Polish Jewish troubled neighborhood

[gigi]

Mar 6, 2009 20:40:51 GMT 1 Bonobo said:

WARSAW, Poland – A human rights group and Poland's Education Ministry introduced new teaching materials for Poland's middle schools on Thursday in an effort to combat anti-Semitism.

That seems to be good news. Hopefully it will have a positive impact.

I suppose it will depend on what these children are most influenced by - the attitudes/beliefs of their peers, what they are learning in their own homes, etc.

Here is a site I found with some 2007 information about Antisemitism and Racism in Poland:

www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2007/poland.html

[Bonobo]

Poland not only the land of Holocaust
Polish Radio
25.02.2009

Some 18 thousand high school students from Israel will visit Poland
this year.

The number is far less than in previous years, but the current trips
shall include more meetings of the Israeli youth with their Polish
peers. The organizers have worked hard to create an alternative
picture to that of the homeland of many of their ancestors remembered
only as the place of the Holocaust. According to Jacek Olejnik from
the Museum of History of Polish Jews positive effects have been
achieved thanks to placing the young visitors from Israel in the
homes of their Polish colleagues, instead of tight security hotels.
However, Jacek Olejnik pointed to rapidly rising costs of travel as a
potential factor limiting the number of families who can afford such
trips.

Jewish organizations have estimated that over 70 percent of Jews
scattered all over the world have Polish connections.



Germany gives $1.3 million for Nazi death camp repairs
The Associated Press
Friday, February 27, 2009

BERLIN: Germany will give $1.3 million for badly needed restoration
work at the Auschwitz death camp museum in neighboring Poland.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says the donation followed an appeal from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk to all 27 European Union members to contribute to a fund to preserve the Nazi-built camp. The Polish government says it needs up to €100 million for restoration work at the camp.

Steinmeier said Friday Germany would contribute more in the next
budgetary year and said it would encourage German businesses and private foundations to donate. Tusk's office was not immediately able to comment.

[Bonobo]

Mar 6, 2009 22:29:58 GMT 1 gigi said:

Mar 6, 2009 20:40:51 GMT 1 Bonobo said:

WARSAW, Poland – A human rights group and Poland's Education Ministry introduced new teaching materials for Poland's middle schools on Thursday in an effort to combat anti-Semitism.

That seems to be good news. Hopefully it will have a positive impact.

I suppose it will depend on what these children are most influenced by - the attitudes/beliefs of their peers, what they are learning in their own homes, etc.

Here is a site I found with some 2007 information about Antisemitism and Racism in Poland:

www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2007/poland.html

There are reasonable people in Poland who stand up and protest.


Some random quotes from the site:

Most of the 149 racist incidents recorded in Poland in 2007 were antisemitic in nature.

According to Never Again, there were 149 racist incidents in 2007, most of them antisemitic in nature, including cemetery desecrations, antisemitic demonstrations and antisemitic slogans at football matches.

Populist political parties that employed antisemitic rhetoric suffered a defeat in the October 2007 parliamentary election.

Graffiti such as “Gas the Jews” appeared on Lodz schools, buildings, buses and shops on March 14. Some 60 non-Jewish Polish teenagers demonstrated in protest outside the city hall.

In response to a potential compensation deal over Jewish confiscated property in July, Roman Catholic priest Tadeusz Rydzyk, the owner of Radio Maryja, stated: "You know what this is about: Poland giving [the Jews] $65 billion. They will come to you and say, ‘Give me your coat! Take off your trousers! Give me your shoes’." The prime minister’s office condemned the statement and over 600 Polish Catholic intellectuals, journalists, priests and activists signed a letter of protest.

[Bonobo]

Polish antisemitism before the war.


