather than college students, because the March is able to exploit the naiveté that goes along with being in high school. “At that age,” she says, “[teenagers are] like putty, highly impressionable” and searching for identity. Friedman agrees that “[h]igh school is probably too young. . . Perhaps we should focus on sending college students; they generally seem more equipped to handle such an intense experience and to actually learn from it, rather than just feeling it.”
But capitalizing on teenagers’ susceptibility to influence, it seems, is just what the March of the Living wants to do. The first March for college-age students did take place in 1997, and a second is scheduled for the spring of 1999. However, neither Kedem nor Susan Rachlin, Director of Special Projects for the New York Board of Jewish Education (BJE) and coordinator of New York-area March of the Living groups, see college programs as their priority. Rachlin’ s reasons are telling. Though she cites the difficulty of locating students on campus as well as the conflict between Yom Hashoah and university final exams, in language remarkably reminiscent of Goldman, she states that the most important motivation for focusing recruitment efforts on tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders is that these teenagers are “impressionable, and amenable to change and understanding.”
Even before the March begins, organizers are intent on emphasizing the transformative effect of the experience. “Afterwards, you may never be the same! And you may like what you’ve become,” exhorts the educational packet sent to all participants. But how does the March attempt to change students, and what does it want them to become? Yoni Schwab, a junior at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and a 1994 March alumnus from New York, believes that the program relies on a “shallow evocation of emotion in order to spur on pro-Israel and anti-gentile feelings.” Despite what he says is an admirable attempt by March educators to provide students with background and resources both before and during the trip, there is also considerable reliance on emotional “manipula[tion].”
Goldman and Richler both charge that the Poland itinerary itself is “contrived” and “calculated” to achieve the greatest dramatic effect (as though the sight of gas chambers requires any extra drama). Goldman even sees a purposeful order to the extermination camp visits. First was Treblinka, at which there are only memorial stones, then the march between Auschwitz (primarily a camp for non-Jewish prisoners of war and other undesirables) and Birkenau (which had only Jewish inmates). The final destination, as Goldman recalls, was Madjanek, “the most intact, horrifying, and emotion-jerking.” Richler goes so far as to label the March an attempt at “reconstructing” the Holocaust experience. In Poland, the time constraints imposed by the groups’ one-week stay are compounded by the long distances between major sites and cities.
Is the trip, as these alumni contend, intentionally made even more grueling and intense? “While in Poland the kids barely eat, barely sleep, and we take them from camp to camp. Of course they are going to react emotionally,” says Friedman, who has served as a staff member on the March. She continues, “I think we need to ask ourselves, what is the goal of the March? I hope that it is education and not emotional manipulation.”
March organizers do not deny that they want participants to have an emotional reaction to what they see. The organization’s official web site likens the emotional swings felt by participants to those of a roller coaster, careening from a low depression to the heights of joy. As his group’s bus arrived at Auschwitz, Richler remembers his chaperone telling students that it was O.K. not to cry, that people deal with pain differently. Yet this trite pronouncement did little to lessen his sense of confusion and numbness. There is, according to Friedman, an implicit pressure “that they have to cry, to feel it, to touch it,” a dynamic in which students can either end up terribly upset or feeling horrible about being unable to display the anticipated emotion.
But it is one thing to encourage an emotional response and another to specify what that response should be. Strangely unconvinced that the sheer emotional power of visiting Poland and Israel is sufficient in and of itself, organizers provide models of appropriate responses that belie the March’s own claim to students that “[y]ou have to do what is right for you.” In describing the journals which students are encouraged to keep during the trip, the curriculum states: “You do not have to conform to any textbook style. . .Whether in lines, shapes, free form art, in rhyme or in special relations, your journal should tell. . . your story.”
Yet immediately following this encouragement for individual expression is a “sample” diary of a marcher. After recalling the “harsh, alien sight” of a “young, grim-faced, Polish soldier” at the Warsaw airport, (the diary doesn’t mention that the Polish army fought the Germans during World War II), this model student goes on to record the menu for her first Polish meal: “a dull lunch of a hard roll, raw radishes with the roots still attached, and, yes—an Israeli chocolate wafer!” It is a meal more likely to have been served in a concentration camp than in any of the tourist-oriented, though modest, kosher restaurants which exist in Poland today. From the outset the March presents Poland as a modern-day graveyard, redemption from which comes in the sweetness of the Jewish State. This stark imagery of darkness and light is one which many participants feel is crudely drawn and exaggerated during the course of the trip.
Participants are taught that Poland is a country full of death camps and anti-Semitism, according to the students who spoke to New Voices. Kedem, the March’ s director, does not believe that the program sends a message to participants to hate the Poles. We do not teach that the Poles are to blame for what happened during the Holocaust, he says, adding that some recent groups have met with Polish non-Jews. Yet Cynthia Weinger, a 1998 graduate of Washington University and a 1995 March alumna, describes how her group “traveled around Poland in a protected bubble.” She cannot recall any meaningful interaction with Poles. Orlee Richman, a 1998 participant who did have a positive experience on the March, remembers Poland as “dark and gloomy.” She cites only negative encounters with Polish non-Jews, mostly people throwing things and making comments. Goldman, too, felt that her group was just waiting for an anti-Semitic incident to occur. This, to her, was a view of Poland unchanged since the 1940s.
