National Ant Day: Some history

I write this quickly as Shabbat is on its way in and the apartment is still in shambles.

I've celebrated NAD in different ways over the years. A delightful memory that just came to me is of a fellow Kosher co-op member (a dining co-op at Oberlin College) making a cake in honor of the occassion.

But the most exciting NAD of all is like this...

I was on March of the Living, a huge program that involves taking thousands of Jewish youth to visit former concentration camps in Poland and then go to Israel.

It so happened that I was in Warsaw on NAD and it was also Shabbat. The afore-mentioned Boaz Frankel has a sister named Bat-Ami who is a very good friend of mine. She, too, was on the March of the Living trip, but from the Israel contingent, so we hadn't seen each other at all among the other 5,998 participants. Well, in Warsaw there was a little shul that had several minyanim back to back. We participants packed that shul so there was no breathing room. They even had more than one minyan. Bat-Ami and I passed each other unexpectandly as she left and I entered the shul. "Happy National Ant Day" we called. I was so excited to see her I forgot to tell her that I had just been accepted to Oberlin College and would be going there with her in the fall.

Later that day I was just lounging around in the sun with other people from my U.S. Northwest contingent. We were exhausted. Visiting Auschwitz, Birkenau etc. on 3-4 hours of sleep per night can take a lot out of you. A group of Hare Krishnas came up to us and started playing music. So a couple of people from my group starting dancing with them. A counselor called, "They're trying to get you to worship their god!" So we got up to go, and began to dance away singing, "Am Yisrael Chai." The Hare Krishnas chased after us until we were all running and laughing and singing about survival.

Way to turn a secular day into a moment of Jewish triumph.