Index books of Jewish students with Ghetto bench seals stamped above the photograph.



upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/Index_of_Jewish_student_in_Poland_with_Ghetto_benche_seal_1934.PNG


Ghetto benches or bench Ghetto (known in Polish as Getto ławkowe)[1][2] was a form of official segregation in the seating of students, introduced in Poland's universities beginning in 1935 at Lwow Polytechnic. By 1937, when this practice became conditionally legalized, most rectors at other higher education institutions had adopted this form of segregation. Under the ghetto ławkowe system Jewish university students were forced, under threat of expulsion, to sit in a left-hand side section of the lecture halls reserved exclusively for them. This official policy of enforced segregation was often accompanied by acts of violence directed against Jewish students by members of the Polish fascist organization ONR (delegalised already after three months in 1934) and other pro-fascist organizations.

The "bench Ghetto" marked a peak of antisemitism in Poland between the world wars."It antagonized not only Jews, but also many Poles."[6] "Jewish students protested these policies, along with some Poles supporting them... and stood instead of sitting. The segregation continued in force until the invasion of Poland in World War II and Poland's occupation by Nazi Germany suppressed the entire Polish educational system.


The demonstration by Polish nationalist students:
A Day without Jews!
We demand official Ghetto!


Anti Jewish leaflet


Jews to ghetto!


Poland for Poles!


www.rp.pl/artykul/171908_Uczelniane__getta_lawkowe_.html
www.zydziwpolsce.edu.pl/panel10.html

[Bonobo]

Things have changed in Poland, chief rabbi saysShlomo Kapustin
Jewish Tribune
Tuesday, 19 May 2009

TORONTO – Ask most Jews for their impression of Poland and their response could get downright nasty. Even for many young Jews, Poland's history of antisemitism has edged it past Germany in the ignominious race for top historical rogue state. But if the Central European country's chief rabbi is to be believed, that was then; this is now.
"People are realizing that Jews [have been] a part of the country for 1,000 years," said Rabbi Michael Schudrich.
His address, which took place at Beth Habonim Congregation in Toronto last week, was sponsored by the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada and the March of the Living. About 300 people attended.
he New-York-born rabbi was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary and later by Yeshiva University. Appointed to his post in December 2004, he traces the new attitude towards Jews to the fall of Communism. Suddenly, Rabbi Schudrich said, "people now feel safe telling their grandchildren and children who they really are."
Poland's Jewish community once took pride in its scholarship – the famous scholar Rabbi Moshe Isserles lived in Kracow in the 16th century – and it numbered 3.5 million on the eve of the Holocaust. While 90 per cent of the community were murdered in the Holocaust, about 350,000 Polish Jews were spared. The vast majority have since emigrated from Poland, but those who opted to stay hid their identity – in many cases, even from their children.
Two major developments are at the root of the sea change in Polish sentiment, said Rabbi Schudrich.
The first is Pope John Paul II, who "did more to effectively fight antisemitism than anyone in 2,000 years." Witness the former pope's celebrated speech at Yad Vashem nine years ago, Rabbi Schudrich said, and contrast it to the current pope's much-criticized efforts at rapprochement with the Jewish community last week (see pages 1 & 5).
The second, he said, is today's Poles' general rejection of the past. And along with their turning from Communism and Fascism has come a spurning of antisemitism, or "anti-antisemitism. "
In fact, Rabbi Schudrich said, two Polish non-governmental organizations – Never Again and Open Society – are dedicated just to fighting it.
This happy confluence of events has kept the rabbi busy – and increased his repertoire of entertaining, even bizarre, stories.
Take the tale of a certain Polish couple. At 20, the woman discovered her Jewish roots, but it wasn't until she turned 23 that she decided to make Friday-night dinner. Her husband went along with the new lifestyle, but his parents were furious. Their son was baffled at his parents' attitude until they too revealed their Jewish roots.
But that is not even the story's punchline. For that, you have to return in time to the early '90s, when the two classmates were high-school sweethearts in Warsaw – and skinheads.
Now, at 33, the happily married couple is active in the community.
As well as his work with those returning to their roots, Rabbi Schudrich is a key liaison to government figures who need insight into Jewish concerns and a prime source for non-Jews about all things Jewish. Just recently, he said, he met with a group of teachers who wanted to learn about Jewish culture.
Much of his time, though, is spent trying to restore cemeteries.
"We have had tremendous success," he said, "but not always."
Some of the many Polish expatriates in attendance still bear animosity to their former home country. One questioner focused on the issue of confiscated property. While the Jewish community has been given the right to claim communal property – a process Rabbi Schudrich described as "too slow, but it is working" – private property that was confiscated from Jews has no such remedy.
Rabbi Schudrich acknowledged that the problem "needs to be fixed," but he clarified that this lack of "reprivatization" is not aimed at Jews. Anyone whose land has been confiscated – by Nazis, by Communists – cannot reclaim it at the moment.
Another questioner took issue with the entire premise of a revitalized Jewish community in Poland. Why doesn't everyone move to Israel? she asked.
"Jews in Poland think a lot about Israel," Poland's chief rabbi said. Many have indeed moved there.
"[But] my responsibility is to teach the people living in my community.… If they are living in Poland they should live as Jews."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers

