What is it like to be a part of the Jewish communities in Poland?

If you ask Polish Jews living in Warsaw, Kraków or Wrocław about the revival of their communities, they’ll tell you that’s old news. But for anyone who isn’t a member or is visiting Poland from abroad, the fact that there is a small, but thriving Polish Jewish community is a surprising revelation.

After all, Poland has had the unfortunate reputation as the location where millions of Jews died during World War II. In fact, many abroad still see the country as the site of Jewish ghettos and concentration camps and little else. More often, their assumption is that no Polish Jews have remained.

Were here . . .  But consider these facts:

Warsaw alone has several religious congregations, from Orthodox to progressive to reform (and even a community of Georgian Jews!). There are also a volunteer centre, Hillel – an international organisation for Jewish students, the Drejdel nursery and the Lauder-Morasha Jewish pre-school, grade school and middle school, the Makabi sports club, a scout organisation for children, the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Taube Centre with its heritage tour programme, and the Jewish Community Centre, which runs a full programme of events for children and adults alike.

JCC Programme Coordinator Marta Saracyn says:

The assumption of the outside world is that Jewish Polish culture has died. And while part of it did, that doesn’t mean there is no modern culture. We want to spread the word that we’re here and we’re alive.

There are definite signs of a burgeoning community. Just swing by the Warsaw JCC on a Sunday, and you’ll see how the ground floor overflows with Jewish and non-Jewish diners sharing a delicious kosher brunch. In Kraków, the popular Jewish Culture Festival takes over the Kazimierz neighbourhood every summer for a week of showing how dynamic, contemporary and diversified Jewish culture is. Then, there are the numbers like 700 Jewish teens from Poland who have gone on birthright trips to Israel. And just this month, the Polish Jewish athletic team competed in the Makkabiah, or the Jewish Olympics, and won Poland its first gold medal in 82 years.
        
Signs of change

Community leaders say these are all positive signs of continuity.

Of course, no one denies that today’s numbers are a tiny percentage of the pre-war levels when Poland was home to an astonishing 3.5 million Jews, while Warsaw was home to the second largest urban Jewish community in the world after New York City. By comparison, today’s population of Jews living in the country is estimated to be around 30,000. 

Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich, a New Yorker who has lived and worked in Poland since 1990 explains:

Some people say 20,000, some say 50,000. I say 'who cares?'. What’s more important is to create engaging educational, social, intellectual and religious programming to give them a chance to become connected to the Jewish people.

Until the 1990s, many Polish Jews didn’t even know they were Jewish. Most who survived the Holocaust left the country in subsequent decades, while those who stayed hid their identity for the remaining decades of communism. Only after the fall in 1989, their children and grandchildren began to discover their true roots and confront their new identities. Rabbi Schudrich says:
        
When I started in 1990, we didn’t know if you were talking about just three dozen young people. Since then, thousands of Poles, maybe even tens of thousands discovered their Jewish roots.

Rafał Szymczak, a publicist who lives in Warsaw, is one of such Poles. He found out his grandmother was Jewish in the late 1980s, though his new identity took many years to come into its own. For the first few years, Szymczak called himself ‘a Pole with Jewish roots’. Now, he identifies as a Polish Jew. In a country where minorities make up only 3% of the population, that nominative difference is crucial.
        
Step by step

What helped him embrace his newfound identity were several steps. First, he went on a trip to the U.S. and then to Israel organised for young Polish-Jewish professionals, which helped him meet other people Polish Jews. He then began to actively participate in several Jewish programs run by international organisations in Poland, such as the Limud educational conference and summer camps for families and kids organised by the American Jewish Joint Distibution Committee. But the final step toward fully embracing his Jewish identity, he says, was deciding to raise his daughter Jewish.

Szymczak’s story is typical for third-generation Jews living in Poland. Many who find out they have Jewish roots don’t first know what to do with that information. But the growing community and the increasing number of local programs and institutions help give them resources to embrace or at least better understand what it means to be Jewish. 

Szymczak explains: 

It’s important that there are people who’re openly Jewish. In the 1960s-80s, everyone knew there were Jews in Poland, but they were hidden. Now, if you meet a Jewish person or see a Jewish place, it makes you braver to explore your own roots and join the community.

