Yeshurun is organising its first Mission to Poland next February.   Designed to be long enough to be meaningful but short enough to avoid taking too long off work the Mission begins early on a Sunday morning and concludes on Tuesday evening.   The schedule as planned below is pretty intensive but we will tailor the final schedule to those attending.

The detailed itinerary is below, together with details of how to book.  You need to book the flights yourself NOW with Ryanair then contact our agent, Marcel Manson, who will arrange everything else for you.

To prepare for this important Mission, Yeshurun is hoping to run a programme of cultural learning during the winter, before the trip, for those attending, though of course anyone will be able to attend these.   Further details shortly.

What to do to book

1.    Book your own flights direct with Ryanair.  So far we have around fifteen people signed up.  The current cost (assuming hand luggage only) is around £120 but the price is going up all the time.  Ryanair charge £24 for each piece of hold luggage. (Fuel and wings are already included in the prices, together with the services of a pilot).  

Book the Ryanair flight going out on Sunday 15th February from Stansted to Krakow leaving at 06.10 (Flight No 2432) and returning on Tuesday 17th February (15.25 Flight No 2437) landing at Stanstead at 16.55.2.    

Once the flights are booked, contact the trip organiser, Marcel Manson on 0208 954 5074, or at marcelmanson53@hotmail.com.  Marcel will then reserve the room. The hotel charges for two sharing are approximately £56 per night or with a £40 per night supplement for single occupancy.

Food will be extra to this.  We are still receiving final costs for this but expect the final total, excluding the flight to be under £300.  This will include the cost for the coach, guides, donations and museum entries.  The final cost will depend on the number of people on the trip.

For further details, contact Steve.

Itinerary

Sunday 15th February 2009

We may arrange for a coach to leave Yeshurun at 4am to London Stansted.  Alternatively we will share taxis or minicabs and car parking.  You will probably want to have a packed lunch with you.

Arriving at the airport by 5.00am, we will catch the Ryanair flight to Krakow (which you should already have booked yourself) and be met by our guide, Julia Lasek, after we land around 9.35am.

A coach will be waiting for us to go straight to Auschwitz-Birkenau, arriving at approximately 11.30am and we will spend some 4½ hours there with our guide. 

We will end the tour of Auschwitz around 4pm, with Minchah & a Kinnah (Lamentation) for the victims of the Shoah (Holocaust) as well as a memorial prayer for the Martyred.  This will conclude with blowing of the shofar at the end of the railway track in Birkenau, where the crematoria were.

Following the visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, we will visit the new Museum and Holocaust Centre in the nearby town of Oswiecim (see their interesting web site at www.ajcf.org) with its reconstructed Synagogue.  We will daven Maariv there after taking in a Holocaust related film and discussion led by Rabbi Lewis.

We will leave the Osweicim centre at approximately at 6.30pm to go to our hotel, the three star Eden in Kazimierz, the Jewish area of Kracow, for dinner at 8.30pm. (The hotel comes complete with its own Mikveh).

Then bed.

Monday 16th February 2009

Up early and off to Shacharis at the Remuh shul at 6.45am, followed by breakfast at the Eden hotel.

At 8am the coach will leave for a full day shtetl tour of Galicia, to include the visits to former shtetls that will include Myslenice, a small shtetl before the war with 700 Jews of predominately Bobover Chasidim.  Since the war, the locals still bake Challah there, although it’s not kosher.

We will tour around the town, pointing out who lived where, where the ghetto was, stories about the residents and families, talk about the yeshiva and the assimilated Jews who also lived in the town. We also hope to visit the inside of a Jewish house essentially unaltered since the Second World War.

We may drive out via Skawina where there is a small synagogue typical of such towns, now converted into a shop. We will then visit the famous Chasidic town of Bobova to visit a typical Polish wooden shul. Here, we will daven Mincha before climbing a picturesque Polish countryside hill to visit the cemetery and the ohel (tomb) of Rabbi Shlomo Halberstam.

We hope there will then be enough daylight hours left to visit the town of Tarnov and the remaining Bimah of its great Synagogue, then see where the Jews lived and its two  cemeteries.

We will return to Krakow by 7.00pm for dinner at 7.30pm at the Eden Hotel.

Then bed.

Tuesday 17th February 2009

We will daven Shacharis in the Eden Hotel lounge at 7.00am, followed by breakfast.  We will check out of the hotel, leaving any luggage in reception which the driver will put on the coach. 

The morning will then be spent with a 2½ walking tour of the Jewish quarter in Kazimierz, including Szeroka Square. This tour will take in museums, seven shuls and cemeteries.

The tour will incorporate the newly rebuilt Kupa, Remuh, Temple and Isaac High Popper & Temple Synagogues.  It will include a presentation on how Jews lived in Krakow for over 700 years, and why Kracow was called the ‘Galician Jerusalem’.

At 11.00am the coach will take us from the Galicia museum, our last stop on the tour, to Podgorze, south of the Wisla river.  This was the wartime ghetto in which we will visit the Chemist Under Eagle museum, the Shindlers factory and the Plashov camp.

After this, the coach will leave for the airport and the flight home.