Spiegel Online

5/20/09

The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6 million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler's foreign helpers.

He's been here before, in this country of perpetrators. He saw this country collapse. He was 25 at the time and his Christian name was Ivan, not John; not yet.

Ivan Demjanjuk served as a guard in Flossenbürg concentration camp until shortly before the end of World War II. He had been transferred there from the SS death camp in Sobibor in present-day Poland. He was Ukrainian, and he was a Travniki, one of the 5,000 men who helped Germany's Nazi regime commit the crime of the millennium -- the murder of all the Jews in Europe, the "Final Solution."

He was part of it, if only a very minor cog in the vast machinery of murder. Ivan Demjanjuk stayed in post-war Germany for seven years before he emigrated to the US in 1952 with his wife and daughter on board the General Haan. Once he arrived, he changed his name to John. His time as a supposed DP or "displaced person," as the Anglo-American victors called people made homeless by the war, was over.

DP Demjanjuk had lived in the southern German towns of Landshut and Regensburg where he worked for the US Army. He moved to Ulm, Ellwangen, Bad Reichenhall, and finally to Feldafing on Lake Starnberg. Feldafing belongs to the area covered by the Munich district court, which is why Demjanjuk has been sitting in Munich's Stadelheim prison since he was deported from the US last week. His cell measures 24 square meters, which is extraordinarily spacious by usual prison standards.

Last Big Nazi Trial in Germany

He faces charges of aiding and abetting the murder of at least 29,000 Jews in Sobibor. The trial could start in late summer, provided Demjanjuk, now almost 90, is deemed fit to stand trial. Witnesses will be called to testify, but none of them will be able to identify him. The only evidence lies in the files, but that evidence is strong. Twice, in 1949 and 1979, former Travniki Ignat Danilchenko, who is now dead, stated that Demjanjuk had been an "experienced and efficient guard" who had driven Jews into the gas chambers -- "that was daily work."

Demjanjuk has denied this charge throughout. He says he was never in Flossenbürg or in Sobibor, never pushed people into the gas chambers. The ex-American has adopted the same tactic of denial as many other defendants who stood trial for war crimes after 1945.

The Holocaust in numbers.
DER SPIEGEL

The Holocaust in numbers.
But it's already clear that this last big Nazi trial in Germany will be a deeply extraordinary one because it will for the first time put the foreign perpetrators in the spotlight of world publicity. They are men who have until now received surprisingly little attention -- Ukrainian gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian railway workers. Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers -- they all took part in Germany's Holocaust.

Experts such as Dieter Pohl of the German Institute for Contemporary History estimate that more than 200,000 non-Germans -- about as many as Germans and Austrians -- "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of murder." And often they were every bit as cold-blooded as Hitler's henchmen.

