September 22

Today we commemorated our Jewish neighbours who on September 22, 1942 were murdered by the Germans and their co-perpetrators on the streets of Sokolow. We read testimonies of Aaron Elster, Golda Ryba, Simcha Poliakewicz and Josek Kopyto.

Thank you all who were there today!

We are all Sokolowers

 This year we didn't organize a ceremony in Sokolow but instead we organized a virtual ceremony on zoom. We are all Sokolowers - in Poland, Israel, US and even in Wien 🙂

Thank you all for being here today!

And watch a video about Jewish history of Sokolow! 

https://youtu.be/Uh5Yggckj3I

Upamiętnienie ofiar likwidacji getta

22 września 1942 r. Niemcy rozpoczęli likwidację getta w Sokołowie Podlaskim. Ponad połowa mieszkańców miasta - Żydzi, którzy przez pokolenia przyczyniali się do rozwoju Sokołowa - została wywieziona do Treblinki. Upamiętniliśmy tę tragiczną rocznicę, odczytując fragment książki Simchy Poliakewicza "Dzień w Treblince". Fragment swojego opowiadania "Droga do Treblinki", inspirowanego prawdziwymi wydarzeniami, przeczytała nauczycielka SP1, Wiesława Kwiek. Psalm 23 odczytał nauczyciel SP3, Jacek Odziemczyk.

Ceremony in Sokolow

I invite you on Sunday, September 22, at 3pm for the ceremony commemorating the Sokołów Jews who were killed during the war.

Memorial service in Israel

To all our friends who live in Israel,
You are invited to the annual memorial service to our family members from Sokolow Podlaski who were killed in the Shoah.

Rocznica zagłady sokołowskich Żydów

Ksiądz Daniel Jankowski, przedstawiciel ambasady Izraela Emil Jeżowski, wójt gminy Sokołów Marcin Pasik, harcerze oraz mieszkańcy miasta wzięli we wtorek udział w uroczystości upamiętniającej sokołowskich Żydów, którzy zostali zamordowani przez Niemców 75 lat temu. Już po raz kolejny spotkanie zostało zainicjowane przez mieszkankę Sokołowa, Katarzynę Markusz.

22 września 1942 roku przypadał dzień po święcie Jom Kippur. Wielu Żydów, którzy pracowali na wsiach powiatu sokołowskiego, przybyło wówczas do getta, by móc modlić się razem. "W getcie nastrój był niezły. Nikt się niczego nie spodziewał. Udaliśmy się na modlitwę. Wieczorem spotkałem się ze znajomymi. Winszowaliśmy sobie, żebyśmy przeżyli ten rok. Ludzie mówili sobie, że należy mieć nadzieję. W poniedziałek, w Sądny Dzień poszliśmy się modlić. Był piękny słoneczny dzień" - wspominał Josek Kopyto w relacji zachowanej w archiwum Żydowskiego Instytutu Historycznego.

"75. rocznica likwidacji getta w Sokołowie Podlaskim wpisuje się w kontekst obchodów 75. rocznicy Aktion Reinhardt i Zagłady Żydów Polskich dokonanych przez niemiecką III Rzeszę, nad którymi patronat objęło Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego. Co szczególnie istotne, to że upamiętnienie tej niewyobrażalnej zbrodni i tragedii nie ogranicza się do uroczystości na szczeblu centralnym. Od samego początku towarzyszył im odzew ze strony społeczności lokalnych, diecezji, parafii i organizacji pozarządowych" - napisała w liście skierowanym do uczestników uroczystości w Sokołowie Podlaskim, wiceminister prof. Magdalena Gawin.

"Zdaję sobie sprawę, że społeczność żydowska od setek lat związana była z Sokołowem Podlaskim. Przed wojną stanowiła nawet 6% ogółu ludności, mając czynny wkład w rozwój waszego miasta. We wrześniu 1942 r. relacje te brutalnie zostały przerwane w wyniku zbrodniczej polityki hitlerowskich Niemiec. (...) Dziękuję wszystkim mieszkańcom Gminy Sokołów Podlaski za ich pamięć o dawnych żydowskich sąsiadach" – również w liście skierowanym do sokołowian napisała ambasador Izraela Anna Azari.

Ponieważ wtorkowa uroczystość odbywała się w przeddzień żydowskiego święta Rosz ha-Szana, czyli nowego roku 5778, zebrani - dzięki Piotrowi Kadlcikowi z Fundacji Gszarim - mogli również usłyszeć dźwięk tradycyjnego rogu, którym religijni Żydzi witają to święto.

Sokołów przed wojną liczył około 10 tysięcy mieszkańców, z czego 60 procent stanowili Żydzi. Większość z nich została zamordowana przez Niemców w mieście lub wywieziona do obozu zagłady w Treblince.

Commemoration

We promised not to forget

Invitation to the ceremony in Israel.

This year's ceremony

This year's ceremony took place at the old Jewish cemetery on September 22. That day, in 1942, Germans began liquidation of Sokolow ghetto. Thank you all for coming.

