The Ukraine Diaries - Entry #1

28 October 2025

Krakow, Poland

I arrive from Los Angeles on an overnight flight that has, through the cunning use of time zones, erased an entire day. Roughly twelve hours of travel has used up twenty four hours of the clock, so that it was evening when I left, and evening when I land. I traverse the airport and arrive where I am staying.

It occurs to me that this city, Krakow, Poland, is probably where RISE began. I was here in 2006 when I was twenty one years old. It was my first time. I was traveling with a friend under the guise of doing research for a school project. We had schlepped through the Balkans and bits of Eastern Europe, got stuck on a broken down train somewhere in Romania, dodged a potential arrest in Bulgaria, got robbed by a cabby in Belgrade, and walked through the remnants of the tunnels of Sarajevo. A great time was had, but it wasn't until our train rolled into Krakow that I began to feel like I had actually arrived somewhere. It was as if a door opened.

We stayed in Kazimierz, the old Jewish neighborhood. By night we joined in with the partiers, but during the day we marveled at synagogues that had survived pogroms, the Nazis, the Holocaust, and the Soviets. We visited Auschwitz and Birkenau, coinciding with a March of the Living event, and seeing people carry flags with the Star of David on display through the grounds of a former Nazi camp was, for me, a sight to behold. We visited the Galicia Jewish Museum and their exhibit on lost and forgotten sites of Jewish heritage. I bought a Jewish star from their gift shop. I still wear it today.

It was during that trip that I had the first inkling that I would dedicate much of my creative and intellectual life to that subject matter. I spent a year after that trip composing an orchestrated rock concert about resistance to oppression, inspired by my travels in Poland. It became my senior project for college. I called it "The Rising."

Now, nineteen years later, here I am. I have a rock musical called RISE that addresses the same subject matter that gripped me during that first trip to Krakow. Tomorrow, I will travel into Ukraine, a country my ancestors fled decades ago, to perform for a Jewish community that has survived and thrived and resurrected Jewish life in the war-battered region. You can't fly into Ukraine. I have to enter through Poland. Once again, Krakow is the doorway through which I walk.