Summary Of The Journey By Reb Atler

The first secondary document that I used for this was The Journey, short story By Joe Lumer. This Story begins with Reb Atler waking up in his apartment. He is 83 years old. He is Jewish, you can tell because in the story he references his tsitzis. They are tassels worn on traditional Jewish garments. He prays a lot during the story. Later it is found that he used to be a Rabbi. He walks out of his apartment and you can tell that he is in a poor part of the neighborhood. He is reminiscing about his late wife. Towards the end of the story we realize that Reb has dementia of some sort. He walked to the Shul but was upset when he realized it was closed. A passerby helped him and led him to the new Synagogue. On the Kristallnacht in 1938, the Shul was destroyed. We can assume that this story takes place in 1948, ten years after the Kristallnacht, like the man in the story states. This was about 3 years after WWII ended. This explains the poor conditions of the apartments, the loss of his wife and the reason why the Shul was destroyed. …show more content…
This photo shows three generations of a Jewish family. The description of the photo states that it was taken in Vilna around 1938 or 1939. Doing some research I found that Vilna was a Jewish ghetto from 1941-1943. In late 1939, Vilna was occupied by Soviet Union forces. This would be about right after the picture was taken. The Soviet Union transferred Vilna to Lithuania after it was occupied. Vilna was a home to about 55,000 Jews at the time. In 1941 Germany invaded Vilna and transformed it into a ghetto. About 40,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto by the end of 1941. The others were used as laborers at first, and then sent to concentration camps