About the ceremony you can read here (in Polish) http://podlasie24.pl/sokolow/region/nieliczni-upamietnili-likwidacje-sokolowskiego-getta-1def2.html

Ceremony in Israel

If you are in Israel you are invited to annual ceremony on April 15

Invitation

The invitation to this year's ceremony commemorating the victims of the liquidation of the ghetto on September 22, 1942

Yom HaShoah

Pictures taken during today's ceremony at the Holon cemetery in Israel: https://plus.google.com/photos/107906032585317696529/albums/6007390190014786673

The Ceremony on April 28

You are invited to attend the ceremony of the Day of Holocaust
In commemoration of Sokolow Podlaski’s community
To be held on Monday April 28th at 5:30 pm
Near Sokolow’s matzeva at Holon’s South cemetery

Program:
17:00 - 17:30 - gathering and candles lighting
17:30 - 18:30 - Yizkor, Kaddish, El Male Rahamim, Artistic segment
18:30 - Meeting at Sarah Sade’s house; Migdal St. 65/17, Raanana
This year the ceremony will be dedicated to the memory of the life and legacy of Jewish Sokolow
For more information: Shoshi 0506946566; Sarah: 0542198881

Ceremony at Mały Rynek

The article about the ceremony (in Polish) http://www.jewish.org.pl/index.php/pl/wiadomopci-mainmenu-57/5658-wybor-pamici.html

Me, Piotr Kadlcik (the president of Warsaw Jewish Community),
Dawid Wildstein (a journalist), Tomasz Krakowski (representative of rabbi Schudrich)

Paweł Kryszczuk

Karolina Skibniewska

Tomasz Krakowski says a prayer at the old Jewish cemetery

Invitation

This year we'll meet in Sokolow to commemorate Jews killed here during the war

The ceremony

Let's meet in Sokolow on September 22 at the ceremony commemorating Jewish victims of German Nazi regime.

On September 22, 1942 Germans started liquidation of the ghetto. 6,000 Jews died there or in nearby Treblinka extermination camp.

Here are two letters written after the ceremony in 2011 and 2012.

2011 http://jewishsokolow.blogspot.com/2011/10/out-of-past.html

2012 http://jewishsokolow.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-few-days-in-sokolow.html

To Cultivate Memory

Batami Engel was a small girl when her mother was invovled in the consturction of a monument of Jews from her native town murdered during World War II. Those who had survived and emigrated to Israel would meet by the monument at the Holon cemetery every year. Year by year, their ranks shrank until there was no one on Yom HaShoah who could come to the large stone with “Sokolow Podlaski” inscribed on it. Several decades later Batami returned to the cemetery with her grandson. She and forty other people whose roots can be traced to this small town in the eastern Poland decided to resume their meetings as their parents and grandparents did. And although not all of them had ever visited Poland, it is something important for them, and what they do inspires others to engage in similar actions.

The Batami family had lived in Sokołów for generations. When I inquire about the details, instead of Batami her teenage grandson, who knows the story very well, responds. His great grandmother had decided to emigrate to Palestine even before the war. She believed that through hard work she would be able to build a new country and that it was the right place for her. Her parents, wealthy and influential town dwellers would not consent. They could not imagine living outside Poland, particularly in such a remote and unfriendly place Palestine seemed to them at that time. However, their daughter was determined to go. When she left home with her luggage, her parents informed the police that she had stolen their money and jewelry. That is how they tried to keep her in Poland. But she had put one male clothes and a cap slipped by policemen who patrolled the railway station. When the train started rolling, she changed her disguise and waved goodbye to her parents standing on the platform. That was the last time they had seen each other.

The survivors were mainly those who had managed to emigrate to Palestine or America and those who were in Russia during the war. Some of them returned to their home towns in search of any of their relatives. But hardly ever did they find anyone. “You won’t find anything here any more. Leave this place”, was the advice the Jewish Holocaust survivors heard. And so they did. They would leave, first to Łódź, and later to Palestine or the United States. Behind they left their home towns, because no one waited for them any more. They abandoned their former life and started a new one in a different place. But they could not forget about their families, their neighbors, the people they had seen every day in the street, and whom they would have no chance of seeing again. That is why monuments of Jews from individual towns who had been murdered by the Germans were erected. At he Holon cemetery in Israel, Batami's mother was involved in such a project.

For years the survivors would meet by this monument, but from year to year there were fewer of them. Finally nobody would come. No one would light a candle, no one prayed, no one read out the names of their relatives. The monument stood there on its own, and life went on at its own pace. This began to change a few years ago. Shoshi Shatit, whose father had been born in Sokołów, decided to find out more about her roots and the town where her family had lived for many years. Initially, her inquiries arose astonishment among her relatives, as they took up a lot of her time and there was no way of knowing the result, and her first trip to Poland turned out to be disappointing. “There was nothing there. Nothing at all”, Shoshi recalls.

Shoshi was not the only person to look for information about her father’s home town. It turned out that there many more such people. They are bound by the common past of their ancestors who had been their neighbors. Today, even though they live in different countries they try to rebuild this community that bound their parents and grandparents. They meet, exchange information, revive memories of a world that will never come back. When they look at it, Shoshi’s friends themselves are taking interest in their family history. And they start their inquiries.

