Poland trip immerses students in Jewish culture, past and present

Rising Emory College sophomore Sydni Demester felt more than a little intimidated by the prospect of pursuing education abroad.

She had never been on a plane, much less traveled outside the U.S. But, her passion for history trumped that fear when she learned about an intensive 12-day trip to Poland this summer to complement her “Jews of Eastern Europe” course last spring. 

The experience of walking through a millennium of history and connecting with current Jewish communities and museums fueled an even deeper interest in the aspiring attorney, to study history for the context necessary to interpret modern law and society.

“People refer to Poland as a Jewish graveyard, so I was expecting it to be dark and depressing and the content to be about suffering and loss,” says Demester, a history and philosophy, politics and law major from Kennesaw, Georgia. 

“But as more people there are finding out they are ethnically Jewish, Jewish life is reviving,” she adds. “People are talking about the tragedies and the shared culture. It’s surprising to me how vibrant the community has become by how they memorialize their full history.”

Sponsored by the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies in partnership with the Taube Center for Jewish Life & Learning in Poland, the trip to to Kraków and Warsaw immersed students in history and culture and provided them with opportunities to examine the country’s post-communist Jewish renewal. This summer was the third iteration of the program, which attracts students with Jewish roots and non-heritage students alike.

Ellie Schainker taught the spring course and guided students who didn’t take the class with readings to help prepare for the two weeks of travel.

The Arthur Blank Family Foundation Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies, Schainker led the dozen through history via walking tours of Kraków’s historic Jewish quarter and the former Auschwitz- Birkenau concentration camp, conversations with students at the University of Warsaw and a Polish-Jewish social media influencer as well as classes, meals and cultural events.

In addition to visits to large-scale historical sites, students met with grassroots groups helping locate forgotten Jewish cemeteries and erecting monuments with the names of the dead. They also engaged with organizers of cultural festivals aimed at preserving Jewish culture, food and music.

At each point, Schainker encouraged students to examine how the Polish and Jewish culture developed together in a country that was home to Europe’s largest Jewish population before World War II, then alternated between periods of intense antisemitism and honest embrace of its history.

Like many other nations today, Poland now is deeply polarized. While the nationalist Law and Justice party has been out of power since 2023, factions of the ideology remain popular, Schainker says.

“Students today are more aware of nationalist rhetoric and can see how those politics shape history,” says Schainker, incoming director of the Tam Institute.

“I want them to be able to see a deep history that goes back to medieval times and how nationalism is often a question of what is a nation and who constitutes it,” she adds. “I hope they can distinguish between Jewish life and political rhetoric about Jews, especially in this moment of heightened global antisemitism and uptick in Holocaust denialism in U.S. politics.”

The trip encourages learning from a local to global scale so that students are better equipped to have effective, well-informed conversations about any sensitive topic, says assistant professor of German studies and outgoing Tam Institute Director Miriam Udel.

“What’s extraordinary is learning to approach Jewish life not only as the stuff of memory and a buried past but also as a living history,” says Udel, whose scholarship explores and explains the political significance of Yiddish literature.

For rising junior Briana Castillo, an international studies and music performance major from Edmond, Oklahoma, small details illustrated how propaganda worked to shatter a common history. She found a formal letter a man had written in Hebrew amid the documents at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The same man wrote a second letter, discussing his wife’s death, in Yiddish.

Language changed based on the situation, with Russian for government documents and Hebrew seen as the language of the elite and rabbis. A tour guide mentioned that the era’s propaganda suggested only outlaws used Yiddish, effectively criminalizing Jews’ everyday language.

“A lot of people know the surface of the Holocaust but not the layers of success and suffering that came before and after it,” Castillo says. “I think it’s important to understand those layers to understand Jewish life in context today.”