Sunday, March 15, 2015

Poland Day One


My name is Taylor Dougherty; I am a freshman at Iona College. I am from Brooklyn, New York. My intended major is Mass communication with a specialization in broadcast media. I am a practicing Roman Catholic and have attended Catholic school my whole life, which helps explain why I took this Course. I have taken a religion course every year since the age of five; each course was typically the same but would go in dept more as the years went on.  The course’s all consisted of Christianity the history, believes and practices.  I took this course to look at Christianity from a different angle, to learn about Judaism to help better my understanding of the foundation of my religion.
The Courses is titled Memory and Reconciliation: The Churches and the Holocaust.  We have just landed in Poland yesterday, and started our studies right away.  The first town we have visited is Oswiecim. Oswiecim is the town where the Center for Dialogue and prayer, also know has home for the rest of the week, is located. It is also right across the street from Auschwitz one. On the first day, we visited a museum based on the Jewish life and culture in Oswiecim before World War II. Before the Holocaust the town was about sixty percent Jewish, and now there are no current Jewish Family’s residing here. We finished our day with a trip to a Jewish cemetery. This finally made all of the anti-Semitic teachings visual for me. On the way to the Center from the airport, I took notice of what I believed to be two Christian cemeteries, which were very beautiful and orderly with flowers on every head stone. Then the Jewish Cemetery was quite the opposite with head stones placed all over, against trees, broken all together very disrespected. The taught running thought my mind was how gracious I am that somebody had saved these headstones and created a memorial but I believe that these headstones and more important the people they belong to deserve a better place to rest.




0 comments:

Post a Comment