Just for example, on June 27, 1941, a colonel in the staff of the Germany's Northern Army Group in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas passed a petrol station surrounded by a crowd of people. There were shouts of bravo and clapping, mothers raised their children to give them a better view. The officer stepped closer and later wrote down what he had seen. "On the concrete courtyard there was blonde man aged around 25, of medium height, who was taking a rest and supporting himself on a wooden club which was as thick as an arm and went up to his chest. At his feet lay 15, 20 people who were dead or dying. Water poured from a hose and washed the blood into a drain."

The soldier continued: "Just a few paces behind this man stood around 20 men who -- guarded by several armed civilians -- awaited their gruesome execution in silent submission. Beckoned with a curt wave, the next one stepped up silently and was (…) beaten to death with the wooden club, and every blow met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience."

Orgy of Murder Like a Lithuanian National Ceremony

When all lay dead on the ground, the blonde murderer climbed on the heap of corpses and played the accordion. His audience sang the Lithuanian anthem as if the orgy of murder had been a national ceremony.

How could something like that happen? For a long time now, this question hasn't just been directed at the Germans, whose central responsibility for the horror is undisputed -- but also at the perpetrators in all countries.

What led Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu and his generals, soldiers, civil servants and farmers to murder 200,000 Jews (and possibly twice that many) "of their own accord," as historian Armin Heinen puts it. Why did Baltic death squadrons commit murder on German orders in Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine? And why did German Einsatzgruppen -- paramilitary "intervention groups" operated by the SS -- have such an easy time encouraging the non-Jewish population to wage pogroms between Warsaw and Minsk?

It's completely undisputed that the Holocaust would never have happened without Hitler, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and the many, many other Germans. But it's also certain "that the Germans on their own wouldn't have been able to carry out the murder of millions of European Jews," says Hamburg-based historian Michael Wild.

It's a perception that many survivors never doubted. When the Association of Surviving Lithuanian Jews convened in Munich in 1947, they passed a resolution that bore an unmistakable title: "On the guilt of a large part of the Lithuanian population for the murder of Lithuania's Jews."

In the Third Reich with its well-functioning bureaucracy, there were comprehensive registers of the Jewish population. But in the territories conquered by the German army, Hitler's henchmen needed information of the type supplied in the Netherlands by registry offices whose staff went to a lot of trouble to compile a precise "Register of Jews."

And how would the SS and police have been able to track down Jews in the cities of Eastern Europe with their broad mix of ethnic groups if they hadn't had the support of the local population? Not many Germans would have been able "to recognize a Jew in a crowd," recalls Thomas Blatt, a survivor of Sobibor who wants to testify as a witness at Demjanjuk's trial.

At the time, Blatt was a blonde-haired boy and tried to pass for a Christian child in his Polish home town of Izbica. He didn't wear a yellow star and tried to appear self-confident when he ran into uniformed people. But he was betrayed a number of times -- the Germans paid for information on the whereabouts of Jews -- and he always escaped with a lot of luck.

Denunciation Was Common

Denunciation was so common in Poland that there was a special term for paid informants "Szmalcowniki" (previously a term for a fence). In many cases, the denouncers knew their victims. And while the French, Dutch or Belgians could submit to the illusion that the Jews deported to the east from Paris, Rotterdam or Brussels would be all right in the end, the people in Eastern Europe learned through the grapevine what lay in store for the Jews in Auschwitz or Treblinka.

For sure, many counter-examples can easily be found. A senior officer in Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for the murder of more than 100,000 people, complained that the Ukrainians lacked "pronounced anti-Semitism based on racial or ideological reasons." The officer wrote that "there is a lack of leadership and of spiritual impetus for the pursuit of Jews."

Historian Feliks Tych estimates that some 125,000 Poles rescued Jews without being paid for their services. It's clear that the perpetrators always made up a small minority of their respective population. But the Germans relied on that minority. The SS, police and the army lacked the manpower to search the vast areas where the Nazi leadership planned to kill all people of Jewish origin. Across the 4,000 kilometers stretching from Brittany in western France to the Caucasus, the Nazis were bent on hunting down their victims, deporting them to extermination camps or to local murder sites, preventing escapes, digging mass graves and then carrying out their bloody handiwork.