Frozen in this same time warp is the March’s depiction of the relationship between the Holocaust and the modern State of Israel. This “old school” perspective views the creation of Israel only as a response to the events of 1933 to 1945, not as an outgrowth of earlier Zionist impulses. By spending one week in Poland and one in Israel, Friedman argues, students are taught that Israel and the Holocaust are equally important in Jewish history, that Israel is a solution to, and result of, the Holocaust.
“Israel,” Friedman insists, “ is obviously much more.” The itinerary for the Israel portion of the March varies according to the interests and background of individual groups; traditional sites on the agenda include a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, and the natural wonders of the Negev desert. All the contingents join together for what are, respectively, the most solemn and the most joyous events on the Israeli calendar: Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut. The March’s director, Kedem, correctly notes that there are “lots of facets to show.” Because not everything can be seen in one week, organizers encourage students to return again for a longer visit.
But a key result of this circumscribed tour is that Israel is only seen through the prism of the Shoah. Just as participants went straight from Madjanek to an El Al jet, Israel is shown as a direct and necessary response to the tragedies of Poland. In Kedem’s words, one “cannot separate the two issues.” During that one week, students, particularly those who are first-time visitors, develop emotional attachments to Israel at the Western Wall and at Masada. They do not learn about either the peace process or the struggle between the secular and the religious, although Kedem stated that such a program could be arranged if a group expressed interest. Failing to engage students in an intellectual understanding of Israel’ s current day concerns, the March instead “reinforces Israel as a myth,” says Richler. “It’s as if we decide to visit the Israel of the past rather than examining Israel for what it is today.”
Indeed, the March of the Living’s official curriculum has little to say about modern day Israel’s military power. The organizers of the March are wedded to a view of history in which Jews are perpetual victims; major sections of the curriculum are little more than recitations of the tragedies which have befallen the Jews. Tracing the “long tradition” of European anti-Semitism, the curriculum recounts the thirteenth century Crusades, the 1881 pogroms, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and Arab terrorism, marshaling evidence in the case for “The ‘War Against the Jews.’” Though careful not to equate the Holocaust with earlier persecution, one section instructs students to read a chapter on European anti-Semitism and “trace with a highlighting pen the events...which allowed religious prejudice to develop into government policy.” Citing the separation of Jewish passengers during plane hijackings in the 1970s as another “‘selection process,’” the text proclaims, rather ominously: “The War Against the Jews continues to this day.”
With this type of instruction, it’s no surprise that one returning Marcher who was interviewed by his local paper, the Palm Beach (Florida) Sun Sentinel, asserted: “We’ve been harassed in, or kicked out of, every country we’ve ever been in, and it could happen here too. The roots of it are here. We just don’t see it because we’re blending in better.”
Why would the organizers want young Jews entering the adult world to have this “us against them” siege mentality? Is it because they want these teenagers to be ready for the next attack? Probably not. They’re waging a different sort of battle, attempting to transform a generation of undereducated and uncommitted Jewish teenagers into proud and involved members of their community. As Goldman explains, young Jews on the March relive the most tragic and triumphant moments of Jewish history, getting a “quick dose of Jewish identity” in order to make up for the deficiencies in their schooling.
In 1990, the headlines of all the Jewish newspapers bemoaned the future, as the Jewish Population Survey revealed that over fifty percent of American Jews were intermarrying. The newly-created March of the Living offered one answer to this dilemma. In just two weeks, the Jewish community could compensate for the failure of their Hebrew schools and camps and get young Jews excited about their religion.
To the defense of the March of the Living’s founders, the program began with different intentions. Israeli Knesset member, Avraham Hirchson, and an American Holocaust survivor, Dr. Shmuel Rosenman, developed the March to ensure that the stories of aging eye-witnesses would live on and to provide a response to the increase of Holocaust revisionism. Its primary purpose was not to bolster participants’ Jewish involvement or practice, Kedem says. But American Jews like Rachlin, the New York March coordinator, have additional goals for the trip. It “helps develop leaders of the Jewish community [by] strengthening their Jewish identity and mak[ing] them conscious of their responsibility,” she explained.
And, according to at least one expert, the March is achieving those goals. A 1993 study commissioned by the March of the Living and conducted by City College of New York Professor William Helmreich, found that alumni of the March do return more interested in Judaism and more likely to identify Jewishly. According to the study, one third of respondents reported becoming more active in their synagogues after the March; eighty-eight percent of that third credited the March with having influenced that decision.
Lauding the March’s successes, few have stopped to consider that these students are basing their Jewish identity on a foundation of destruction and fear. “It’s a scary notion that [the trip] in itself is what a Jew should focus on in terms of strengthening Jewish identity,” Weinger, now a Jewish Campus Service Corps Fellow, argues. “Holocaust should be a priority but not the priority,” says Friedman. “Let’s teach them about. . . socialism, chasidut, Zionism. Let them walk away knowing the names of great Jewish figures in history rather than the names of all of the concentration camps.”
With the exception of Richler, none of the alumni interviewed advocated ending the program. They agree that Holocaust education in moderation is important, but they insist that experiences like the March, which give young Jews no positive reasons for being Jewish, will not suffice.
* * *
During her senior year in college Sarah Guzick became involved in Lights in Action, a student-run, national organization devoted to creative, pluralist Jewish education. Today, she teaches in a Hebrew school and continues to maintain that there is more to Judaism than remembering “all the terrible things that have happened to the Jewish people.” Perhaps the March did give Sarah her first Jewish spark. But the Holocaust alone cannot sustain Jewish life.
* This student’s name was changed to protect her privacy.
Shira Schnitzer is the Associate Editor of New Voices