YITZHAK RAPOPORT ORAL HISTORY

AGNIESZKA ILWICKA-SHEPPARD: This is Agnieszka Ilwicka-Sheppard, and today is 22nd February, 2015. I'm here in Israel, in Ma'ale Adumim with Yitzhak Rapoport, rabbi, and we are going to record an interview as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. Yitzhak Rapoport, do I have your permission to record this interview?

YITZHAK RAPOPORT: Yes.

AIS: Thank you. I would like to start with question about your family background. Could you tell me briefly what you know about your family background?

YR: Both of my father's parents were from Wilno, Lithuania. My mother's mother was from Kovno and my mother's father was from outside Tarnów, in Poland. So, I 1:00guess I'm three-quarters Lithuanian and one-quarter Polish Jew.

AIS: Do you have any famous or infamous family stories?

YR: Well, from my father's side, the tradition is that we come from the original Vilna Rapoports that date back to at least the seventeenth century, a famous rabbinic family whose main ancestor, or whose most famous member, was Rov [Rabbi] Shabtai HaKohen, the author of the Shach, one of the most prominent commentaries on parts of the Shulchan Aruch. So, yeah, there certainly -- I mean, again, my grandfather, thank God, left Vilna before the war and went to Russia, and that's why he survived the war. Of course, his wife, as well. He 2:00lost his entire family -- or, at least, so I imagine. He almost refused to -- I never met him, 'cause he died before I was born. But when I asked my father, "What did your father tell you?" -- so, mainly my father would say that his father refused to speak about the old days, and was difficult to get any kind of information at all. Among the few things that he did say was that my father should be proud about being a Rapoport, because we belong to the old rabbinic dynasty of Rapoports in Wilno. But beyond that, not much.

AIS: Okay, can you describe your neighborhood growing up?

YR: Yeah. I think, since we're talking about Poland, I think I should add that 3:00my mother's uncle was the last rabbi of Sosnowiec after the war. My mother's uncle survived Auschwitz. Rabbi [Chaim Monsdorf?]. Well, he lost his entire family, of course, but he was also a rabbi after the war, and he died in Sosnowiec in the '50s, unfortunately, murdered by Poles. Well, one of those tragic stories. But he was, I think -- my main inspiration to become a rabbi was him, because my mother grew up with him. She was born after the war, and she grew up with him, and he lived with her and her parents. And so, whatever influence she had from him, I had some of that from her. So, he was my main 4:00inspiration to becoming a rabbi. And also, my second name is Chaim, as was his name Chaim, so --

AIS: So, maybe this is a good moment to ask you how come your family from continental Europe and then from Sweden?

YR: Well, my father was born in Moscow in 1939. And as a young man, he was a brilliant violinist, violist in the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, and he decided that he wanted to flee the Soviet Union, leave the Soviet Union. And, well, to cut a long story short, it was basically impossible to do that, and the only opening was not really an opening, but it made it possible, though extremely 5:00dangerous -- was to try to do so through Poland, through being married to a Polish citizen. So, my father and my mother, they married. And, I mean, they met, they married, and it took my father a long time to -- well, do you want me to tell you that whole story? I don't mind, but it's a story. Okay, I don't mind. I don't know how -- okay. Okay, so my father came -- the first time my father came to Poland, it was on a trip, a vacation. As I said, he was a brilliant musician, he was a concert master, and so he had certain privileges to go to certain stores that were for elite workers, so to speak. So, he came to Poland and he -- my mother's parents apparently had some friends in Russia who wanted someone to pass something along. So, he came to my mother's family to 6:00bring something from their friends in Russia. And he met my mother and they fell in love. And he explained to her that his intention is to flee from the Soviet Union, and he has this crazy plan that's going to take a long time. But it's either that or nothing, because he is not -- doesn't intend to stay. And the plan was basically he saw that there was, in Poland -- did not exist in Russia, this was about 1967, '68 -- that there was a black market for dollars in Poland. If you had something to sell that was very valuable or that wasn't attainable, you could sell it for dollars. And for dollars, you could also buy tickets, train tickets, to other countries within the communist world. Only tickets, 7:00though, not visas. So, it was still risky. But he also saw that everyone is supposed to know Russian but they don't. And here he comes, all the way from Moscow, and he has a passport, and he has a -- well, he saw that everyone was afraid of him because they weren't used to seeing people from Moscow at all. And, well, he basically -- what he did, it took him about a year and a half because according to Soviet Union law at the time, if you had a wife in Poland, you were allowed -- I think it was every three months -- to take a holiday of about two weeks. Leave Russia, in other words, go to Poland, and spend two weeks with your wife and then come back. So, he did that. Took them about a year and a half. During this year and a half, he would buy, in Russia, things which were in 8:00those more special stores, things which were difficult to get in Poland, or maybe impossible to get. He would smuggle them to Poland, sell them in Poland on this black market, and amass dollars. And so, after doing this for about a year and a half, he had enough money to buy the following tickets: Warsaw, Budap-- well, going south, right? Warsaw, Budapest -- or maybe Prague, also, first, and then Budapest, Moscow. Budapest, Bucharest, Bucharest, Moscow. Bucharest, I don't know where in Yugoslavia. Maybe Zagreb, and Zagreb, Moscow. I guess also there must have been a Prague ticket there, in between the first -- Warsaw, Prague. And so, he went. He got onto a train with his suitcase and his violin and -- viola, really -- and at the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia, at 9:00the time, they asked, of course, for ticket and visa. He explained to them in Russian, which they didn't know well, but they should know -- and he did it, of course, with certain chutzpah, certain authority. And he explained to them that he was going to Moscow. And so, he told me that the first -- the Polish conductor started laughing and tried to explain to him, in broken Russian, which he didn't really know, that "You're going south in order to go north," which doesn't make any sense, right? So, my father, he understood Polish by then, already. They spoke in Russian, my parents, because my mother finished two faculties. She has an MA in Russian, so she speaks Russian fluently. And so, that was their language. But he had picked up enough Polish, so he said that they -- the couple of conductors or people who check tickets on the border, they had this little conference kind of next to him, because they did it in Polish. 10:00They thought he only spoke Russian, but he understood Polish. And so, they were talking among themselves -- "Why does he have a ticket but not a visa?" And so one of them said, "But listen, he has come all the way from Moscow. He must know somebody." So, that's what my father realized, that he realized that the whole communist system is based on fear. And so, since he happened to have the social standing, due to his musical career, that he could be -- that in Poland, he was like a king. And so therefore, he realized that that would probably make it possible for him to basically bully his way, so to speak, through Europe, and he did. In other words, he went all the way from Poland through -- going south, throughout all of Eastern Europe, until he got to Yugoslavia. And Yugoslavia's communism was less strict, that was always the case. At least Tito made it so, 11:00probably because they were on the border to the free world and so on. So, there, there was some nice Yugoslav who helped my father, well, get to Italy, basically. Trieste, which was on the Italian side. And he went to a refugee camp of refugees, and he said that they -- when he walked in, he walked in with a suit and tie -- he had rubles. Rubles worked in every Eastern European country at the time. So, he didn't -- I mean, he fled, but his fleeing was a fleeing in luxuries. I mean, not luxury. Was not really luxury at the time, but in comfort. He was very comfortable. And so, he walked into the refugee camp with a suit, and a tie, and ironed clothes, and with his violin case in one hand and a suitcase in the other. And he said that they asked him -- he said he's from Russia. And they were shocked and they said, Otkuda ty -- where are you from? 12:00And he said, "Moskva [Russian: Moscow]." And he said that the guy's jaw just fell, because he had never in his life seen a person from Moscow. He is in the refugee -- he said that the people in that camp had done great feats -- going through the mountains, swimming through -- I mean, they'd done real amazing feats in order to get out. And here, somebody walks in with a suitcase and a violin case and says, "Yes, hi, I'm from Moscow." I mean, you couldn't get out of Moscow. This is 1968. You couldn't get out of Moscow in 1968 in any way. The only reason why he was ever able to leave Moscow on a regular basis was because he was married to my mother. And that, they did for a year and a half without -- so, by the way, the rabbi refused to give them a chupah. They only married civilly, because he said that "You are risking your life." It's a simple halachah. He said, "You're risking your life. If I marry you, then the chance" 13:00-- well, the rabbi didn't believe that he was going to make it. And he said, "If they capture you and they send you to Siberia -- so, she is a -- she cannot get a divorce and she is just stuck." Nineteen sixty-eight, nobody thought, aha, in twenty years, communism will be over, right? That was not -- nobody thought that. So, the rabbi at the time, who was Rabbi Morejno was, at the time, in Łódź. Rabbi Morejno was in the same barrack as my mother's uncle in Auschwitz. Rabbi Morejno and my uncle, as my mother remembers from her childhood, they would meet and study Torah together. They were khevruto, study partners, though the Rabbi Morejno's considerably younger than my great-uncle. But they still studied together. I mean, how many rabbis in post-war Poland were there? So, they studied together from time to time. So, Rabbi Morejno refused to give them a chupah because he said that, "If you're going to risk your life in 14:00order to -- I mean, so -- you can't." And so, they only married, really, in Sweden, later, after they had fled. Well, my mother didn't flee. My mother was among those Jews that were kicked out by Gomułka in '68, '69. And, I mean, it was very -- it was kind of crazy. I mean, when he was fleeing, she was leaving, pretty much, at the same time or being kicked out at the same time. And she didn't know -- they had agreed beforehand that he was going to -- if he got out, he was going to send a telegram to some aunt of his in America, and she was going to send a telegram to -- because if they would catch -- I mean, even if 15:00they wouldn't capture, they would realize at some point, right, that he's not here. It was a totalitarian regime and very strict, right? Very controlling. At some point, they would realize he was not there and they were, of course, afraid that the family would suffer, right? His family was -- which was my mother at the time, also. I mean, the fact that they didn't have a chupah yet -- but they were married according to the civil law. So, they timed it so that he was fleeing around the same time that she was being kicked out. And so, when he made it, that was from -- her experience was that all these Jewish organizations -- once she got out of Poland, they were taken by trains and they came, I think, to -- was it Austria, I think, Vienna, and then there were these Jewish organizations that wanted to take them to Israel. And they were all very surprised that she wanted to go to Italy, and said, Why do you want to go to 16:00Italy? What's in Italy? And she said, "Well, my husband is waiting in Italy." Which was not -- which was, of course, not common, but -- well, and then they went to Sweden, because my father was a very brilliant musician. And so, he had several job offers in several different orchestras. The Bonn Symphony Orchestra offered him concertmastership, yes. He refused. It was Bonn, I mean -- (laughs) it was, you know. Actually, he was offered a couple of orchestras in America, which he later regretted that he didn't accept. He said that he would have, but my mother's parents were still in Poland, and so they thought that, If we go so far away, we won't be able to help, 'cause in those days, you thought of distance as actually meaning something. So, they didn't go to America and they didn't go to Bonn, either. But the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra offered him a contract right away. And so, he came to Sweden, started working the next day. 17:00Actually, in Italy, he said he was interviewed several times by both the CIA and the Mossad, because how could a person from Moscow suddenly be here? And so, he said that they both concluded, though, that this is not something that we can use. It's not a -- you can't do it this way, right? No, because my father's sister, his younger sister, she tried to do the same thing and she didn't manage -- not because -- she broke down. I mean, she had a mental breakdown because of the tension, because of the fear. She made it as far down, I think, as Bucharest -- or Budapest? Well, she made it pretty far down, doing the same thing, but then she broke down and she actually went to the rabbi there. And then, Mossad Aliyah Bet, which was the smuggle, the so-to-speak illegal Aliyah -- I mean, at 18:00the time of -- the Aliyah part was not illegal. The illegal -- my father's sister was smuggled out, which was, of course, also very dangerous and so on. But yeah, anyway, so that's (laughs) a lot of history, actually. But at least it makes for an interesting conversation. It's not boring. I never thought that my history was boring.

