Read The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod for Free Online Page A

sympathetic Zionist youth; and a Jewish town that could supply provisions and fraternally accommodate the training.
    Alongside the secular Zionist fervor in Trochenbrod, Jewish religious observance, tradition, and scholarship were only slightly diminished there. All the Trochenbroders I spoke with who were young men and women in Trochenbrod in the 1930s had been ardent Zionists, but the men also had been yeshiva students in places like Olyka, Rovno, Mezerich, Lublin, and Warsaw. Many synagogues flourished in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s—some Trochenbroders told me that as many as nine functioned simultaneously in this small town. Everyone in Trochenbrod followed Orthodox Jewish law and customs. As one Trochenbroder put it, “You were either an Orthodox Jew or they called you a goy [Gentile].” Trochenbroders continued to govern their lives and the life of the town by Jewish custom, observe Sabbath prohibitions scrupulously, celebrate all the Jewish holidays robustly as community events, and pray three times each day.
    A “Talmud Torah,” a Jewish day school for boys that had a number of teachers and taught the classic Jewish religious texts, thrived in Trochenbrod in the mid-1930s, as did many smaller cheders . Most children went to Jewish school for a few hours each day after Polish public school. Families that could afford it also hired private teachers for additional Jewish or Hebrew instruction at home.
    Trochenbroders who were youngsters in the 1930s reminisce about the Sabbath using the same words as those who experienced Sabbaths in Trochenbrod two or three generations earlier. It was a day for which everyone prepared by baking chalah [braided egg bread] and special chulunt dishes that would cook all day over a low fire; cleaning themselves and their houses; sending the children door to door collecting baked goods to give to the poor; and dressing in a manner appropriate for greeting and being in the company of “the Sabbath Queen,” an affectionate moniker for the special Sabbath day. There were always guests for the Sabbath, often merchants visiting Trochenbrod who could not get home before the start of the holy day, on which travel is forbidden. Everyone who was able happily brought someone home from Friday night prayers to share dinner and their home for the Sabbath.
    The women generally left it to their husbands to intercede with God in the synagogue while they, together with their daughters, worked on the special Sabbath meal that was served to the family when the men and boys returned from prayer. Following an after-meal nap, families would go for a stroll, visit relatives, meet in a small park to gossip and talk politics, or perhaps let the children run to find wild blueberries in the Radziwill forest. Sabbath was a day of peace, rest, prayer, family, good eating, socializing, making excursions to the Radziwill forest, singing Sabbath songs and pausing to savor the goodness that God, hard work, and Trochenbrod provided.
    Ryszard Lubinski, though he was a Polish Catholic, could not help also being caught up in Trochenbrod’s Sabbath:
    There were Shabbos goys 3 in Trochenbrod; I helped with that all the time, to light fires for heating and keeping the food warm. We helped our neighbors with that as friends, to keep the fire going. But there were hundreds of houses in Sofiyovka and Ignatovka, so people would come from the villages to tend the fires for the Jews, and made a little money from that. Most of the houses had the same organization: in the kitchen everybody had a stove and an oven to bake bread. I remember that for Shabbos , once everything was made, on Friday they would put it inside the bread oven so it would stay warm for the next day. I remember the smell of that very well.
    While a bar mitzvah in Trochenbrod was cause for little more than a piece of sponge cake, some fruit, and a taste of schnapps for the men after prayers, weddings were a different matter altogether. Much of the town showed