The Book of Radom

Radom, Radom! A city of scholarship and Hassidism, of intelligence, and heartfelt, honest folksy people. You are a beautiful link in the golden chain of Jewish communities of Poland. The chain is torn and the links - broken! Destroyed and desolate is Jewish Radom. The destroyed synagogue, our pride, was pillaged and burnt, wiped off the face of the earth. The same thing happened to the Beit Midrash and all of our holy places. The Torah scrolls - torn and burnt. Even the cemetery was disgraced. They built a factory with the bricks of the dismantled fence. The gravestones were laid on the sidewalks. One can no longer visit the ancestral graves. Today, cattle pasture over the holy graves, and other indignities take place. Radom, Radom! How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! No communal ledger, monograph, historical notices, or any records regarding societal life remain from this major Jewish city. We collected worn out holy pages, fragments, and crumbled documents. We also relied on the memories of people who were active in societal life and still remember the institutions and their activists, the houses of worship with their students and worshippers, the rabbis, scholars and good Jews, the schools and yeshivas, organizations and movements, writers and teachers, rabbinical judges and ritual slaughterers, cantors and teachers of young children. As long as the memory is fresh and before everything is locked into forgetfulness, let us remember the noble personalities, the holy souls. In this merit - may their souls be bound in the bonds of eternal life. Let the book serve as an eternal light for our pure martyrs. And let us remember, What the Nazi Amalek did to us!