AIS: What languages were spoken in your home?

YR: Polish, Swedish, and a little bit, also Russian. My mother and -- well, my grandfather lived until I was six years old. He and, of course, my grandmother, whom I never saw, unfortunately, because she died before I was born -- they spoke Yiddish to my mother. But, well, my mother also used many Yiddish 19:00expressions, but I couldn't -- I wouldn't say that Yiddish was spoken. It was just kind of implanted here and there. Yeah, but also when I was a -- when I was a small child, I mean, there were still many old Jews alive. I mean, they're still -- all the Jews alive then were people who really spoke Yiddish. So, there was a lot of Yiddish being spoken among the old. And since my mother spoke Yiddish, because that was her first language -- so, I think I heard quite a bit of it.

AIS: How come, in Sweden, you could hear Yiddish around you?

YR: Well, I mean, Sweden had a -- well, not a large Jewish community, but a 20:00Jewish community that hadn't really suffered from the war. I mean, if anything, the size of the Swedish Jewish community is because of the war, but in a positive way. In other words, the Swedish Jewish community increased because of the war and because also of subsequent things that happened. So they had a, I don't know -- they had a decent amount of elderly Jews who spoke Yiddish. That's just how it was. I didn't think of it as anything special or unique. As a child, you think that everything around you, that's the normal way. Again, but it wasn't so pronounced. It existed, but I heard much more Polish than Yiddish, if 21:00anything. I mean, as a child, I had a few Polish nannies as a small child. And so, I heard a lot of Polish. And then, the older I got, of course, once I started kindergarten at age five and then school later, so, then, of course, Swedish took over, totally. But I still kept -- I still had Polish some in the back of my head. I would still answer my mother in Polish. My brother, I don't -- categorically not. I mean, he's six years younger than me, and -- although he also understands Polish fully. But, well, I don't know from what age, but -- well, he also started kindergarten when he was about one year old. One years 22:00old, yeah. And so, he therefore had the -- he was therefore exposed to Swedish so early on that -- although he can speak a little bit, but it's not so natural for him, I think. But due to the fact that I have Polish nannies -- well, and also, of course, mainly because of my mother, but in combination with that. So, I spoke Polish and would speak to my mother in Polish. And I knew lots of Polish Jews. I mean, most of my parents' friends were Polish Jews who had left or been kicked out in '68, '69, or who'd left later, but among their children, I'd say that -- well, overwhelmingly, they didn't speak Polish at all. I even knew of 23:00cases where the Polish parents spoke Swedish to their children. So, maybe not when they were very young, but -- no, but it also happened -- I mean, as soon as the child starts answering in the local language, so, the parent is kind of forced into that, as well, that eventually -- so, I mean, when I worked in Poland, for instance, and I would speak to my mother over the phone, if she said -- and I would say to her, "Don't speak to me in Swedish" if she said it, right, something in Swedish, 'cause now I want to just think in Polish. And then, I noticed that although we did speak Polish together -- but Swedish had taken a very big part, of course. Maybe majority of -- actually not maybe majority. Most definitely majority. But five years in Poland, well, that helped a lot.

AIS: Who were your neighbors while you were growing up?

YR: Well, there were some Polish Jews among our neighbors, actually. Not that many. I mean, after all -- oh, I don't think that more than maybe five thousand, maybe less Polish Jews came to Sweden, so it's not -- Sweden is a relatively large country. It's not like they're all Polish Jews. But, well, within walking distance, there were several, let's say half a dozen families. And because they were my parents' friends -- so, I saw them, among my parents' friends, more than anyone else. And therefore, well, a very big part of my world as a child was in 25:00Polish. And, as a matter of fact, I didn't realize -- I remember it very clearly. I must have been, I don't know, five years old or something, the first time I realized that one of my mother's friends who was Polish isn't also Jewish. I don't know why that happened. I mean, as I said, I had Polish nannies who were purely Polish, not at all Jewish. But maybe that's somehow since I was, then, smaller, maybe, children forget and whatnot. But I remember at some point, when my mother would tell me and whisper in my ear, "No, no, no. Ella is not Jewish, so don't" -- because I somehow had got it into -- well, the kind of sentence that starts with "because of," and then something Jewish, "therefore, it must be." And that kind of sentence doesn't apply to someone who isn't 26:00Jewish. So, I remember at that point, like, what? I just have that flashback. I mean, again, because overwhelmingly, they were Jews. Truth of the matter is, still, until this very day -- well, really, there's only one of them -- no, more than one, but the majority of those that my parents hung out with were Jews, with a couple of exceptions that were Polish Poles, not Polish Jews. You know, okay, I mean, whatever.

AIS: And the language what you spoke to your family home was what?

YR: Yeah, so we spoke a lot of Polish. And, I mean since my parents' friends were Polish, Jews overwhelmingly, and they spoke between themselves also in 27:00Polish, right? So, if my parents -- if we went to hang out or dinner, whatever, to somebody else's and they speak Polish there -- so, you hear a lot of Polish. I never, ever spoke Polish to the children there, right? I mean, ever. But if you hear your parents speak Polish all the time to their friends -- so, yeah, it sticks.

AIS: Tell me briefly about your educational background, please.

YR: Well, I went to Jewish school in Stockholm. That's only available for primary school -- until ninth grade. High school, which is tenth, eleventh, and twelfth, there is no Jewish school, so -- well, so I went to Jewish school from 28:00first class to ninth, and -- well, I mean, I think it's probably similar to a lot of other Jewish schools in the world. Of course, it taught Hebrew and it taught Judaism. The level wasn't that high I would discover later in life. But that's also true for many other Jewish schools in many other countries. It's a very common complaint. I saw in Israel, many people coming from different countries who come to yeshiva and think that they have a very solid background and realize that they do not. So, I don't think it's unique for Sweden, and I don't know how it is now, if it's improved or not. But, I mean, it was Jewish school. So, you definitely weren't like any of the goyim, because we didn't have 29:00any of the Christian holidays and we had all of the Jewish holidays. Of course, we had the plus of being -- we had off both for the Christian holidays, because they were public holidays, and the Jewish holidays. But, on the other hand, that led to us having -- we had to have longer days, to equal. And so, I don't know who wins, but -- yeah, but I mean, it was okay. I mean, I don't think there's any -- Yiddish was always something in the background -- kind of existed, and things like "Fiddler on the Roof" and Yiddish songs and stuff like that. When my mother, on her fortieth birthday -- she and her best friend, who was also from 30:00Poland, actually, from Bielsko-Biała, they did their fortieth birthday party together. I was, I guess, eleven at the time, and what I remember is that -- well, all the children -- she has two children and I also -- I mean, my mother has two children, and so we all prepared something. We did some kind of performance on stage, and I remember that I sang two songs in Yiddish and one song in Russian, actually, so there you go.

AIS: Do you remember what songs?