For non-religious Jews, one such important place is the Jewish Community Centre (JCC). In Kraków, the JCC has played a key role in providing a space for the local Jewish community as well as welcoming many passing visitors interested in Krakow’s ghetto and the nearby Auschwitz- Birkenau for the past nine years. In Warsaw, the JCC opened more recently – in 2013 – and focuses almost exclusively on nurturing the needs of the local community.

Saracyn says: 

The JCC came to be because the community needed a safe space where everyone could come in and express their Jewishness in whatever way they wanted. Nowadays, Poland is a very homogenous society, so it’s super cool to find out that you’re a bit different and then explore this special thing about yourself.

She concedes that discovering Jewish roots isn’t easy for everyone. For people who find out later in life when their identity is already fully formed, incorporating it into their lives can be a great challenge.
        
Some people are excited about it and some are too shy to even enter our building. For people who struggle to say they have Jewish ancestry it gets normalised because of being around other people who take it easy.

New challenges

The more organisations and activities there are for local Jews, the easier it is for people to come into the fold. While in the 1990s, most of the active groups in Poland were founded and sponsored by foreign-based Jewish organisations, today Poland’s Jewish community is on the cusp of becoming independent.

Karolina Szykier-Koszucka, programme coordinator at Ec Chaim, a progressive religious community and synagogue of the Jewish Community of Warsaw, which opened in Warsaw in 2010, says today the local Jewish community relies much more on itself. Szykier-Koszucka, who first got involved with the Jewish community in Wrocław before moving to Warsaw, says:
        
It wasn’t easy for us to create life twenty-five years ago, but now we don’t need people from outside to help us as much in terms of organizing and having ideas.  We know what to look for, we create our programmes for ourselves and we feel much more comfortable doing so. It’s a very long process to feel that you can be Jewish and that you can do it for yourself and you don’t need to wait for help from the outside. But that’s the biggest change our community has seen: we took our lives in our hands.

Rabbi Schudrich, who is based in Warsaw, says all the combined efforts mean that the capital has reached critical mass for a small Jewish community. In fact, every organisation – from the JCC to EC Chaim to the Warsaw Jewish Community’s building on Twarda Street – seems to be outgrowing their current space, especially during bigger events such as on the Jewish holidays.

With that come new challenges. Rabbi Schudrich says: 

Twenty-five years ago, our challenge was almost all post-Holocaust, post-Communism related. Now, we have typical challenges of a small Jewish community like how to find nice Jewish boys and nice Jewish girls to marry each other.

He says working as a rabbi in Poland means he faces a unique challenge in deciding between dedicating his efforts to the preservation of the past versus toward building the future.

How much time should I spend saving the cemeteries or looking for lost mass graves and how much times should I spend talking to people about their Jewish roots or talking to non-Jews about Jewish culture? I have no idea, so I try to do everything.

Talking about Jewish culture to those who aren’t familiar with it is now especially pertinent to the community because they are worried about the potential rise in antisemitism. Though no one we’ve talked to said they’ve experienced direct antisemitism, the rising xenophobia in Europe right now is a big concern. 

Szymczak explains:

Hate speech and hate crimes are growing. Jews may not be next on the list, but we’re not far off.

To combat this, the Warsaw Jewish Community and JCC Warsaw recently created a new anti-discriminatory program to prepare the local community for how to react to uncomfortable online and face to face situations, legal options as well as what not reacting can lead to.

Szykier-Koszucka says:

We don’t know what will happen in the future. Every Sabbath, we pray for Poland, so hopefully it works.

Yet no matter what the future brings, one thing is clear: for the first time in decades, the Polish Jewish community is growing both in numbers and in self-confidence. 

Szykier-Koszucka adds:

I'm amazed that it happened this way and not the other way around because twenty years ago it seemed like those were the last Jews.

Written by Sasha Vasilyuk, July 2017

The politics of memory: Poland and beyond

With the judiciary and public media in Poland captured, the time has now come to implement a “politics of memory,” with one sanctioned vision of history, and capture the hearts and minds of the Poles

The text was originally published in The Jerusalem Post on 30th January 2018.

