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It has been said that all a person really needs are roots and wings. For Rabbis Michel and Benzion Twerski, those roots carry them ten generations deep, all the way to the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism.
And the father and son spiritual leaders of Congregation Beth Jehudah, on Milwaukee’s west side, along with six other family members, recently participated in a group trip to Ukraine to explore those roots.
The trip, organized by a New York rabbi, Avrum Schorr, brought the group of some 30 men to more than 20 shtetls, graves and memorials of the founders of various Hasidic groups and Torah scholars.
The group landed in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital city, on Aug. 17 and spent one week traveling throughout western Ukraine. Because of the large Twerski contingent, the tour was largely tailored to include sites pertaining to the family.
For Rabbi Benzion Twerski, the trip provided a chance to connect with his ancestors. “I feel like I have a much deeper connection to those people [whose graves we visited] now. I feel that when I talk about the various shtetlach or share the words of Torah of those people, that I have a deeper relationship,” he said.
Twerski said that he decided to participate in the trip for two reasons: First, he’s always been curious about his ancestors’ land and wanted to see the shtetls, shuls and landscape. He assumed he’d have to employ a hefty dose of imagination to visualize the villages of hundreds of years ago.
But he was shocked by what he found. “It required no imagination whatsoever…. The minute you leave Kiev, you go back 100 years. Everybody grows their own food, there’s no running water, every yard has its cow, its goat, its geese and its chicken.”
The second reason Twerski was attracted to the trip, which he heard about from his brother-in-law, was for the chance to pray at the gravesites of tzadikkim, holy men, where the group read psalms and left little notes of petition, akin to the notes Jews leave at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
‘ Blood-stained earth’
Visiting graves of tzadikkim has deep significance to Hasidim. Rabbi Michel Twerski offered two explanations: “When a person lives an uplifted life, an exalted kind of life, a life of service, the body becomes something holy and the ground in which it rests is now the vessel for this sacred thing.”
“For Jews,” he continued, “A cemetery is sacred ground…. Visiting these places is to stand on sacred soil.”
There is a kabbalistic reason for visiting graves also. “Even though it is a tenet of our faith that the soul is immortal and ascends to the Almighty after death, the kabbalists say that there is a trace of the soul which remains as a connection to the body” and can advocate on behalf of the living.
“[Visiting burial sites] is a very emotional, liberating kind of experience,” said Twerski, who had been given piles of notes to be read at the burial sites.
The state of Ukranian graves is, on the whole, dismal, said Rabbi Benzion Twerski. Only within the last ten years, has there been a movement to preserve and repair cemeteries and other remnants of Jewish life. The cemeteries that the group found intact were in serious disrepair, he said.
And only one of the villages visited — Berdichev — had any Jews left at all. Many of the villages were completely gone.
“One thing that happened consistently wherever we went was that someone always pointed out where they murdered their Jews. In Babi Yar, they showed us where [German Nazis and Ukrainian police] murdered more than 100,000 Jews in a three-day period [in 1941]. They said the earth was moving for a week afterward,” Twerski recalled.
“One of the feelings was that you were walking on earth that was drenched with Jewish blood. On the one hand you couldn’t wait to get off the blood-stained earth, and on the other hand you had the holiness of these sites. It created a strong contrast of feeling,” he said.
That juxtaposition of emotions seems to describe the trip, which was wrought with countless hours — generally more than 16 hours daily — riding buses on old dirt roads, learning, storytelling, singing and, by all accounts, plenty of laughing and camaraderie.
“It was about being serious and being exhilarated and excited at the same time,” said native Milwaukeean and Chicago resident Harlan Loeb, who joined the Twerskis on the trip. “That combination of intense emotions seems to me to encapsulate what Judaism is all about when it’s practiced at perfect pitch.”
Loeb joined the trip to be with the Twerskis, but also because his father’s family is from Vistopovich, which is about 30 miles from Hornesteipel, the Twerskis’ ancestral home.
For Loeb, the trip provided a tie-in between his personal and spiritual journey, and his relationship with his father, prominent Milwaukee attorney Leonard Loeb, who died last March. As part of his mourning, he recited Kaddish at holy sites.
“For many of us, I think, the trip awakened the sparks and enthusiasm we have. We all felt feelings on a very profound level.”
Moreover, though Loeb is loath to draw conclusions about the visit, he said that it “does give me a link to eternity that I didn’t have before.”
‘ Bigger than myself’
For Rabbi Michel Twerski, the trip was about homecoming and his relationship with his ancestors and his identity.
“I’ve been connected to the people whose graves we visited by their works and stories we’ve been told, but to actually visit…. There’s a certain kind of connection that becomes deeper and more authentic, that gives you a sense of continuity,” he said.
But, he continued, “It’s much more than just connecting with the past for the sake for the past, but about connecting to something that’s bigger than time…. I belong to something bigger than myself, that I have an obligation to continue.”
The trip included a visit to burial sites in Chernobyl, which was evacuated after the 1986 nuclear disaster there. The group had to receive special permission to enter the city and undergo radiation testing as they exited.
One of the highlights of the trip was visiting Medzibezh, the home and burial place of the Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760). Though there are no Jews living in the village, an Israeli organization is working to preserve the Jewish remnants of the city by building a center for visitors that houses a new guest house, synagogue, mikvah and beit midrash (house of study). The organization also repurchased the Baal Shem Tov’s old shul and returned it to its former condition — without running water or electricity.
It was there that the group brought in Shabbat on Friday evening by praying and singing to candlelight in the 300-year old shul.
As night fell, Rabbi Michel Twerski led prayers for the group. He sang his melody for “Lecha Dodi,” an experience that his son describes as powerfully moving. On the way back to their hotel, the group of men “spontaneously locked hands and danced home,”
said Rabbi Benzion Twerski.
“It was,” Loeb recalled, “the closest thing I can imagine to the ultimate form of [praying].”
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