YR: Yeah, was "Óči čjórnye," "Black Eyes," which is a famous Russian song, 31:00which actually I remember now -- that I sang it both in Russian and Swedish. Like, together, one after the other. In Yiddish, it was -- I actually believe that one of them was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising song, "Zog nit keyn mol az du geyst dem letstn veg," "Never say it and you go there." Yeah, I believe that was one of them. Now, I can't remember what was the second one. But there certainly was nothing in Hebrew. Were a couple of songs in Yiddish and also song in Russian. My father, of course, played. I mean, what's he going to do? I remember that my mother's friend's husband, who -- also a Russian-Polish Jew, he sang in 32:00Russian. And my friend, who was -- we were in the same class together, so he was the son. His name is Marcus and we're still sometimes in touch. And he told jokes, which were good, right, and they were in Swedish. So, at this party, there was Russian, there was Polish -- yeah, there was Russian, there was Yiddish, and there was Swedish. I don't actually think there was any Polish. I remember there was one guy, Pyotr, which, of course, means that he was probably Jewish, a Jewish guy. And I remember he told jokes with a bad Polish -- I mean, in Swedish, but with a Polish accent. You can hear from three kilometers away that he is not Swedish. But he did tell them, though, in Swedish, which is -- 33:00no, because, of course, when I sang my songs, I realized -- I mean, I knew beforehand, I knew that only some people will understand what I'm singing. I mean, the Russian song will be understood by my family, by my mother's friends' family, and also some people. I mean -- no, there were actually -- again, the majority of the people, I think, at this party were also Polish Jews. But there were also, of course, Swedes there. And so, of course, the Swedes didn't understand anything. I mean, they did understand the jokes told in Swedish, but they didn't understand anything of the Polish or the Russian, but so what? I mean, (laughs) if they were friends of my parents or of the other family there 34:00that was from Poland, so, clearly, they knew what they were getting into, so to speak. But, yeah, I remember I sang in Yiddish.

AIS: At that time --

YR: But written by Latin letters, by the way, not written in Hebrew. Not written in Hebrew letters, as Yiddish is.

AIS: Right. At that time, was your family in touch with Poland and Russia, and people from (UNCLEAR) places?

YR: My mother had -- well, first of all, with Russia, I mean, there was the Iron Curtain, so it was limited availability to be in touch with people. Plus, my father, both of his parents had died before I was born. His sister had fled and had made it to Israel. So, there were -- I don't know how much -- I don't know of that much of a connection. I went with my father to Russia in '94. I remember 35:00that my father had to -- actually, I don't know if he had to, but he contacted the Russian embassy in Stockholm because he wanted to make sure that he wouldn't get arrested upon entering Russia. He left Russia, the Soviet Union, illegally, right? In other words, it could have been -- it wasn't, they assured. It was fine, they said, The Soviet Union, that's over. But in theory, could have been that he would still be a -- someone who had left Russia illegally and. So no, but they said, of course, it was fine. And so, we went for summer. And we were in Moscow and Leningrad, or Saint Petersburg at the time, of course, already. And so, I saw that he had lots of friends from that time. We didn't stay ever in a hotel or anything like that. We just stayed with his friends from way back. No family. Again, my father was the first and last generation of Russian Jews. His 36:00parents were both from Lithuania. So, he naturally didn't have any family in Russia, but he had friends. And so, we stayed by friends. He had friends among great musicians, also, who -- I remember when it was still the Soviet Union, and you had people coming from the Soviet Union Orchestra. Soviet Union Orchestra did do tours, of course. And I remember Temirkanov, Yuri Temirkanov who was a great conductor, and he was a friend of my father's. I remember him visiting our house when we were there. Well, I mean, when he was in Sweden. I didn't remember this because I, unfortunately, wasn't yet alive, wasn't yet here in the world, but my parents met Oistrakh. Was a tremendous violinist, whom they actually 37:00helped. I don't remember exactly what it -- yeah, they helped him with some money or something, because Oistrakh was one of the greatest violinists of his time, but the Soviets, of course, in order to make sure that he wouldn't leave the Soviet Union -- so, he was never allowed to go with his wife. His wife was there and was more or less made clear to him that should he leave -- I mean, should he basically just, say, run away -- should he run away, his family will suffer. And it was terrible. My mother told me how he told them that there was some young woman in the, I guess, Politburo who would decide whether or not he could go as a soloist to different performances and how he would tell my mother that, This young woman, she knows absolutely nothing about music. I mean, not only does she not appreciate music, she is a total zero. For her, there is no 38:00difference between Mozart and I don't know what. So, and how Oistrakh was really -- he shared with them how difficult it was to be a Soviet Union musician. And then, they helped him because he didn't -- yes, they helped him to call his wife, I think -- something like that, because he didn't have the means to. And it was also -- I remember my father -- I don't remember the details, but they were going to meet, but, you know, you couldn't -- my father couldn't walk up to Oistrakh and start speaking to him in Russian because there were people watching Oistrakh. So, they worked out some kind of crazy thing of how they would be able to meet and how my parents would be able to help him. But, of course, without 39:00anyone seeing. No, when Oistrakh played, it was totally -- everyone knew, he knew that that guy and that guy and that guy is watching me if I do something. That was obvious, because everyone -- such a great musician, he could have walked into the embassy of any country, pretty much, and just say, "I'm David Oistrakh, could I please be a refugee from the Soviet Union in your country?" I mean, surely, any great -- any symphony orchestra anywhere in the world would thank their lucky star that Oistrakh decided to come to them. Doesn't matter it be America, England, Sweden, he could have his pick, right? But, of course, he couldn't because -- and my mother said that he was very pained. He was a -- as they say in Yiddish, he was a nebekh [unlucky person]. They felt very bad for 40:00him, because on one hand, he was such a great musician. The other hand, he was basically a prisoner. I mean, while not being in prison, he kind of was. My father said that the people like Oistrakh and Kogan, two great, two tremendous musicians and Jews -- so, he said in Russia, yeah, they were like kings. Yeah, they were like kings in Russia, that's true. But the second they would step foot outside Russia, they were like prisoners, like trash, in comparison even to the people who -- to the not-so-great musicians around them, to anyone, right? So, yeah. I mean, again, I didn't see -- but in relation to that, I remember that we would send packages to Poland. My mother had friends, had good friends -- only a few, but she had some very good friends who she's still in touch with, with whom 41:00she's still in touch, in Poland. And we would send them things, I mean, because this, of course, was in the early and mid- and probably also late '80s, 'cause obviously you couldn't get certain things in Poland. It was difficult to get -- this is everything from clothes and things like that, and if you could hide away a few dollars inside clothes that you sent by package -- I'm sure though that the Polish -- the communist custom authorities obviously must have opened these packages. I don't know, but I imagine so. But, as you know, there was an astronomical difference in the currency, right? In Sweden, you could buy dollars. It was not anything special. You could buy dollars just like you could buy any other international currency, right? In Poland, dollars were like a -- 42:00was kind of like --

AIS: Like gold.

YR: Yeah, it was gold, yeah. It was gold. So, I don't know to what extent she was able to give them, how much we sell them, but I do know that we -- I do remember helping, as a child, pack boxes to send. And I remember being surprised, because some of it was my clothes. I mean, old clothes that I already wasn't using, and that we were sending. And I remember thinking why? Who needs this, right? But --

AIS: And I would like to come back to your education and ask you about how is to be a person in transition in that sense that you were the child of refugees from communist countries, and you are the first generation of Swedish Jews in your 43:00family. Is this making you a different Jew in any sense?

YR: Well, I mean, first of all, being exposed to several different cultures, languages gives a perspective that -- I find it difficult to find other people, find many other people who have the same perspective. It's very rare, but if I find people who have both a Polish and a Russian -- yeah, I knew someone who had parents from Poland and Russia and had grown up in the United States. So, at least there was the free world with the Poland-Russia package. But it was only partial. I mean, the story's kind of unique. So, on one hand, it gives a certain 44:00feeling of -- I mean, on one hand, it enriches. On the other hand, children want to be like everyone else. And so, it does give you certain feeling of outside-ship, right, because -- well, there was pretty much nobody else like us. I mean, yeah, a few people, a few there were, but not so many. So, I mean, really, my first Swedish friends that were -- the first people who -- I'm sure -- no, of course, in kindergarten, I did spend a year or so in the Swedish kindergarten, so I must have had friends then, not that I remember them. But the first time that I can at least remember having friends, hanging out with friends and so on, with Swedish friends, is in high school -- tenth, eleventh, and 45:00twelfth grade, and that's because there was no Jewish high school. So, I had to go to Swedish high school, so I went to a local Swedish high school and I had friends. I mean, just like people make friends. And there, I was even more unique, right, because there, there were, I think there were two Jews in that high school. So, that's not that many. I mean, again, could have been maybe some more, but there were two Jews that I knew about. And actually, the other one, he was also, (laughs) he also was a child of Polish Jewish parents, actually. But I did notice, I think -- I don't know. It's difficult to know that -- you're a high school kid. I do remember that I came up to him and started talking. I thought that the fact that we were both children of Polish Jewish parents or whatever, because of our common background, we should kind of, by default, be 46:00friends or something like that. But that again, I have nothing against it, but we never became friends, really. Okay, we also weren't in the same grade, I mean, but still -- actually, no, I think we were in the same grade, but not in the same class. But I can also understand him. I mean, the problem of being different -- most people, and myself included, I'm sure, want to try to erase that. I mean, I was very, very Swedish. I was a passionate Swedish patriot. I was a member of the right-wing Swedish party. I was an active member. I volunteered. I was very passionate about Sweden as a -- ice hockey and football, which is -- ice hockey, especially. I remember watching those games. I remember crying when Sweden would lose. Again, very passionate Swede. Well, which I think 47:00is understandable, considering that that's a ticket in, so to speak. And that really only changed in the last year of high school. So, that's when I realized that my good Swedish friends, for them -- to use a not-so-nice expression -- for them, I was still a kike, no matter what. And they didn't think it was such a bad way. It was, I think, third year of high school. Yeah, third year. Last year, in other words. And I found out that people -- it was through some conversation or other -- I mean, basically, it was there was some discussion 48:00about foreigners, and then I remember saying that, "Well, who cares? Let's change topics," or something. "It's boring, it doesn't really concern us anyway." And then, they all looked at me like, "What? But you're a foreigner." And I remember looking at one of them and saying, "Wait a minute? Who helps whom when we have exams in Swedish?" (laughs) "Whose Swedish is better," right? And I remember he said, "Yeah, but that's not what it's about." And I realized that's -- that despite everything, in spite of wanting to be Swedish and really, really believing in this idea that you can fully be both Swedish and Jewish, you do not have to be less Jewish. You can be one hundred percent Jewish and one hundred 49:00percent Swedish, because that's the essence of the multicultural Swedish society, that you're allowed to just add on, basically. I kind of got that as a slap in my face. The truth of the matter is it happened several times in high school. I remember speaking to one of my teachers at -- actually, specifically the Swedish teacher. And I remember at some point, he refused to give me an A and I came to him and I spoke to him. And he said, "Well, you know, it's difficult when you come from a foreign family. It's difficult." I remember that phrase. I remember my feeling of, ugh, wanting to throw up, because there was nothing to do. And so, I remember detesting him. But okay, so all these things 50:00contributed to me eventually leaving Sweden.