Of course only Hitler and his entourage or the army could have stopped the Holocaust. But this doesn't invalidate the argument that without the foreign helpers, countless thousands or even millions of the approximately six million murdered Jews would have survived.

In the killing fields of Eastern Europe, there were up to 10 local helpers for every German policeman. The ratio is similar in the extermination camps. Not in Auschwitz, which was run almost entirely by Germans, but in Belzec (600,000 killed), Treblinka (900,000 deaths) or in Demjanjuk's Sobibor. There, a handful of SS members were assisted by some 120 Travniki men.

Without them, the Germans would never have managed to kill 250,000 Jews in Sobibor, says former prisoner Blatt. It was the Travniki who guarded the camp, drove all the Jews from the railway wagons and trucks after their arrival in the camp, and who beat them into the gas chambers.

Was the Holocaust a European Project?

Such a stupefying number of victims raises disturbing questions, and Berlin historian Götz Aly already started asking them a few years ago: was the so-called Final Solution in fact a "European project that cannot be explained solely by the special circumstances of German history"?

Many Foreign Perpetrators Acted Voluntarily

There is no final verdict yet on the European dimension of the Holocaust. The French and Italians started late -- when most of the perpetrators were already dead -- to deal comprehensively with this part of their history. Others, such as the Ukrainians and Lithuanians, are still dragging their feet; or they have only just begun, like Romania, Hungary and Poland.

Since 1945 the countries invaded and ravaged by Hitler's armies have seen themselves as victims -- which they doubtless were, with their vast numbers of dead. That makes it all the more painful to concede that many compatriots aided the German perpetrators.

In Latvia, local assistance was greater than anywhere else. According to the American historian Raul Hilberg, the Latvians had the highest proportion of Nazi helpers. The Danes are at the other end of the scale. When the deportation of Denmark's Jews was about to begin in 1943, large parts of the population helped Jews to escape to Sweden or hid them. Some 98 percent of Denmark's 7,500 Jews survived World War II. By contrast, only nine percent of the Dutch Jews survived.

Does the Holocaust represent the low point not only of German history, but of European history as well, as historian Aly argues?

There is evidence challenging the widely-held notion that foreign perpetrators were forced to help the Germans commit murder. It's true that local helpers risked their lives by refusing to assist the German occupiers. That applied to the police units and civil servants in occupied Western Europe as much as it did to newly-formed auxiliary police in the east. But it's also true that in many places people volunteered to serve the Germans or participated in crimes without being forced to.

The Holocaust in numbers.
DER SPIEGEL

The Holocaust in numbers.
There is also the often-repeated claim that the governments of countries allied with Hitler had no choice but to hand over Jewish citizens to the Germans. That's not true either. The Balkan countries in particular quickly understood how important the "solution to the Jewish Question" was to Hitler and his diplomats -- and they tried to extract the highest possible price for their complicity.

There's also reason to doubt the assumption that the helpers were pathological sadists. If that were true, they should be easy to identify, for example within the group of 50 Lithuanians who served under the command of SS Obersturmbannfü hrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Joachim Hamann. The men would drive around the villages up to five times a week to murder Jews, and ended up killing 60,000 people. It only took a few crates of Vodka to get them in the mood. In the evenings the troop would return to Kaunas and boast of their crimes in the mess hall.

None of the Lithuanians had been criminals before. They were "totally and utterly normal," believes historian Knut Stang. Almost everywhere after the war, the murderers returned to their ordinary lives as if nothing had happened. Demjanjuk too was a law-abiding citizen. In Cleveland, Ohio, where he lived, he was regarded as good colleague and a friendly neighbor.

It's the same as with the German perpetrators. There's no identifiable type of killer -- that's a particularly disturbing conclusion reached by historians. The murderers included Catholics and Protestants, hot-blooded southern Europeans and cool Balts, obsessive right-wing extremists or unfeeling bureaucrats, refined academics or violent rednecks.