Batami was a small girl when she visited the Holon cemetery for the last time. On 8 April 2013, on Yom HaShoah, she came here for the first time after many years. She brought her grandson, who knows the family history very well. Apart form them another forty people came, whose family history can be traced to Sokołów Podlaski. They came here because memory is a very important part of their identity. They brought their children and grandchildren so that they could also cherish this memory.

“Today is the day when we want to say that we remember the 6 million of Holocaust victims, particularly the six thousand from Sokołów Podlaski”, said one of those who came to the cemetery. “We remember their death in the ghettos, camps or on the streets of Polish towns. But this cannot be the only thing one can say about a person - that they died. Because life is most important. What you do shows how much you want to find out more about the life of your ancestors, not only about their death. And this is something we’ll never forget.”

At the Holon cemetery, on Yom HaShoah, they gather by symbolic tombstones dedicated to people from a given locality. There are still many monuments there which nobody visits...

Katarzyna Markusz

Sokolow Ceremony Holon 2012

This is a video in Hebrew documenting the first Holocaust memorial ceremony for the town of Sokolov-Podlaski to take place in Israel for many years. Participating in the ceremony were first, second and third generation descendants of the town now living in Israel.

http://vimeo.com/56378722

A few days in Sokolow

Dear Kasia,

I never imagined that it would be so hard to write about my trip. Arrived to Sokolow Podlaski in the evening, I moved into the hotel and went for a walk, just after a few steps I discovered the places I had seen in pictures. Suddenly everything was so close, I could touch, I could smell. Just in front of the hotel the first surprise, the old Jewish cemetery with a sign that says: "cmentarz zydowski, przechodniu uszanuj spokoj zmarłych" - "Jewish cemetery, passerby respect the peace of the dead".

Turn right and immediately recognized the synagogue building, in front of the beit midrash, a few meters and reaches Dluga street and I could see the monument to Brzóski my heart speedup there: I was in front of my father's house. While I knew for some time ago that the house no longer exists the proximity to the place where my father lived during his early years gave me a shock.
During my stay in SP passed by this place many times, many times took pictures of the place trying perhaps to capture something that my eyes could not see. How were the days when even the street called Rogowska, Jews filled the streets, the square, the market, certainly talking aloud, creating a soundtrack that disappeared 70 years ago.

My family had a transport company (moved by  horses), according my uncle  his great great grandfather had started the business and was established in Rogowska street, a two floor house with an exit to Piekna  (where they kept the horses, carriages, sleds and other tools) in the front of the house were a couple of shops. Every Thursday when the market worked anti-semitic groups came inveighed against the traders, my grandmother called my father and my uncle home and from behind the door they heard the screams, people running ... and so every Thursday, an almost routine in the life of the inhabitants of SP.

Tried to listening to the echoes of those sounds; I only had the silence of the evening in the city, almost deserted streets. Again I closed my eyes trying to identify in the old photos of the city my grandfather and his brothers with their carriages, those faces I never knew; nothing was left of them, only their names which we still carry generation after generation.
At that moment I realized that I was the only Jew in SP, me alone in a city which is said: "A visitor to Sokolow in 1930s could not walk 10 feet down the street without bumping into a Jew"

The next day I had the luck and privilege to meet you in person. After a long exchange of emails, photos and following your virtual projects finally were there, along with your child ready to take the tour created by you : "Jewish SP". Again, I saw each of the places so well documented in your "Missing" project, toured all stations along the way trying to revive this incredible place that was the home of my ancestors.

Every moment shared with you, walking around the town, visiting Treblinka, the trip to Siedlce, the ceremony in Maly Rynek, the chat with students in the school, the visit to the cemetery at the grave of someone who was born a Jew and decided to end his life as a Christian, each of these moments will remain in my memory forever and for each of them I will be forever grateful.

I spent only a few days at SP, emotions were a lot like the feeling of surprise, feeling that even today several days after returning home I cannot understand.

That morning in which visited Marian Pietrzak's Museum did not expect such a surprise, as everyone of our friends who visited SP just expected to see the remains of the matzevot and other Jews' utensils recovered by Mr. Pietrzak, he greeted me, I told him that I am from Israel and that my family was from SP. Asked about my family name: Angielczyk, I answered. He opened his eyes and held the breath for a moment took my arm and led me to a small carriage, a "doroshka" and told me that it was from my family. At that moment besides the feelings I was able to see for the first time a link to my past. There was this carriage that survived so long, 70 years until I arrived to SP and saw it.

There are several images that marked me deeply, the mass grave at Piekna, the mark of the mezuzah that once stood in that old house alongside Maly Rynek, the kind gentleman that after the lighting of candles in the old cemetery gave me two oat nuts from the trees that grow there, maybe as a sign to remember the cemetery that no longer exists, to have something in place of the matzevot that were razed.

Every moment was very emotive; every step I took tried to find something  last of many generations of Jews who lived there but the silence that remained put me back in my position of being the last Jew in town.

Warm regards,
Eduardo

Zaproszenie