At the end of August a delegation from the Jewish Agency's Partnership 2000 - Beit Shemesh-Mateh Yehuda-Washington-South Africa - left for Poland. The delegation included students from the Branco Weiss School and youth from Mateh Yehuda, together with youth from South Africa.

As in previous years, this year's trip lasted eight days and included visits to concentration camps and death camps, the major cities in Poland and various Jewish cultural sites with a history of up to 800 years during which Jews lived in Poland before the community was wiped out.

Preparatory sessions were held prior to the trip at which we learned much about Jewish heritage, the bond between the people, the country and the Torah, about Polish Jewry, European Jewry, World War Two and human rights.

During the visit to the Auschwitz concentration camp we came across a survivor of the camp. The unscheduled encounter caused great excitement among the students. The survivor summed up her feelings with a sentence that was etched deep in the hearts of all those present: "Go to the army and protect your country, because we have no other country!"

After they returned from Poland, Adva and Vera, two students wrote:
"The trip was very significant for us and, despite all the difficult experiences, we enjoyed it very much. Most important, we learned a lot. We learned about our own people and we learned to experience things.

We believe that everyone should go on a trip like this, to try and get a better understanding of what happened there. The long sessions we had before the trip contributed greatly to our understanding, and brought us together as a group. We would like to attend more sessions, when we could meet as a group and share our experiences."