Among them was Viktor Arajs (1910-1988), a learned lawyer from a Latvian farming family who commanded a unit of more than 1,000 men that murdered its way around Eastern Europe on behalf of the Nazis. Or the Romanian Generaru, son of a general and commander of the ghetto in Bersad in Ukraine, who had one of his victims tied to a motorbike and dragged to death.

Anti-Semitism Was Rife Across Europe

And anti-Semitism? In the 1930s, anti-Semitism grew across Europe because the upheaval after World War I and the global economic crisis had unsettled people. In Eastern Europe, the tendency to regard Jews as scapegoats and to try and exclude them from the job market was especially strong. In Hungary, Jews were banned from public office at the end of the 1930s and were forbidden to work in a large number of professions. Romania voluntarily adopted Nazi Germany's racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws. In Poland, many universities restricted access for Jewish students.

The extent of the hatred of Jews is also reflected in the fact that after the end of the war in 1945, mobs in Poland killed at least 600, and possibly even thousands of Holocaust survivors. However, excessive nationalism appears to have been the more important factor, at least in Eastern Europe. Many there dreamed of a nation state devoid of minorities. In this sense, the Jews were simply one of several groups that people wanted to rid themselves of. As World War II raged, the Croats didn't just murder Jews but also killed a far larger number of Serbs. Poles and Lithuanians killed each other. Romania liquidated Roma and Ukrainians.

It's hard to determine what motivated people to kill. Often nationalism or anti-Semitism were just excuses. During the war, no one had to go hungry in Germany, but living conditions in Eastern Europe were squalid. "For the Germans, 300 Jews meant 300 enemies of humanity. For the Lithuanians they meant 300 pairs of trousers and 300 pairs of boots," says one eyewitness. That was greed on a personal level. But it also featured on a collective level. In France, 96 percent of aryanized companies remained in French hands. The Hungarian government used the assets seized from Jews to extend its pension system and reduce inflation.

Jews Were Scapegoats for Soviet Crimes

Imaginary revenge also played a part. Pogroms in Poland by local people against Jews in 1941 were based on the assumption that the Jews formed some sort of base for Soviet rule, because communists of Jewish descent had for a time been over-represented in some areas of the Soviet bureaucracy. As a result, many people blamed Jews for the crimes committed during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941. Stalin's secret police the NKWD had actual and presumed opponents of the regime in the Baltic States, eastern Poland and Ukraine shot or deported to Gulags. As the German troops advanced, the Soviets left behind a deeply traumatized society between the Baltic and the Carpathians -- and many fresh mass graves.

Hitler hadn't worked out all the details of the Holocaust from the start, instead assuming he would be able to drive out all Jews from his sphere of influence after a quick victory over the Soviet Union. But the German advance into the Soviet Union started faltering in autumn 1941, which raised the problem of what to do with the people crammed into ghettos, especially in Poland. Many Gauleiter, SS officers and top administrators called for their territory to be made "judenfrei" ("free of Jews" -- which meant liquidating them. The construction of extermination camps began, first in Belzec, then Sobibor, then Treblinka.

Brief Holocaust Training Course

It was a gigantic killing program in which most of Poland's Jews, 1.75 million, were murdered. The SS preferred to recruit its helpers among Ukrainians or ethnic Germans in prisoner-of- war camps where Red Army soldiers like Demjanjuk faced the choice of killing for the Germans or starving to death. Later, increasing numbers of volunteers from western Ukraine and Galicia joined the unit. The men had to sign a declaration that they had never belonged to a communist group and had no Jewish ancestry. Then they were taken to Travniki in the district of Lublin in south-eastern Poland where they were trained for their deadly profession on the site of a former sugar factory. In mid-1943 some 3,700 men were stationed in Travniki. Training for the Holocaust took several weeks. The SS men showed the new recruits how to carry out raids and how to guard prisoners, often using live subjects. Then the unit would drive to a nearby town and beat Jewish residents out of their homes. Executions were carried out in a nearby forest, probably to make sure that the recruits were loyal.