AIS: Leaving Sweden to where?

YR: To Israel. I began university and I studied law and I studied French. And in university, also -- at this point in time, I wasn't so -- I didn't really think that I would ever be accepted as a hundred percent Swedish. That train had gone, had passed. And so I felt it was so difficult to be in university and not be -- and there were so few Jews at the end of the day. I was very active in the Jewish student union, but how large could that be? It was a very, very small thing, really. And actually, after about a year and a half of college, I decide to go to yeshiva just for a summer. A summer program. And I went for summer 51:00program and I fell in love with yeshiva, and I ended up staying for another five years. And my rosh yeshiva [Hebrew: head of yeshiva], Rabbi Brovender, who has a great sense of humor, he sometimes, when he would pass me in the beit midrash, the study hall, he would stop and with his deep voice would say, "Yitzhak, you're still here? It's a long summer program." You know? Because, yeah, it was a -- no, yeshiva was the best five years of my life, was --

AIS: But tell me, why did you decide to go to the summer program?

YR: Well, 'cause I wanted to learn more about -- I was not going to go to the summer program to stay for five years. I was going to go the summer program to try it out, to be able to put that, so to speak, on my CV. Not actually thinking about CVs, but just to have the experience, to study, to learn something more, because I was active in the Jewish student union and I was reading a lot. But 52:00you still felt that you were on the outside, and you certainly were. And so, I wanted to go to yeshiva to see what the -- I remember emailing some yeshivas, asking if they had summer programs. And I got a couple of answers. And this was an answer that I thought was very nice and so on, and so I went. And the rest is history.

AIS: How long did you -- were in Israel before you went to yeshiva?

YR: Now, my parents took us to Israel very often, as often -- so, that was also something different about me. And actually, most -- I would say actually all of -- almost all, maybe, of my friends, because friends of mine would vacation in Sweden. My parents never, ever went for a winter vacation in the north, which is very popular -- ski vacation. My parents never ever went for ski vacation. I 53:00remember asking my parents, "Why don't we go for ski vacation? And why don't we" -- and they would always say that, But we take you to Israel, we go -- so, I was in Israel many times as a child. Very many times. And, I mean very many -- couldn't be much more than once a year. I mean, after all, it costs a lot of money. But still, a lot -- and also, when I was in eighth grade, there's a six-week Israel tour for the eighth graders in the Jewish school, and I went. I actually ended up breaking my collarbone after a couple of weeks. So, I had to stay with my father's cousin for -- well, not quite a month. Bit less, maybe for three weeks it was. And so, for three weeks, I lived in the center of Jerusalem, 'cause he lived in the very, very center of Jerusalem, and he was a wonderful man. He's dead now, but he was a wonderful man. And he was one of those who had 54:00left Wilno well before the war, who had been a member of the Haganah here, who had stories about smuggling food into Jerusalem, about nightly raids. And he also knew everything about everything. I took a tour guide course when I came back to Israel after Poland, and he was not a tour guide, but he would drive, he would point to one place or tell you the whole story about that place. And also, for him -- that was the -- he could say, around the places in Jerusalem at least, he could say what he did there and what he did there. So, I remember, already in eighth grade, I totally fell in love with Jerusalem. I loved Jerusalem, I would explore Jerusalem, and my parents were generous. I had plenty of pocket money, which I, of course, spent on the stupidest of things. But 55:00still, so I had that maybe three weeks or maybe even more in Jerusalem and having nothing to do. I mean, he was already a retired musician. He had played in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Oh, my father's family predominantly were musicians. So, I couldn't hang out with him. I was in eighth grade, he was retired. So, I explored Jerusalem. And if you walk a place back and forth and right and left, you create a relationship that you don't get if you are driven from every place or if you just visit. Just the every day walking, walking, walking, walking was a great experience.

AIS: How did your parents react to your decision that you would like to stay in yeshiva?

YR: Well, initially, they weren't happy about it, of course, and maybe even beyond initially, right? Because here I was -- I stopped doing what a good Jewish boy should do. They say a good Jewish boy becomes a doctor. If he is a half failure, he becomes a lawyer. If he's a total failure, he becomes an accountant, right? So, that's a -- there's a famous Jewish joke that says somebody is late for a brit milah, for circumcision. That's when you give the boy the name, his name. He's late for brit milah of a close friend -- the child of a close friend. But there are lots of people there, so he figures maybe he can pretend that he didn't miss it. I mean, he comes late, after they're already eating and so on. So, he asks somebody, he says "Listen," whispers to somebody, 57:00"I missed it. Could you tell me, what did they name the boy?" "Ah, they named him Dr. Jonathan." (laughter) So, it's a famous Jewish joke. Well, no, so they were not happy, because -- originally, they were not happy because it was not a good career move. Certainly, in the beginning, I was not at all interested in becoming a rabbi. Just wanted to study. And so, to go from studying to becoming a lawyer -- from that to studying just to study -- obviously, they were worried. I got a scholarship in yeshiva, so I didn't have to pay for it. They did give me pocket money for me to be able to have something like that. And eventually, I was accepted into the rabbinical program, to the kolel, after which I started 58:00receiving a stipend. So, then, I didn't even have to ask for any money, for any pocket money. And from yeshiva, I went directly -- after I finish yeshiva, after I got my smicha, after my ordination, in 2002, I went to become the rabbi of the Jewish community in Oslo, from 2002 to 2006. And then, from 2006 to 2011, in Wrocław, in Poland.

AIS: Before we will talk about how is to be a rabbi, I would like to ask you how does yeshiva look like?

YR: Well, first of all, there are many different yeshivot. [BREAK IN RECORDING] First of all, there are many different yeshivot, and in my second year, I actually, so to speak, shopped around to try to -- several different other yeshivot, just to return to Yeshivat HaMivtar, where I was originally. Yeshiva 59:00is not just about studying Torah, it's about experiencing Torah and living Torah, so to speak. And, well, at the end of the day, I consider myself very, very blessed for having, so to speak, stumbled across Yeshivat HaMivtar, which I did. As I said, I sent out a few emails and I got a few answers. So, I could have just as well have never gotten there. But I didn't find any other yeshiva that was as open-minded and as -- where each rabbi was really a great inspiration. I saw many yeshivot, but this was the -- but I returned to this one because I considered it the best one. I mean, for a number of rea-- that doesn't 60:00mean that it's considered the best place. Well, nowadays, it doesn't really exist as it existed then. It's completely changed from what it was. But, I mean, it exists as in the building exists and it's still yeshiva, still has the same name, but it's very different from what it was. There was -- I'd say the uniqueness or part of the uniqueness was the intellectual honesty, which is -- well, it exists, of course, in many places, but not everywhere. Sometimes, rabbis tend to be more interested into spoon-feeding their students with a certain amount of knowledge, thereby narrowing, so to speak, their 61:00open-mindedness. So, on one hand, it was that. On the other hand, it was the very unique rabbis. I spent time in other yeshivot, where I met, of course, other rabbis. But I saw my own rabbis -- or my original rabbis, so to speak, to whom I returned -- as very, very unique. And the unique part was that everyone was unique. It was a small yeshiva. I also -- I tried a couple of big yeshivot. I thought that one disappears there. This was a small yeshiva with about fifty, sixty, seventy, sometimes maybe eighty or more students. But it was a yeshiva where everyone knew everyone, and you had a personal relationship with the rabbis, with each and every one if you wanted to, and where each and every one 62:00was, at least for me, a very big inspiration. And in the book that I wrote in Poland, together with (UNCLEAR) Rosik -- so, in the intro, in my intro to my part, I mentioned each one by name, and write what inspiration I got from him in particular. Although, of course, it's only -- it's like a sentence for each one -- can't write whole thing, but I tried to pinpoint the main things.

AIS: Could you please tell me what is the place of Yiddish in yeshiva?

YR: Well, I mean, I spent some time in Mir, for instance, in Yerushalayim [Jerusalem], which is a yeshiva where there's a lot of Yiddish, where there are classes in Yiddish. Not only, though, but there are classes in Yiddish. And I listened to some shiurim [Talmudic lessons] in Yiddish. Well, I mean, to say the 63:00truth, of course, you don't need that much Yiddish to understand a Talmud class in Yiddish, because it's mainly about the text in the Talmud, right? It's not that much Yiddish. It's much more the text that you're studying, so -- but still -- so, well, in the yeshiva where I studied, in Yeshivat HaMivtar, I would say that there was no Yiddish, meaning, yes, the older rabbis, I'm sure, spoke Yiddish, speak Yiddish, but not in an active way. They're not -- and certainly not in class. The shiurim were in English, and on the highest levels in Hebrew. So, there was no Yiddish. But, well, I mean, the yeshiva where I studied, all 64:00the rabbis were Ashkenazi rabbis, and so, naturally, there was a great affinity for Yiddish and Yiddish culture. But I remember being much more interested in improving my Hebrew and Aramaic, for Talmudic Aramaic, than Yiddish. I think Yiddish was very low on the list, if it was on the list at all.

