You Cannot Be a Jew Alone
“You cannot be a Jew alone.”
I heard those words in Warsaw, following one of the most difficult days of my life. I have thought about them constantly since.
I’m writing from Prague at the conclusion of Jewish Federation of Greater Indianapolis’ Maurer Koach mission. My husband Jamil and I traveled through Poland and the Czech Republic with a group of emerging Jewish leaders, confronting the destruction of Jewish life during the Holocaust and meeting people building its future today.
Generously funded by Linda and Todd Maurer, the program prepares the next generation of Jewish leaders to confront antisemitism through education and shared experiences. Jamil is a member of the third cohort, and I was grateful to accompany the group.
At Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek, I struggled to comprehend how much thought and effort human beings devoted to annihilating our people. Someone imagined these places. Others designed them, built them, and made them function. Every step involved deliberate decisions that brought the murder of millions into being.
The Nazis intended to erase us from the world. Entire communities were destroyed, taking with them centuries of learning, traditions, and ways of life. I kept thinking about the generations who should have followed, the children never born, and how much of our future was murdered, too.
Even after standing in those places, I cannot fully comprehend the enormity of the evil.
By dinner on the day we visited Auschwitz, I had been crying for hours. That evening, we heard from a Hillel director serving Warsaw’s growing Jewish community. She had fled the war in Ukraine and was rebuilding her life in Poland, where she was helping young adults discover Jewish roots their families had been afraid to acknowledge under communism.
“You cannot be a Jew alone,” she told us.
Hours earlier, I had stood where our people were meant to have no future. Now I was listening to a woman describe how she was helping young Jews find theirs.
I have dedicated my career to building Jewish community. I thought I understood how much it mattered. After everything we had witnessed that day, I realized there were depths to that responsibility I was still discovering.
When she finished speaking, I was still crying. She approached me, placed her hand on my shoulder, and embraced me.
“I can tell this is hard for you. Don’t worry. We will be okay.”
“There is nothing I’ve been more sure of,” I replied.
I meant it. Here was a woman who had been forced to leave her home, rebuilding her own life while devoting herself to the future of our people. She had noticed my pain from across the room and came to comfort someone she barely knew.
I spend my days helping build community for others. That evening, I felt what it means to be carried by it.
I keep returning to that moment because it captures something I hope every person experiences at our JCC: the feeling of being seen, cared for, and connected to something beyond themselves.
Our JCC, like the Krakow JCC and so many others, brings together people of different faiths and backgrounds through Jewish life and shared experiences. Those relationships are especially important as antisemitism continues to threaten Jewish communities. Hatred threatens people we know, people whose children play with ours, people we care about. Those relationships give us reasons to stand beside one another when it matters.
We cannot undo the destruction we witnessed in Poland or recover the generations of Jewish life stolen from us. We can, however, take responsibility for the Jewish future being built right now. I believe more deeply than ever in the importance of creating places where Jewish life can flourish, where people belong, and where we care enough about one another to act on it.
I still cannot make sense of what we witnessed. I suspect I never will. Yet I return to Indianapolis more certain than ever that building Jewish community and ensuring our people have a future is work worthy of everything we can give it.
“You cannot be a Jew alone.”
She had told us what that meant. Then she put her hand on my shoulder and showed me.
Shabbot Shalom,
Sam Dubrinsky
Chief Executive Officer