With the judiciary and public media in Poland captured, the time has now come to implement a “politics of memory,” with one sanctioned vision of history, and capture the hearts and minds of the Poles. The most recent and dangerous installment of this politics of memory is the attempt to criminalize the public and erroneous assignation of blame to the Polish nation for crimes committed by the Third Reich.

Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, the most dangerous man in a government full of dangerous men, presented his rationale for this legislation as follows: “[…] the Polish government took an important step in the direction of creating stronger legal instruments allowing us to defend our rights, defend the historical truth, and defend Poland’s good name everywhere in the world.”

He alluded to the notorious “Polish death camps” designation occasionally appearing in the foreign media, and potentially suggesting co-responsibility on the part of the Poles for the crimes committed by Nazi Germany. He vowed to prosecute all those who defame Poland or the Polish nation. Already in its draft stage the legislation has sparked a furore regarding its scope and the severity of its sanctions (up to three years of imprisonment), and has been criticized as a “blunt instrument” (US president Barack Obama’s unfortunate remarks in 2012 would be covered by this law!), as another example of the nationalist revival in Poland and the return of revisionist history. Critics have also pointed out the possible dangers of limiting free speech and research and of building the martyrological narrative that the world does not understand how much Poland and Poles have suffered.

While this all true and cause for concern, there are important general lessons to be learned from this foray into the past. Polish leaders are currently in the business of no-holds-barred war on memory. The objective is to craft a one-dimensional explanation of where “we, the people” come from and what makes up our national identity, with anything else being a “mis-memory.”

While mis-memory manifests in many places and under many guises, it has one unifying premise: denouncing the “Round Table Talks” in 1989 and the peaceful transition of power that ensued as a rotten compromise struck by Lech Wałęsa (now seen a traitor and secret collaborator with the communists), and his Solidarność (Solidarity) labor union with the outgoing communist regime as a means of keeping the old elites alive.

This war is vindictive: the Poles are entitled to greater respect and recognition for their significant suffering in the past, and Poland must be compensated for all the injustices it suffered at the hands of the “dark” foreign powers.

The historical debate and our collective memory become tainted by an imbalance, as certain elements are celebrated, while others that do not fit the overarching narrative are relegated to the margins of public discourse, castigated, and now penalized. Anyone who counters the dominant understanding of our past is characterized as a liar and ostracized. Passing the new law will help this crusade progress even faster and in a more disciplined way.

Controversial of a nation’s history must be discussed openly and dispassionately. Reopening historical debates to probe less known or potentially controversial aspects of our history should form an important part of our common effort to unearth past, present and future.Seeking historical truth does not equate to finding it. Sometimes the process itself is gratifying, even if a final result is unattainable. This is the price for maintaining an overlapping consensus and living in a divided society with competing visions of our history. Every voice is important as long as it adds to the ongoing debate.

Nobody should be excluded, much less penalized, for taking part in the exchange of views about history, regardless of whether such views go against the mainstream (and often momentary) narrative, which is often rather more about politics than historical truth.

In trying to understand the current Polish way of remembering history the analysis of British historian Tony Judt can be very instructive. He argues that two kinds of memories emerged from what he calls the “official version of the wartime experience” which became dominant in Europe by 1948. One was that of the things done to “us” by Germans during the war, and the other that of things (however similar) done by “us” to “others” after the war.

This created “Two moral vocabularies, two sorts of reasoning, two different pasts. In this circumstance, the uncomfortably confusing recollection of things done by us to others during the war […] got conveniently lost.”

Crucially, it has built post-war national mythology around “examples and stories which were repeated and magnified, ad nauseam, in novels, popular histories, radio, newspapers, and especially cinema.” Crucially, this mythology took on special importance in Eastern Europe. Judt rightly points out the communists’ interest in “flattering the recalcitrant local population by inviting it to believe the fabrication now deployed on its behalf by the USSR – to wit, that central and eastern Europe was an innocent victim of German assault, had played no part in its own downfall or in the crimes perpetrated on its territory, and was a full partner in the work of liberation led by Soviet soldiers abroad and communist partisans at home.” With the new legislation, the signal is being sent that far from being internalized, the lessons of history are selectively instrumentalized to serve the new political masters’ vision.