At first the Travniki were used to guard property and to prevent supply depots from being plundered. Then their German masters sent them to clear ghettos in Lviv and Lublin, where they were remorseless in rounding up their Jewish victims. Finally they were put to work in eight-hour shifts in the extermination camp. "Everyone jumped in where he was needed," recalled one SS officer. Everything worked "like clockwork."

Historians estimate that a third of the Travniki absconded despite the punishment that entailed if they were caught. Some were executed for disobedience. And the others? Why didn't they try to get out of the killing machine? Why didn't Demjanjuk? Die he allow himself to be corrupted by the feeling of "having attained total power over others," as historian Pohl argues. Was it the prospect of loot? In Belzec and Sobibor the Travniki engaged in brisk bartering with the inhabitants of surrounding villages and paid with items they had seized from the prisoners.

Perhaps there was something else, something even more disturbing that many people have deep in their psyche: following orders from authorities even if they ran counter to their conscience. Total and utter obedience.

Germany Relied on Outside Help in the Monstrous Murder Project

Germany's troops didn't have the whole of continental Europe under the gun to the same extent. Outside the Third Reich and the occupied territories the Germans needed the help of foreign governments in their monstrous murder project -- in the west as well as the south and southeast of Europe. Their support was strongest among the Slovaks and Croats whom Hitler had given their own states. The Croatian Ustasha fascists set up their own concentration camps where Jews were killed "through typhoid, hunger, shooting, torture, drowning, stabbing and hammer blows to the head," says historian Hilberg. The majority of Croatian Jews were killed by Croats.

Anti-Semitism wasn't so deep-rooted in Italy and was ordered by the state out of consideration for the Germans. An Italian military commander in Mostar (in today's Bosnia) refused to chase Jews from their homes because he said such operations "weren't in keeping with the honor of the Italian army." That wasn't the only the only such case. But it's clear that Benito Mussolini's puppet government of 1943 eagerly took part in persecuting Jews. More than 9,000 Italian Jews were deported to their deaths.

Some 29,000 Jews from Belgium were murdered, many after being denounced in return for cash. Denunciations also happened in the Netherlands and France. Local authorities obediently paved the way for the deportation of Jews and later said they hadn't suspected what fate the Jews faced. That excuse was used by henchmen, opportunists and pen-pushing bureaucrats -- a category of perpetrator that was denied for a long time after the war in France as the country sought to build a myth that the entire French people had been involved in the heroic resistance.

France was divided into two parts. Hitler's troops had occupied three fifths of the country but the southern part of the country remained unoccupied until November 1942 and was ruled by a right-wing government based in Vichy that collaborated with the Germans.

How Many Were Betrayed?

The first major roundup of Jews took place in mid-July 1942 in occupied Paris when almost 13,000 Jews who had no French passport where taken from their homes by French policemen. At least two thirds of the Jews deported from France were foreigners. The remaining third consisted of naturalized French citizens and children born in France to stateless Jews. Police "repeatedly expressed the desire" that the children should be deported as well, one SS officer noted in July 1942. Almost all deportations ended in Auschwitz.

In total almost 76,000 Jews were deported from France and only 3 percent of them survived the Holocaust. It's unknown how many of them were betrayed by the local population. In the Netherlands there's a figure that gives an indication of the extent of denunciation. The country had an authority that hunted Jews on behalf of the Nazis and that listed the property of Jews who had gone into hiding or already been deported. The "Household goods registry office" paid 7.50 guilders for every Jew who could be located -- that's about €40 in today's money. Dutch journalist Ad van Liempt has analyzed historical records and estimated that between March and June 1943 alone, more than 6,800 Jews were tracked down in this way, and that at least 54 people had taken part in this hunt once or even several times. "Most of them made this their main occupation for months," he says.

