A Jewish renaissance in Poland
There are signs that Poles are discovering their lost Jewish heritage and that antisemitism is in decline.In
Kazimierz, once the Jewish heart of Krakow, signs of a revival are everywhere. There are restaurants with Hebrew lettering, a new community centre where students drop in for a Sabbath meal, and even a Jewish kindergarten. And once a year, this quarter is dominated by a celebration of Jewish music, theatre and film that attracts up to 13,000 visitors.
The Old Synagogue in Kazimierz, CracowKrakow's Jewish Culture festival is the most prominent symbol of an apparent rejuvenation in the shadow of the Holocaust. This is the nearest Polish city to Auschwitz, but it has also become a place where Poles are discovering their lost Jewish heritage.
Krakow's Jewish Culture festivalThe Jewish community centre on
Miodowa Street, neighbouring a synagogue defiled by the Nazis but now restored for worship, has seen a steady stream of visitors. Opened in 2008 by Prince Charles, the centre offers Hebrew and Yiddish language lessons and an introductory religious course, alongside yoga, belly-dancing and basketball.
Jonathan Ornstein, the centre's director, says: "
I think that people for a few years have been talking about a Jewish renaissance in Poland, in Krakow especially, and that was primarily an interest by non-Jews in Jewish culture, and I think that now we're in a second stage that is totally made possible by this first stage. That's people with Jewish roots getting involved in the Jewish community."
Jonathan Ornstein, director of Jewish Community Centre of KrakowOrnstein says the centre has young people coming in every day who have no contact with Jewish life but want to explore their Jewish roots. One local rabbi tells a story of a Pole who discovered from his mother's birth certificate that she was Jewish, born in Krakow's wartime ghetto. She told him that she had kept it a secret all her life – and then they discovered that the man's father was Jewish, too.
There are reckoned to be slightly more than 100 official members of the Jewish community in Krakow, but 400 who consider themselves Jewish.
The precursor of this renewal has been the festival, now in its 21st year. It is an event that looks both ways, embracing klezmer music and Yiddish movies of the past, but also seeking out the avant garde. This year that includes a "
hip-hop meets klezmer" act from the US as well as workshops in Hebrew calligraphy, Jewish cooking and singing, all allowing the audience to get involved.
It acts as a reminder to Poles that their culture is not a "
monolith", says the festival's director,
Janusz Makuch, citing the influential Jewish songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig as one example. "Gebirtig composed a lot of beautiful songs, sung by the Poles. When Poles sang these tunes, they didn't realise they sang a Jewish song.
Janusz Makuch, director of the Festival of Jewish Culture in Krakow"Instead of [being] a hermetic culture, the secular Jewish culture was intertwined with Polish culture."
One of this year's performers,
Jarek Bester, of
the Bester Quartet, describes his sound as contemporary chamber music that reinterprets traditional Yiddish folk. On CD it is a mix of plaintive violin and thundering accordion.
Bester says: "
[The Holocaust] was a kind of intermission in composing and playing klezmer music. I'm trying to provide a continuation of klezmer – I think the way we play is how klezmer music would be played, if it wasn't for the second world war."
Jarek Bester, Polish-Jewish musician. (
www.besterquartet.com/ )
Jewish life in
Krakow, nearly extinguished by the Nazis,
was driven underground in the communist era.
Kazimierz, the njewish diustrict of ( Pre-war)
Krakow, where
Schindler's List was filmed,
was a neglected and under-populated district under communism.
In recent years it has been transformed into one of the hippest parts of the city. Pavements are crowded with cafe tables and streets are lined with vodka bars, vintage boutiques and tiny art galleries. Only the peeling plaster and brickwork of some of the facades gives away the past neglect, and that is rapidly being patched up.
Jewishness has been adopted as a selling point, almost a badge of cool, in a way that is sometimes tasteless. Converted golf carts tout for tourist custom with awnings displaying the itinerary: "
Auschwitz, Schindler's factory, Jewish quarter." A local rabbi,
Eliezer Gurary, spoke of his disquiet at the Jewish mannequins in shops – dolls of black-robed, bearded men that border on racist caricature. There have been complaints over a "
Jewish-themed" restaurant that displays a page of the Torah on its wall.
