I did not experience the trip to Poland as a high school student, but as a young mother of a baby.
We toured green Poland, between the ghetto and the extermination camp, with our heads never stopping to imagine imaginations that obscure the trachea.
In high school I could not go on a journey, and since then I have been looking for opportunities to go out.
Luckily, I was able to get involved in such a journey, so important and rare.
Because a trip to Poland is not just a trip, it is not a vacation or a time-out, but a headache and a heartbreak.
If you have not been able to leave in one of the national frameworks: high school, army or academy - you will rarely find the place and time to go to Poland.
I want to turn the spotlight on those important journeys, which under the auspices of the corona plague simply evaporated.
There was no official decision or statement by the Minister of Education, there was no heated debate in the Knesset or any heated public debate.
Someone, or someone, decided to dissolve this project in the education system.
Even now, in the post-Corona period, everything is on a very small fire, dripping, built on private initiatives and not on an overall systemic line.
and on top of everything?
No one seems to care.
For years, there has been a discussion about the necessity of travel to Poland, probably in high school.
This is an important and serious discussion, and it is worthwhile to deal with the arguments and create additional, parallel frameworks.
But in Israel, as in Israel, the tradition did not come and the alternative did not come.
The tradition of traveling to Poland is fading, and of all the great ideas for alternatives - nothing has been implemented on a national scale.
No adoption and study of Jewish life in pre-war Europe, no organized projects with Holocaust survivors, no travel in the country or building programs with Holocaust studies institutes.
Nothing.
"Travel is an important memory agent, forcing schools to address the issue," Uri Meiselman, a Polish guide with mileage, told me, "despite the criticism and the problematic, they have no substitute."
Certainly in the new world in which the Ministry of Education is launching the reform in the humanities, national projects dealing with the Holocaust are a necessity for the whole of Israeli society, especially for the youth.
The travel factory to Poland is a magnificent and old factory.
The dissolution of the Ministry of Education from this property, without any proper replacement and without public thought and discussion, is a shame to the State of Israel.
At Ben Gurion Airport there was a traffic jam on Passover - and the journeys, which were stopped under the auspices of the corona, are still faltering?
The Holocaust is moving away from us, and we are moving it further away.
The years go by, the memory erodes, the survivors die and even the second and third generation who grew up on Holocaust stories are already flipping through.
Because the Holocaust is tough.
A superhuman catastrophe that is difficult for us to contain and sometimes we prefer to suppress.
And so, instead of improving and refining the Holocaust, they simply run away from it.
Alternatives to a high school trip could be considered, and the "Witnesses in Uniform" project could be expanded.
It was possible to improve the trips to Poland, or to combine them with other things.
But we text.
"My selfish brother seeks" is the verse that accompanies the journeys from the day they were founded.
And I also ask for my brothers, the Jewish state that shakes off the past and hopes that no one notices.
Because in the end, what happens with the smashing of trips to Poland is just a symptom of a deeper problem.
The Holocaust inevitably brings us to deal with national questions, and we have no power over it.
Were we wrong?
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