AIS: But I recall that you told me that later on, when you became rabbi, you used your Yiddish for the members of your community.

YR: Sure, I mean, because when I was in yeshiva, I couldn't predict that I was going to be first rabbi in Oslo and then later in Wrocław. I could've just as well become a rabbi somewhere in a young congregation in America where nobody spoke Yiddish, but here, I came to Oslo. Of course, my great -- the great 65:00benefit that I had was that I spoke Swedish. I mean, that was my -- Swedish and Norwegian are very close. But, of course, some of the older people -- I'm not saying that they would want to speak Yiddish or that they spoke Yiddish -- I mean, they spoke Yiddish, but it's not like they spoke it every day. But on the other hand, they would be very happy about the fact that the rabbi could say to them some things in Yiddish, ask them a few questions, hear a few questions. That would -- 'cause it was like a -- you know, it's a nostalgic thing. So, sure, that helped. And I would say in Poland, later on, much more so, even, well, because of the uniqueness of Poland in relationship to Yiddish, in relation to Yiddish.

AIS: Tell me, please, how the Jewish community in Wrocław, in the twenty-first 66:00century looked and looks like. Who are the members of the community?

YR: Well, when I came, there were still -- I mean, the members, I'd say, are predominantly -- well, now much le-- there were some very old Jews, born in the 1920s. They, unfortunately, due to natural causes, died and are dying. May they all live to a hundred and twenty, but that's the fact, that that community is increasingly smaller. Then, there are a lot of -- decent amount of young people, who predominantly have discovered their roots. I mean, Wrocław -- if you want 67:00to talk about more classical Polish Jewish community, I would say look at Warsaw. Look at how high the percentage is of converts, -- how many -- in terms of percentage of active Jews. Well, because, again, due to the World War II, but also due to Gomułka in '68, '69, that middle generation was lost, more or less. People didn't stay in Poland in '68, because they wanted to strengthen their Jewishness. If they wanted to strengthen their Jewishness, they probably left.

AIS: Like your mother, right?

YR: Yes, of course. Well, my mother would have left earlier. My mother's parents wanted to leave always, but they weren't allowed to. I think I told you about 68:00that. That's a completely different story, because my mother's parents would have left happily much before '68. They weren't allowed to leave in '68, my mother's parents. That's a completely different story. My mother's parents moved to Israel, or to the British Mandate, really, independently. They didn't know each other. She was from Kovno, he was from Poland. They moved independently to Israel, or to the British Mandate, and they met and married in Israel. And after the war, my grandfather said to my grandmother that, "Let's go to see if we can find someone," because they both came from large families. And my grandfather said, "We cannot just rely on some -- on the Jewish organizations. Not that they're not doing good job, but we're going to do it ourselves." And so they went, and they searched. They found my grandfather's oldest brother that survived Auschwitz. And then, and this is, of course, something that you could 69:00say is only possible in Poland, my grandfather was accused of being an Israeli spy before the creation of the State of Israel. So, that's really something. No, because I'm saying, that was just pure anti-Semitism. And the reason for it was -- it was said to him that, this way, you won't be allowed to leave, because -- he was never convicted, of course. It was just pure rubbish. But if you had been accused of being a spy, you were forbid--- you were not allowed to leave the country. So, in 1968, when my mother was kicked out, her parents, my grandparents, were not allowed to leave. My mother said that she grew up always -- they had always one or more, maybe, packed suitcases, 'cause they always applied for a visa, to be allowed to leave, and every once so, often, of course, they would be denied, and then they would apply again. But they always had 70:00something packed, because my grandmother would say that if, in spite of everything, if we get the permission to leave that we go at once before they change their mind. Well, this was import-- my grandmother was sick of diabetes. And she couldn't get proper insulin in Poland. Talk about Poland in the '60s. But she could've gotten it in Sweden. My mother was kicked out in 1969, really, she left, and she tried for years to get her mother and father to be allowed to leave Poland. And she couldn't and she couldn't and she had to go and find -- so to speak protection, and strings, and favors, and eventually she was able to. And her parents arrived, and the second day, my grandmother died, because -- I mean, you can't go forever without insulin. So, I actually grew up hating 71:00Poland, I must say. I grew up thinking that the Poles were worse than the Nazis, and at least as bad, because I thought, well, the World War, then they killed my mother's uncle, my great-uncle, and then, kind of to top it off, they kick out my mother but refuse her sick mother, my grandmother, to leave. And even after my parents are already established in Sweden, they still refuse. I mean, this is absurd. I mean, this is absurd. This I already in 1974, I think. So, my grandmother eventually -- as I said, she got out. She got an invitation that -- I mean, that the Polish, whatever authorities at the time, accepted, let her leave. And then, she came to Sweden, saw her daughter again, and died the next day.

AIS: Then why did you decide to accept a rabbi position in Wrocław?

YR: Right, no, I tell you. The first night that I spent in Poland, I couldn't sleep. I cried almost the whole night, I thought that I had betrayed my own ancestors, the reason for which is -- the reason is, and this actually happened. This crying, actually, was not what I was there to become a rabbi. I was actually -- I was still a rabbi in Oslo, Norway, and there was some salmon factory. There was a -- for kashrut [kosherness] certificate, I had to go to Poland. I was a kosher supervisor for a bunch of salmon factories in Norway, and they had put some of the production in the area of Gdansk. And so, they flew me 73:00over, and I was very ambivalent, but I went. And then there, I remember -- and by the way, I was there for, I think, two days, and I pretended I didn't speak a word of Polish. I refu-- I pretended -- I understood everything that was being said. I pretended that I -- and as I said, that hotel room, that night, I cried a lot, because I thought that I had --- I thought people like the former Israeli chief rabbi, Rabbi Lau, who, while he did go visit Germany and Poland, had this rule that he would never sleep in neither Germany nor Poland. Well, he did visit Poland. He has visited Poland. But the arrangers know that he has to have a flight out of Poland that same day. He will not sleep, neither in Poland nor in Germany. And here I went and did it. Okay, I only slept one night in Poland, but 74:00it was very, very upsetting. But anyway, after that, I was invited to be the rabbi of a winter camp organized with the Louden Foundation in winter of 2005/6, and I did go with my wife and -- well, we left one -- with one of our children and we left the other one with my parents in Stockholm. And I was amazed, because here were so many people, a hundred people, who wanted to study Torah, who kind of -- I mean, I remember I called my mother and I said to her, "You know, they're treating me like I'm the messiah," because -- no, because people are, like, Wow, polskojęzyczny rabin -- the Polish-speaking rabbi -- and they were so amazed at -- and I would talk to people and they would -- I don't know 75:00how much I slept during those -- must have been ten days or something like that, because all the time, there were people who wanted to talk to me and speak to me. And I was amazed. I was really amazed, and they called ahead, because Rabbi Schudrich arrived for a couple of days, the chief rabbi of Poland. They called him 'cause he knew about me before even knowing me. And so, and I remember when I met him, he arrived at camp and he -- I stepped forward to greet him and he came up to me and he said, "Listen, we're only on our first date, but I already want to get married." And so, I just -- he also has a good sense of humor. No, because apparently, people had been calling him and calling him about this Polish-speaking rabbi. So, I mean, of course he spoke to me and so on, and 76:00interviewed me for the position. But it was clear that the people very much wanted me, and so I did get the job. And so, left Oslo and came to Poland, came to Wrocław and, well, then five years in Wrocław.

AIS: And from my own experience, I know that you served really well for the community.

YR: Well, I did my best.

AIS: Todah rabah [Hebrew: Thank you very much] for that.

YR: Yeah, I can measure it in the fact that I'm sitting here, talking to somebody who was my student in 2006/7, right? And now it's 2015. So, that's very nice. And I went to Wrocław and I'm always welcomed with open arms by several 77:00of the people that I developed a friendship with. Not with the authorities of the communit-- either way, they have changed. So, you cannot compare anyway. But the open arms are towards people who I know personally, and some people from Wrocław, a few, have been here, stayed with me here in Israel, visited me, and I have stayed by them when I was in Wrocław. Like, for instance, when I went to this week that I was now, and I was five days in Warsaw, two days in Wrocław, and there was -- well, the operation was a discussion of who was going to pay for this. It was the Jewish Agency or it was the -- some other foundation, whatever. And Rabbi Bloom, in Warsaw, who was going to -- he was kind of trying 78:00to organize everything. And so I threw this monkey wrench into the -- right away, and I said, "Well, I am coming to Warsaw, but I have to be a couple days, at least, in Wrocław." And so, that was okay, and then it turned out that he was trying to organize for me something in Wrocław, (laughs) and I remember -- I laughed when I realized that. I said no, I said, "In Wrocław, you don't have to arrange anything. I can just arrive in Wrocław then, and I'm all set." I said, "I can choose if I want to stay by him or by him or by him. So, I'm totally set." I mean, we spoke earlier about Mr. Kestenbaum, so -- I mean, even him -- and we are certainly -- there are couple of generations between us, but if I would say he is -- I could come and stay with him for a few days if I 79:00wanted to. Thank God. It really, at the end of the day, boils down to people. Of course, in order to connect to people, if you don't understand their culture, if their culture's not your culture, it's very difficult. But here, I have in me, I guess, a decent chunk of Polish culture. And in Poland, in Wrocław, that blossomed, right, to some extent, at least. And then, I met a whole bunch of very nice people, yourself included, who became -- well, some of whom became, I think, life-long friends or at least good acquaintances, people who you can not talk to for years and then kind of pick up as if nothing happened. I'm comparing 80:00this to something that actually happened when I was in Wrocław, when there was a reunion -- I think it was a reunion for my high school, high school reunion when I was in Wrocław, my Swedish high school. And I remember that I was basically totally uninterested. (laughs) I mean, which is very, very different with regards to my feeling towards Poland, which I would be very, very happy to be in Poland quite often. And the truth of the matter is since I've moved back, I've done several attempts to try to formalize some kind of -- it's true that of those five years, the last two I was flying in and out all the time. But then I, so to speak, officially left and came here, and I still work for the organization Shavei Israel, who supported me when I was there. At least part of 81:00my salary came from them, and I still work from that. From here, I teach at least a couple of classes a week in Polish, through Skype, and through other media. And I write articles in Polish all the time. And I'm in touch with a lot of people privately, so to speak, or one-on-one basis. So, I have left Poland. I haven't really left Poland, I mean, not totally, because every day, almost, I do some work in Polish. Today, I have taught in Polish. Tomorrow, I will teach in Polish. So, I will be sitting here in Israel, in Ma'ale Adumim, but I will be teaching in Polish. So, I've left Poland, but not --

AIS: Not really.

