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Warsaw, Poland - Jewish Leaders Say Kaddish At Funeral By One Of The Greatest Chasidei Umot Haolam. PHOTOS.
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Sendler, who died on Monday aged 98, was once nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her wartime achievement of smuggling an estimated 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Jewish community leaders, Holocaust survivors, government ministers and the Israeli ambassador to Poland joined hundreds of other mourners in bright sunshine at Warsaw’s Powaski cemetery to pay tribute to Sendler’s life and achievements.
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Poland’s chief Orthodox rabbi, Michael Schudrich, recited a Jewish prayer.
Schudrich fondly remembered Sendler, and said he hoped her life would inspire others.
“We have been blessed for so many years to have her living example,” Schudrich said.
“I have this dream, this prayer, this wish that we won’t miss her so much if every person who hears her story simply tries to do a nice thing, a good thing for another person every day,” he said.
“She changed the world, and with her example we can continue to change the world.”
“Poland, the Jewish people, the world has lost a person who simply fought her whole life… for what it means to help another person, fought for never being indifferent, for never dividing humanity but bringing it together,” Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, told Reuters at the funeral. The chief rabbi said the Kaddish over Irena Sendler’s grave.
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Marian Turski, 82, a concentration camp survivor, said Sendler was a modest woman who always downplayed her own role.
“Nobody knows how many people she really saved… Those survivors (saved by Sendler) are today old people but in the meantime they have given birth to another generation and this generation has given birth to yet another generation. So in fact she has saved very many thousands (more) lives,” he said.
When the Nazis set up a ghetto for Warsaw’s Jewish population of about half a million in 1940, Sendler, who had the right to enter the ghetto as a social worker, started smuggling out children in boxes, suitcases or hidden in trolleys.
She then took them to Polish families outside the Ghetto walls where they lived under new identities. The penalty for helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland was death.
Among those who bid farewell to her was Professor Michal Glowinski, an historian, who was among children rescued from the Ghetto thanks to Irena Sendler.
Glowinski spoke on behalf of the rescued children, whom she smuggled out of the ghetto, which was hell, and found shelter in places offering a hope of survival.
Editors Note: The entire Jewish community can not express in any words the gratitude and appreciation for the heroic deeds of this woman, and we ask all our readers to comment their condolence to recognize her as Righteous Among the Nations.
Its an obligation of every jewish newspaper, online media sites, to pay tribute to the legacy of Ms. Sendler
05-15-2008 - 3:06 PM
Poland’s chief Orthodox rabbi, Michael Schudrich, recited a Jewish prayer."
Did the Rabbi pray at a Catholic cemetery in front of the crosses? Are Jews permitted to do that?
Can we show our gratitude to Mrs Sendler by naming a Children's hospital after her?
05-15-2008 - 3:26 PM
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05-15-2008 - 4:24 PM
Do you still wonder why Arafat & Carter won?
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05-15-2008 - 5:01 PM
Very moving. Thank you for bringing us this story. With the many grandchildren born to these 2,500 Jews, she really did save an entire world. She accomplished more in a few years than 99.9999% of us could do in a million lifetimes.
We need to express gratitude to the those like Sendler, Wallenberg and those precious few others from Japan, China, Dominican Republic, Denmark and elsewhere who behaved courageously, thank G-d.
How many of us could have passed this nesoyon as valiantly they did?
May their memories be an everlasting blessing.
05-15-2008 - 5:10 PM
05-15-2008 - 5:26 PM
May hashem bless her and may her family be blessed forever and ever
05-15-2008 - 7:01 PM
05-15-2008 - 7:12 PM
Besides its brought down in the sefer Kav Hayosher that once a month Basya has the zechus to go to the place of Moshe in GAn Eden to look at his face since she saved him from death. A zechus that no one else has.
May there be many more such heroic people in this world, maybe then will the earth be a better place.
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From the wikipedia article:
"In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Żegota saved her by bribing the German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs.She was listed on public bulletin boards as among those executed. For the remainder of the war, she lived in hiding, but continued her work for the Jewish children. After the war, she dug up the jars containing the children's identities and began an attempt to find the children and return them to living parents. However, almost all the children's parents had died at the Treblinka extermination camp."
"Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory"
Irena Sendler's Letter to Polish Parliament
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