ABSTRACT
In 1946 Dr. Isaac Herzog, the chief rabbi of Palestine and a native of Łomża, a city well known for the yeshiva founded there in 1883 and later transferred to Eretz Israel, set out on a journey to liberated Europe. His mission was to seek out and give assistance to Jewish children scattered over hundreds of miles, lost and utterly alone in the world. He came to Poland with a heavy heart. No matter how familiar he was with the scale of the recent tragedy, the devastation Rabbi Herzog encountered there was horrifying. At the time he said:
I came to Poland, my native country, in order to visit the handful of my brethren—all that remains of three and a half million souls. Pity the eyes that see it! Is this the Polish Jewry, with its thousand-year-old golden tradition, the Jewry that occupied a foremost position in our Nation, that represented the center and source of the Torah and of pious devotion, of science and the Jewish spirit, of Jewish music and poetry—this Polish Jewry that for centuries shed its light upon the whole Nation, this Polish Jewry that made the greatest contribution to Palestine? 1