YR: Well, I don't know if it works in Polish, but there's an English expression -- to paraphrase, you can take a Pole out of Poland, but you can't take Poland 82:00out of a Pole. Now, I don't know if I'm much of a Pole, really, but that's actually something that I asked. What's the difference between Poland and Norway or Poland and Scandinavia and Germany was that in Poland, there's a lot more respect for religious authority. Poland, of course, has many -- Catholic country, but that does have a very positive, actually, aspect, especially in Poland, I'd say. I don't know with other countries, actually, but the more people felt connected to John Paul II, the Polish pope, in general, from my experience, the nicer they were, the more respect they had towards Jews. They all knew that John Paul II had apologized to the Jewish nation for two thousand 83:00years of Christian anti-Semitism, and that John Paul II had been the first pope to ever go to a synagogue, that he coined the expression "our older brothers in faith," and so on. And, you know, Wrocław is the pinnacle of that. I mean, again, Wrocław, I was beyond shocked to see -- well, first of all, to see the neighborhood where the synagogue was, where there's a Catholic church and a Protestant church and the Russian Orthodox church, and where the neighborhood is called the neighborhood of mutual respect between four denominations, four religions, if you will. That was amazing. And then, it was even more amazing that people of great stature within the Catholic Church, within the hierarchy, 84:00were so respectful. One of the main pinnacles is when the father -- Professor Rosik of the Wrocław Theological Seminary, the headmaster, I believe, came to me and asked me to teach, to give classes to his -- well, I don't know what it's called in English, but student -- people who are studying to become priests, Catholic priests.

AIS: Theological seminary.

YR: Yes, but I don't know if there's a name for the student, for the specific student. I mean, there's a word in Polish, but I'm not sure if there's one in English. Either way -- and I was asked to come, and then I came and he wanted me to teach that which -- to explain to them what Judaism is, really, and not what they think it is. Yeah, I remember, actually, asking, I said, "You really want me to teach that?" Because, I mean, basically what he wanted me to teach was 85:00that, as far as Judaism was concerned, the word "holy" totally does not mean what Christianity, for instance, says that it means. It means something completely different, and that -- etc., etc. He wanted me to teach them all the things that were completely different, which at first glance, you could say, ah, it's the same, because it's the same word and Old Testament, New Testament, who cares, right? But Professor Rosik, who had also studied at Hebrew University, he acknowledged and, I don't know, accepted, respected at least, these very fundamental differences and wanted me to teach it to his students. And I must, by the way, also say -- I met with many, many priests throughout Poland. Certainly not everyone was as great as him or as wonderful as in Wrocław, though there were plenty of others who were also great. But I remember from 86:00those few classes -- there were not so many classes, but I remember that I didn't only get nice looks. But I understand. I mean, basically, I was saying that what their religion was saying about my religion -- because, essentially, Christianity considers itself -- well, certainly, throughout many, many, many centuries considered itself as the replacement of Judaism, or as the better version of, or something like that. And here I come and say that, you know, guys, actually, you got this concept wrong, that concept wrong, this concept. (laughs) Why should they be so happy? And then, he came to me and said, "Let's write a book." And I remember that I was very shocked, and I thought out it. I said that my only demand is that I am allowed to write whatever I want to write. 87:00And I wrote, and he wrote his part, I wrote my part. And now, the book received -- that was a shock, even for some representatives of the Catholic Church that I knew, they were in shock that the book got an imprimatur, which is basically the kosher stamp of the Catholic Church, that this is kosher in terms of Catholic theology. Well, my part isn't. (laughs) I mean, well, I mean, to the extent that my part is just Jewish. And even beyond that, Archbishop Gołębiewski in Wrocław has a TV interview in which he calls me "nasz rabin -- our rabbi." And I remember the nun who was from local Wrocław, well, local Wrocław order. She 88:00was very -- Sister Sibella. She was a very big part of the organization about this. And I remember she was struck that the archbishop said "our rabbi," -- so -- but he was, and I'm sure still is, a wonderful person, wonderful man. I remember that Mr. Ringel of blessed memory -- who was the head of the Jewish community of Wrocław at some point, who is now dead, unfortunately -- when there were anti-Semitic occurrences in Wrocław -- I mean, this is years before I was there, and there were some stone throwings on the synagogue. Some windows were broken and so on. That he had gone to the then archbishop, who was 89:00Gulbinowicz -- today Cardinal Gulbinowicz. He went to the then Archbishop Gulbinowicz and asked for help. And the archbishop at the time, Gulbinowicz, went up on the -- I don't know what it's called, where they preach in the main church in Wrocław -- and said that anti-Semitism was a sin, and he who does anti-Semitism will not receive absolution. Now, that's a very big thing for an archbishop to say. And, as Mr. Ringel said, immediately it stopped. I mean, from that speech that the archbishop had held, that's it. Because before, I'm sure they had -- they tried, they spoke to whatever. But from that speech on, that was it. So, I mean, it just shows that the Catholic Church has still a lot of influence, and if it's used in a good way, then that's wonderful.

[BREAK IN RECORDING]

AIS: I would like to ask you about your opinion and your personal perception of Yiddish in Wrocław.