All this must not be read as belittling the suffering of the Polish people and the heroism of Polish Righteous among the Nations, or questioning Poland’s resistance in the face of the atrocities of Nazi occupation. Nobody denies that. My point is different.

The unimaginable destruction of life – physical, spiritual and cultural – wrought on us would have been more than enough to wipe out entire nations less strong than the Poles. We survived because history was always a repository on which to build a new order and rebuild life. We relied on our accumulated constitutional fidelity and moved forward. We remembered both the good and the bad, and what saved us and our way of life. Therefore, my argument against an imposed understanding of history favors an inclusive historical memory that brings together and exposes all national experiences and narratives.

Building a historical debate calls for never-ending “pacting” among the past, present and future. Such pacting would move us away from what J. Connelly called  “a historiography obsessed with minutiae and overgrown with easy assumptions about martyrology” and push toward a more critical reading of where we come from.

A nation that is not ready to embark on a comprehensive journey into its past is impoverished and unable to move forward with true understanding of who “we” really are. When grand gestures dominate and less spectacular soul-searching is lacking, nations become captives of the past rather than its masters. It is here that Polish debate over “what really happened?” must be ongoing, and is far from over.

It must be subject to the most critical and demanding inquiry and exchanges. Imposing sanctions for statements that go against the grain of the mainstream understanding would clearly inhibit the free flow of views and lead to a “one and only” vision of the past. The debate will become flattened and ultimately stifled, as prospective participants who hold different views will be discouraged – and even excluded – from joining the discussion.

The media will think twice before stirring up a new controversy, even if it was viewed as justified by public interest. Consequently, public discussion will become predictable and one-sided, always sitting well within the expectations of the regime and its historical policy.

The last thing Poland needs today is the spreading of an all-too-easy “culture of treason,” (ab)using its own vision of the past as a weapon with which to fight political adversaries and dividing Poles into “better” and “worse” sorts, imposing one historical orthodoxy on society and enforcing it through criminal law, all as part of the wicked politics of resentment and mis-memory.

Historical debate should strive for pragmatic recognition that our constitutional allegiances are shaped, reshaped and re-examined as we move forward. There is no place for fear of failure, because failure is part of the fidelity we owe to ourselves. American constitutional scholars J. Balkin and R. Siegel explain: “we turn to the past not because the past contains within it all of the answers to our questions, but because it is the repository of our common struggles and common commitments; it offers us invaluable resources as we debate the most important questions of political life, which cannot fully and finally be settled.” The past must be the key to the future, but not only. By revealing the past, we discover the present, and most importantly, build the future in keeping with the constitutional fidelity that binds us across generations.  Confronting one’s past and building a memory must  capture the entirety of the historical baggage. Only then will Poles be able to remember honestly and move forward.

Memory properly understood should challenge dominant accounts of history. It might be used to disguise and cover up, or to liberate and reveal.

What matters, though, is that no single overarching master narrative exists, and that disagreement is part and parcel of many “contested paths.” True historical debate must resemble democracy, where all voices are heard. As the majority must not oppress the minority, dominant historic narratives cannot exclude less popular views of historical events.

Unfortunately, in Poland the past continues to be seen as a collection of indisputable truths, not open to divergent interpretations and historical debate. This paranoid politics has already destroyed judicial review, the courts and the free media. It now sets its sights on historical memory. Politics of mis-memory poses the existential danger that Polish history may become an uncontested sphere, dominated by a truth superimposed from above, a truly foreign country with the power of story-telling available only to the “lucky few.”

While captured institutions may be rebuilt, it will take generations to free captive minds and souls. As “we Poles” are imperfect, beautiful, impulsive, contradictory, all this and more, the historical narrative must be allowed to reflect and bring to light the diversity of not only our great moments, but also imperfections, frailties and dark sides. After all, this is my, your and our history. These are my, your and our myths and stories. Not theirs.