Jewish hotel in Poland offers free rooms to doctors fighting virus

Lublin’s Hotel Ilan, once home to one of the largest yeshivas in the world, will also throw in free breakfast for medical professionals who don’t want to expose family to pathogen

By JTA and ToI Staff 28 April 2020, 11:30 pm

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The Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva in Lublin, Poland, was one of the largest yeshivas in the world before it was rendered defunct by the Nazi in 1939. (Wikimedia Commons via JTA)

The Hotel Ilan in Lublin, a city in central Poland, is offering 60 rooms for free to health care professionals busy battling the coronavirus, at times for exhaustive stretches.

Breakfast is included, said Agnieszka Kolibska, the hotel manager. It’s the only hotel in the city offering free rooms for doctors.

Some don’t want to go home right away and be in close contact with family members after a shift working closely with coronavirus patients.

“We are glad that as a hotel and the local Jewish community we can support health care in these hard times,” Kolibska said.

The hotel is located in the building of what was formerly one of the largest yeshivas in the world, Chachmei Lublin yeshiva, founded by Rabbi Meir Yehuda Shapiro in 1930. The building now belongs to the Warsaw Jewish Community organization.

Elsewhere, in Warsaw, the Jewish Theater donated 100 sewn masks to the city’s Social Welfare Center. Now it’s preparing to send a package of them to an orphanage in Warsaw.

Poland has seen 11,273 cases of COVID-19 and 524 deaths.