YR: Well, all the old Jews, of course, spoke Yiddish. Well, I mean, in Wrocław, as you know, there was and still is, on one hand, the community, meaning the Jewish community as an organization, and also the TSKZ, the cultural association, which, of course exists since the communist days, the cultural Jewish -- or the organization for Jewish culture, something that the communist regime in Poland supported, right? Everyone knows that. Sometimes, that was a 91:00very negative thing, because sometimes they were basically spies to find out who was in the religious Jewish life, because this was led by Jews who wanted Jewish culture, but only culture in terms of culture and peoplehood, but certainly not religion. I mean, at least those are the stories. And, indeed, I had that experience, also, in Wrocław that the head of the TSKZ was a man who -- he wasn't very fond of me, so to speak, in the beginning -- or maybe not even later -- in the beginning, he was very -- let's say aggressively so. An old Jew. Also, one of those really old ones. I don't know if he's alive. I would be surprised if he still was alive. He spoke in Yiddish, and I could say some things in 92:00Yiddish, but I said to him that, "My Yiddish is pretty poor and I prefer Polish if you can, if it's okay." And he said, "Keyn yid [Not a Jew]." Basically said -- I don't remember the exact words, but basically, if you don't speak Yiddish, you're not a yid and you can't be a ruv, you can't be a rabbi if you're not a yid. I mean, this is kind of funny, since, of course, his family, certainly, his descendants are not all Jews, right? I mean, there's total intermarriage as it is, I think, in almost every if not every Jewish family in Wrocław or in Poland in general. So, this was kind of, therefore, insulting on one hand and on the other hand. So, but okay, but that's -- the truth of the matter is that did go away. There was a tension between this TSKZ and the Jewish community. There was 93:00a tension, and as I came to be the rabbi of the Jewish community and I came to represent religion -- which, of course, is de facto a kind of undermining, or a threat towards people who say no, Judaism's not religion, it's just about culture and peoplehood. So, that, of course, could be taken different ways. But the truth of the matter is that was the beginning. Soon, that stopped being the case, and I was invited to come to all the different parties and to -- and then, every time I would speak, of course, if I would light Hanukkah candles I would also speak about Hanukkah. And, of course, I would speak about Hanukkah as far as Yiddishkayt, which is Judaism, is concerned. So, I did not put on a communist cap to go in there, right? So, at the end of the day, this was, I think, more of 94:00an initial problem. But in relation to Yiddish, it was funny, because that was his -- because I said, "Redt hebreish," you know? "Speak Hebrew!" So, (laughs) that was not Jewish enough. Okay, but on the other hand, I had a wonderful relationship with his grandson, for instance, who doesn't -- I don't think speaks a word of Yiddish at all. And also he, you know, softened up. But that was my, actually, first meeting with Yiddish in Poland, in Wrocław, actually. Not in Poland, Wrocław. As time went by, I mean, I tried to pepper my sermons with just Yiddishizations, really, nothing beyond that, which I know is well 95:00appreciated by the elderly people. At the end of the day, it's like the Talmud says: "That which exits the heart enters into the heart." So, if you come with your heart and you try to give, then it will enter the heart of someone else and there will be that bond. And, I mean, I don't know to what extent I accomplish it, but I certainly can testify that I did pretty much everything I could to try to be there for them to the greatest extent that I could on Purim and on Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah, I would walk great distances to be able to blow the -- so that these people could also hear the shofar, 'cause they couldn't come to the synagogue, I mean, for health reasons. I couldn't take any public transport, 'cause it was, after all, Rosh Hashanah. So, I had to walk, and it was quite 96:00some distances that I had to walk to do that. And that was, of course, also well appreciated. People appreciated that. And, well, I mean, and I still keep in touch. In the beginning, I would keep in touch fairly regularly, actually, with Mr. Ringel, and there was also Mr. Altmark. Well, Altmark was already -- well, his mind was going a little bit. Now, he's not alive anymore, unfortunately, and he apparently died just before I visited this time around. 'Cause this time around, I was going to visit him. Unfortunately, now it's too late. I will do the second best. I will put up a memory plaque for him here in Israel. It's not 97:00the second best, but it's the only thing I can do now. In terms of Yiddish, so, Mr. Ringel, who -- well, he was one of the real --- he was one of the few people, even postwar, he did not intermarry. The overwhelming majority of these old Jews were intermarried. But he was not. Which didn't really help. I mean, it's not that his -- he had a daughter, and she still is around. But, of course, she married a Polish man. And I remember the grandson, to whom I explained that as far as Judaism's concerned, he's Jewish. And for him, it really meant nothing. It's actually ironic, I think: I saw that people who, from a halakhic 98:00[Jewish legal] perspective, are not Jewish were kind of more interested (laughs) than those few who were told, ah, you are actually Jewish, right? Obviously, I think that there's a psychological thing here. But Mr. Ringel, I remember that I made some efforts to -- 'cause I said to him, "Pan Dawidz, Mr. David, that's what (UNCLEAR). I visited, of course, every time that I was in Poland, and those times, I was half here, half there. So, I was going back and forth, always be with him, always go to him, always bring him something. And I always would say, "What can I bring? What can I bring you? What can -- how can I help?" He would always say, "Bless me, pray for me." I say, "Okay, but I -- (laughs) what else?" So, I think actually I was the one who suggested that since he loves Yiddish so 99:00much, maybe I can find something recorded in Yiddish and bring it to him. Music he had, music he had. So, I found here is a reference I'm searching. I don't think she's alive anymore, but she was connected, I guess, to some institute here, and she recorded stories in Yiddish. From Vilna, she was. So, Lithuanian Yiddish, which I thought, considering that Mr. Ringel was from Leżajsk, probably was not good at all. So I brought it to him, he loved it. Afterwards, I found speeches given by -- for instance, the Lubavitcher rebbe in Yiddish, who was, of course, from Belarus, right, and others from rebbes, mainly, whose speeches are still available somewhere. Now, Mr. Ringel, he said "No," said, 100:00"The Lithuanian Yiddish is a litvish Yiddish, it's beautiful," he said. (laughs) No, he said this, "Litvish Yiddish, to jest piękny [Polish: it's beautiful]." He said it in Polish. And I thought how funny it is that here is a real galitsyaner [Galician Jew] who doesn't really -- he doesn't want to hear galitsyaner Yiddish. He wants to hear a litvish Yiddish. And I then thought of -- my mother would tell me that her parents, her mother was from Kovno, but her father was not. And her mother and father were then in Poland. And although they were, of course, in Słońsk at the time, then Siberia, whatever, but that area. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Jews if not all of them were former galitsyaner Jews, and my mother said that her mother always considered their Yiddish as second-rate, because in Lithuania, that's where they had written grammar books. My mother said that her mother's Yiddish was not just -- she knew 101:00Yiddish throughout, grammatically and so on, while for your average Jew in post-war Poland, as I'm sure also pre-war Poland, Yiddish was just a spoken language for most people. It was not -- there was no linguistic aspect, really. And so, my mother would say that her mother considered her Yiddish to be the real Yiddish. More real than the others. And my mother had certain things that she got from the Lithuanian school. For instance, I say "ros khoydesh [first day of the month, lit. "head of the month"]." Not "rosh khoydesh" but "ros khoydesh," which is Lithuanian, with the change, that "sh" to "s." So, but so, in terms of Yiddish, Mr. Ringel, (laughs) a galitsyaner Jew, admitted that Lithuanian Yiddish, that's the beautiful Yiddish. I know that you study Yiddish 102:00at universities, I mean, Yung-Vilne, right? Vilna was not in Galicia, last time I checked. There is a certain amount of pride of being a Lithuanian Jew. You know, a lot of people say they're Litvaks, but it really means nothing -- just means that they're not Hasidim, so I always -- when somebody says he's a Litvak -- so, I say, "From where and when?" And usually, the answer is, "I don't know, I'm from America" or from wherever. So, I say, "Ah, well, you see my father's parents were both born and raised in Wilno and my mother's mother was from Kovno and I have pictures." Actually, I don't have them. My parents have them, to be exact. No, but also, the big thing -- maybe that was missed somehow, that my father's cousin from Wilno, who I spent a month with and also later was very much in touch with, he would tell me about Wilno. He did not have the trauma of my grandfather, of course, because he had left Wilno before the Shoah, and he 103:00was happy to talk about Wilno. So, I actually heard a lot of things about Wilno from him. So, I didn't have the -- I had a hatred towards Poland, but not towards Lithuania, not at all. I mean, I know what the Lithuanians, they killed Jews even before the Nazis. I know that, from a historical point of view, I understand. But I don't have any personal kind of involvement because my father's parents refused outright to speak about Lithuania. So, my father couldn't tell me anything about Lithuania. My mother actually said that her mother tried to teach her a bit of Lithuanian, 'cause she spoke Lithuanian. But my mother said that she was completely uninterested.

AIS: Is your mother active in any way today with Yiddish?

YR: Yes, she is, for years. There's a Yiddish society in Stockholm, and my mother is, well, one of the active members. My mother's there, my mother sat at the, so to speak, board (UNCLEAR). In Sweden, the Jewish community choos-- it's kind of elections that -- for parliament. There are parties, and then the representatives from those parties sit in a kind of a parliament, and that parliament chooses a board, and so on. And so my mother for, I don't know how many years, ten years, more, was a relatively leading person in one of these parties. The most conservative of them, most religious of them, of the parties. And she sat at this so-called parliament for many years. I couldn't tell you how many. And now, since I don't know when, she's quite active in this Yiddish 105:00society, in which basically -- I guess they get speakers whenever they can. But, I mean, on the more regular basis, I think that as far as I can understand, they just get together and probably eat and drink and speak Yiddish. Maybe not so much eating, but I'm sure that -- they meet in different people's houses, and I guess they just have a good time, in Yiddish. So, yeah. I remember she said that she had to -- I mean, wanted to, not had to as in didn't want to -- but when she wanted to get really involved in it -- so, she had to kind of work on pulling it back from the back of her head. If you don't use a language, it kind of starts 106:00disappearing. But, I mean, just like me. The truth of the matter is I spoke Polish only as a little child. Later on, okay, it's true, that I heard Polish from my mother. Really, I would answer -- especially from teen-- being a teenager, I would speak Swedish. I would speak Swedish to my mother, to my father, to my brother. I don't think my brother ever answered them in Polish. And so, what I had in Wrocław, I mean, you remember my Polish of 2006. (laughs) I won't say it was that great. But it had neshome [soul], I would say. The soul was there and the understanding, and the truth. I mean, I did put in -- not formally, I didn't go to Polish classes -- but I put in a lot of effort during 107:00those five years to improve my Polish. I put I a lot of effort, which I think people -- I've been told by people that they noticed it and appreciated it. I mean, I think that now my Polish is way, way beyond what it was in 2006. And that book that I wrote, it's true that some -- much, whatever -- basically, I mean, one of my students who translated from English to Polish -- but not all of it. Some part, he just adjusts. I'm sure it was a lot of correction, but he was correcting my Polish. I wrote in Polish, and I worked hard to do that. A lot of hours. And now, I write articles every week. And originally, my deal with Shavei Israel was that I write it in English and they employ someone who was originally Polish, lives in Israel, and who will translate it into Polish. And at some 108:00point, I said, No, you know what? I mean, didn't say -- I said to myself, I'm going to write it in Polish. And now, since a considerable amount of time, I write it in Polish and they correct it. Actually, then I prefer to send it to an old student of mine to correct it. Maybe the next article, I'll send to you. Yeah, no, I'm always happy, though, because I see that it's less and less corrections. But also, but it's not -- writing it in Polish as opposed to writing it in English means that I spent several times more time to do it. Maybe not several times more, but considerably more time. Well, look, because of having small children, I stopped the flying back and forth. But I would be very happy, and I sincerely hope that -- unless, which I hope for more, that the 109:00entire Jewish people return to the land of Israel and rebuild the temple and anoint the king of the line of David. Well, that's, of course, my greatest desire. In case that doesn't happen, then when my children grow up, I hope to be able to have much more of a relationship with Poland than just over internet. Already now, as I said, I -- when I was in Poland -- now, I try, I spoke to the head of the Warsaw Jewish community, I spoke to the head of the Wrocław Jewish community, I said, "Listen, it's true, I'm raising children, so on. I could come for maybe a week every second month. And I'm here." So, nobody started to dance 110:00out of joy right away, but okay, I understand. Look, I mean, finances are finances everywhere. But I hope, I sincerely hope some part of my continued relationship has to do with my feeling of my role in this world to be the -- to help the tikkun, the repair of Polish Jewry. Part of that is, of course, the uniqueness of being a Polish-speaking rabbi, which, again, is a fairly unique thing. A very unique thing. And so, therefore, I hope to strengthen this relationship, and at some point in the future, to go back. And again, hopefully 111:00in a kind of going back and forth relationship, but the reason for why -- I didn't leave Wrocław because I was fed up with Wrocław in any way, shape, or form. Neither did Wrocław get rid of me in any way, shape, or form. I just said, "Well, I can't. I can't do this. Small children." But in ten years, I don't have any small children anymore in ten years' time. So, maybe in ten years' time, I could go back to being in Poland a lot. That's what I would want to do.

AIS: What other people in Israel and in other places in the world like Sweden think about your deep relation with Poland?