Krakow rabbi Eliezer GuraryAt the community centre, Ornstein says: "
You have some fake Jewish-style restaurants, and I would love those to be restaurants run by Jews, kosher restaurants and actually be realistic. I think that's a way off, [but] we're moving in that direction. These days in Poland the fact that you can call a restaurant a Jewish restaurant and that brings people in, is in itself a positive thing."
"
I think the remarkable thing here is that you have a community that's growing, that's optimistic, that feels very safe, and it's going in a direction which is very different to most Jewish communities in Europe."
A survey conducted last year by the
Polish Public Opinion Poll Institute indicated
a decline in antisemitism among all age groups over the decade. The poll, which asked questions intended to uncover people's belief in Jewish "
influence" over Polish politics, found that
fewer than 6% mentioned Jewish people when asked about influential minorities, compared with nearly 20% in 2002.
Poland's chief rabbi,
Michael Schudrich, believes that the opinion polls on antisemitism fail to show the underlying change in Polish attitudes. "
The flaw in all these surveys is that – let's say they show that 20% of Poles have antisemitic attitudes – everyone misses what the other 80% is thinking," Schudrich says at his office at the Warsaw synagogue. "Are they indifferent or are they appalled by the 20%? And it seems to me more and more people are raising their rejection of these antisemitic trends. That's mostly due to John Paul II, who did more to fight antisemitism than anyone in the last 2,000 years."
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael SchudrichSchudrich, who was born in
New York and first came to
Poland in
1992, believes that
the late Polish pope, who will be beatified on
1 May, made indifference to antisemitism less acceptable in the Catholic mainstream.
"
John Paul II empowered all those people who found it abhorrent," he says. The rabbi believes he is seeing a subtle, slow but telling transformation in the relationship between Polish Jews and the wider community.
"
I get these calls from town X saying: 'We feel an obligation to perpetuate the memory of the Jews who once lived here.' It used to be: 'What can be done to clean your cemetery.' Now it's: 'What can be done to clean our cemetery.'"
On Tuesday
the chief rabbi was in the eastern Polish town of
Zamosc, along with ambassadors from the
US,
Germany and
Israel, at the restoration of a
17th-century synagogue. The building is considered a jewel of
Renaissance architecture, and will house
a Polish Jewish cultural centre.
Schudrich chooses his words carefully when talking about
Golden Harvest, a controversial new book by a
Princeton University professor,
Jan Gross, about
Poles who dug up
the mass graves of Jews killed in the Holocaust looking for
gold and
precious stones.
"
It's important to talk about this subject. Some people did horrific things, but we knew this already. The question is: was it rampant? In Treblinka and in Birkenau, was it the same 50 people doing this each time, or a different 50 people?"
Schudrich says. "
You could come away with the impression that everyone did it.
"
And were they doing it because the victims were Jews, or because the Nazis destroyed any sense of morality so everything was permitted? I don't know. Gross writes in a way to provoke, not to educate, and Poles don't react well to it. Because of the style, too many people reject what he has to say."
On a bright afternoon recently in
Kazimierz a boy in a
kippah (
skullcap) walked along the street where a few hours earlier a golf cart filled with tourists had trundled past.
Poland was once home to
the second largest Jewish community in the world, and any revival is the faintest echo of what was destroyed – but it is
a source of great pride to a city with 700 years of Jewish history.
Makuch, of
the Jewish Culture festival, says: "
We are sitting in Kazimierz, founded by one of the Polish kings in 1335; we are surrounded by seven beautiful synagogues built mostly in the baroque and Renaissance periods. Poland, and especially Krakow, was proud of cultural pluralism – a lot of people lived here: Poles, Jews, Russians, Armenians, all kinds of guys, and they lived together, and they respected each other."
"
That's what I'm trying to explore and what I'm trying to keep. Everything was mixed, everything was intertwined before the second world war; almost everything."