YR: What do they think or who thinks it?

AIS: Yeah, and how they see this.

YR: Well, I mean, you have people who are misinformed and who think of all Poles 112:00as the worst anti-Semites that there are. And I say jokingly to everyone that I know from Poland that, really, I should be employed by the Polish embassy, because there's no bigger ambassador to Poland here in Israel than me, because I -- especially when I was flying back and forth, but still to this very day, every time that I mention to somebody new that I worked in Poland or work with Poland still today -- or even people who I do know and who know it for-- I'm not saying daily, but I'm saying very often do I spend considerable amount of time, well, as it were, defending Poland or saying, "You know, look at this, look at this, look at this. Look at all these good things." So, unfortunately, I do not 113:00have a job in the Polish embassy -- not that I'm against it. But, no, so, I mean, you have people who are very misinformed. You have people who only know Poland from March of the Living or visiting death camps, and so they have a very narrow picture of Poland. But I think there's a growing understanding, to some extent, partially, I think, due to the fact that Poland has more and more foreign students, right? I mean, you have people who said to me, "Well, we couldn't get into medical school in our country, so we went to Poland, because there I could get in without good grades. I just have to pay properly to get in," right? I knew people like that in Wrocław. Not, say, people in medical school, but there were people like that that -- I knew people like that went to 114:00Jagiellonian University in Krakow, for instance, right? Because, I mean, they get into Jagiellonian University. Wow, right? They couldn't get into college back where they came from. But that has caused the appearance of X amount of people who have gotten to know Poland without any -- not the Poland of death camps. The everyday Poland. And sure, some of it is bad, but some of it is good and whatnot. And they bring that into the Jewish world. And I'm talking about those of them who are Jewish. I mean, I also knew people who came from Scandinavia to Poland and to other Eastern European countries to study at university who have nothing to do with Jews. But those who are Jews, then, later, are able to give a different picture of Poland. But it is still very -- I 115:00mean, there is still a long way to go, a long way to go, to make Poland even acceptable in most -- most of the time, the reaction that I get is very negative, and we all know why. The truth of the matter is it's not even just the Shoah. Then it's Gomułka. And I've said this, actually, even on Polish radio or TV, that the feeling is kind of, what Hitler, yimach sh'mo [Hebrew: may his name be obliterated], didn't do, then came Gomułka to just kind of like -- if you have a cup of coffee and you want me to tip it -- add a little -- of course, there's no comparison because they were not murdered. They were kicked out, which is, of course -- you cannot compare, on one hand. On the other hand, I 116:00don't think anyone would want to be in the kicked-out group of people, right? I mean, they suffered the trauma they suffered. If you compare with the Shoah trauma it's, of course, so much less. But if you have a car accident and you lose an arm, then why would you care that other people lost two arms, right? I mean, (laughs) each person sees his or her suffering and it's difficult to kind of ignore one's own suffering -- oh, well, because others suffered more, right? That's not so much of a good argument, right?

AIS: We are nearing to the end, but I would like to ask you how do you use Yiddish towards your children? I know that sometimes you are singing to them.

YR: Yes. Actually, I'd say, overwhelmingly, all the songs -- most of the songs, at least, that I sang and sing sometimes still to my children in terms of to 117:00either -- if my youngest daughter, who is now five, will fall and hurt herself, I'll pick her up and I'll sing her a song. She'll ask what -- actually, it's funny, she thinks that a couple of songs that are in Yiddish are in Polish. My older daughter, who's now seven-and-a-half -- well, almost eight, really -- she is proud of the fact -- she says -- and I've heard her say this to other children here in Israel -- she says, "Ani polaniyah," which means, "I am Polish," right? Literally, " ja jestem polko," right, which is so funny when she says it. You've seen them, they're both blonde and blue-eyed, so they don't look that un-Polish, actually. But no, they're very, I'd say, proud and connected to 118:00-- and my younger son, Hillel, was born in Norway. He is both -- I mean, he's both proud, so to speak, of the Scandinavian heritage, but -- well, Norway, he was really just a baby. He was more in Wrocław than in Norway. And so, too, with Hanina, our oldest son. And so, I think, if anything, their affinity is more towards Poland and Wrocław than towards Sweden or Scandinavia, although they have both. They have both. They very much want me to take them and show them, and so on. And so, my youngest daughter, Shoshi -- so, she's -- I've corrected her, but she has got it into her head, probably because her older sister, Batya, told her, probably, that it was from Poland or something. She 119:00asks me to sing, "Oyfn pripetshik [By the hearth]" and she thinks it's Polish. I tell her it's not Polish, it's Yiddish. But then, on the other hand, when we walk, we often sing a song that I was taught by my mother, who was a scout in Poland as a teenager, (singing) "Maszerują chłopcy, lewa, prawa, raz [Polish: Boys are marching, left, right, and one more time]" -- you know of this song? Right? So, my children all know this song, and it's quite funny to hear, walking in Ma'ale Adumim, hearing my children singing that song.

AIS: What is your favorite Yiddish song which you sing to them?

YR: Well, I mean, not all Yiddish songs are applicable to -- I mean, usually it was -- it used to be to help them to fall asleep, now to maybe help Shoshi calm down if something happens. And they do very much like "Oyfn pripetshik" -- they 120:00know as "Di rebe elimeylekh [The rabbi prays]," they also know that song. They have heard, though that's not part of their daily repertoire, they have heard the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising song. I think maybe they would recognize it, maybe not, I don't know. They have heard it being played from a CD here in the house, but I don't know if they -- there are many, many Jewish songs, Yiddish songs that I love. It's difficult to say which one is my favorite. I mean, I can't sing them all. "Rozhinkes mit mandlen [Raisins and almonds]" is a wonderful song. "Romania" is a wonderful song. Can I sing it? I can't sing it. The "Belts, mayn shtetele belts [Belz, my little town of Belz]" is a wonderful song. I cannot sing it, even if I tried. I mean, again, yes, of course, you give me the text, but if I try to put one of my children to sleep, I cannot sing by heart. 121:00Ah, no, sorry, there's also another one that -- well, which is really kind of young -- not so old Yiddish, "Bay mir bistu sheyn [To me you are beautiful]," which -- really America has taken and (UNCLEAR). So that also, and there was one more Yiddish song now that just kind of -- I thought about it for a second, it slipped my mind, there's "Oyfn pritpetshik," there is "Bay mir bistu sheyn," and "Di rebe elimeylekh," and -- ask another question. They will pop back into my head.

AIS: Okay. I would like to ask you what is your, Rabbi Yitzhak Rapoport, advice for the future generations?

YR: You mean in terms of Yiddish specifically?

AIS: No.

YR: No. Well, I mean, let's limit it somehow. I mean, in terms of future generations in the world, let's limit it, at least, to the -- I would say the Polish Jewish community, right? I mean, well, in my opinion, the lifeblood (phone rings) of Judaism is to study Torah, to experience Torah, Yiddishkayt. I don't believe that it's possible to really survive Jewishly without being among lots of Jews, and Jews who also live Jewishly. This is the problem of being a 123:00Zionist rabbi in the Diaspora, that on one hand, from a personal perspective, each and every Jew should move to Israel, or at the very least, plan B should be to move to a strong Jewish community like Brooklyn, New York, or the equivalent. But, of course, if everyone does that, then that community ceases to exist, right? So, at the end of the day, at the very least, there are many people -- I stayed in Israel and I finished yeshiva till I got smicha. But I knew many people who came to yeshiva for one year, and even some who came only for two years, and that was much more serious, but still they came for two years and then they returned to America or England. Well, at least that, though it's hard for me to believe that somebody would leave Poland to go to yeshiva for a year, two years, and then go back. I think that would be very hard. But maybe. But, at 124:00the very least, you can't be a Jew in a vacuum. And despite all the best intentions and the struggles of every single one of the local Jewish communities, they can't provide that. Now, if a person -- a way of doing it, which -- this has been done in many Jewish communities around the world, is that the Jewish community says, Okay, we will support financially -- if we have young people who want to go to Israel and study, we will support them and we kind of pre-sign a contract that they -- we support them, then they come back and enrich us. So, that is something that's doable. Then, the community doesn't lose these people, right? At least not automatically. So, I would say that's the best thing 125:00in terms of community life. Those who rule should realize that they need to enrich. The enrichment must come from the outside, because Poland is what Poland is, and Vilna is not yerushalayim de lite [Jerusalem of Lithuania], right? It's not Lithuania, Jerusalem, it's not, right? Warsaw had a third of its population being Jewish before the war. That doesn't really help now, right? So, there has to be, in my opinion, a lot more emphasis on continuing your Jewish education beyond the borders of Poland, because, with all due respect, within the framework of the Jewish community of Poland, there is a limit, and not just a limit in studying. Okay, you could say, ah, but there are rabbis here, but there's a limit of experience. You cannot experience how it is to live Jewishly 126:00without, I don't know, a hundred people, a thousand people -- you have to have a lot of Jews living Jewishly around you for some period of time for you to be able to feel it. In this neighborhood, you can walk on the streets on Shabbos. If you haven't experienced that, then you can't understand what that means. You can say, ah, but I can read about it in a book and I can write a PhD about it. Yeah, but you don't get it at all. (laughs) That's my opinion. There's no neshome if you don't actually -- "neshome" comes from the word "neshimah," "breath." (breathes) Right? If you don't breathe in, I can describe to you until tomorrow how the air feels, but there's only one way of knowing how the air feels. And I can describe to you how something smells. Can I really tell you how something smells? No, the only way for you to know how something smells is to do -- (breathes) right? And you have to be in the place where that smell is, 127:00otherwise you can't smell it.

AIS: A sheynem dank [Thank you very much] for this interview.

YR: Yeah, yeah. You're very welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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