The head of the unit was a car mechanic called Wim Henneicke who evidently had good connections in the Amsterdam underworld. He built up an extensive network of informants who told him where Jews were hiding. Some 100,000 Jews from the Netherlands were murdered in concentration camps, a far greater proportion than in Belgium or France.

However, in contrast with France, Dutch collaborators were quickly punished after the war. Some 16,000 were put on trial by 1951, and most of them were convicted.

Demjanjuk is a different category of perpetrator. He's not a collaborator or head-hunter, not a policeman of the sort that contributed to the Holocaust far away from the actual killing. He was at the scene, prosecutors say in their detailed arrest warrant.

The Terrible World of the Holocaust Helpers

In the coming days doctors will decide will decide whether and for how long Hitler's last henchman from Sobibor can be put on trial. The German government wants him to face trial. "We owe that to the victims of the Holocaust," says Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Those who suffered in the camps under Travniki men like Demjanjuk don't feel any desire for revenge when they talk about him today. American psychoanalyst Jack Terry, who was imprisoned in Flossenbürg concentration camp while Demjanjuk was a guard there, says it would suffice if Demjanjuk "had to sit in his cell for even just one day."

And Sobibor survivor Thomas Blatt says he "doesn't care if he has to go to prison, the trial is important to me. I want the truth."

Demjanjuk could provide information about Sobibor -- and about the terrible world of the Holocaust helpers.

Reporting by Georg Bönisch, Jan Friedmann, Cordula Meyer, Michael Sontheimer, Klaus Wiegrefe

---------------------------------------------------------------------------


Poles Raise Germany's Nazi Past as Economic Crisis Spreads East
By Katya Andrusz

May 20 (Bloomberg) -- Germany is trying to rewrite the history of its ties with Poland, which it occupied during World War II, Polish opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski said, straining ties between the two countries as Germany's economic slowdown spills over into its eastern neighbor.

"The Germans are trying to deny their guilt for the Holocaust," Kaczynski said today. "If things go on like this, Poland will be asked to pay compensation for German soldiers who died during the Warsaw Uprising," he added, referring to resistance against the Nazis in the Polish capital in 1944.

Kaczynski was commenting after the German periodical Der Spiegel said this week that Hitler's Holocaust could never have taken place without the support of local populations in occupied Europe. So many Poles denounced Jews to the Nazis that a special name was invented to describe them, the article said. Kaczynski's Law & Justice party appealed today to Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski to "intervene" on the article.

Germany's economy is undergoing its deepest recession since the war, hurting imports from its trading partners as investment stalls and companies cut jobs.

Relations between Poland and its western neighbor remained troubled even after Poland's accession to the European Union following the defeat of communism in 1989. Successive Polish governments have voiced suspicion of a German-Russian gas pipeline project intended to connect the two countries via the Baltic Sea and also blame Germany for not supporting bids by Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO soon.

Maciej Giertych, a Polish member of the European Parliament, was also cited yesterday by the daily Dziennik as saying in a pamphlet that Germany is using the EU to increase its power over other nations.

The Nazis called for the creation of a united Europe that foresaw "German domination in foreign, military, monetary and economic policy," Giertych said in the paper, entitled `Quo Vadis Europa?' published on his Web site. Germany has a greater influence on European Central Bank policy than other EU member state because its headquarters are in Frankfurt, he added.

************ ********* ********* ********* *********

Polish farmers collaborated with Nazis, says Der Speigel

thenews.pl

20.05.2009

This week's edition of Der Spiegel accuses Poles and other nations of having collaborated with Nazis during World War II.

Article about collaboration with Nazis, Der Spiegel


The accomplices: Hitler's European helpers in the Holocaust reads the headline of the front-page article, accompanied by a photo of Hitler.


The article names Polish farmers, among others, as accomplices of the Nazis during World War II.


The article tells the story of John Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian SS-officer, who was recently extradited from the US to Munich to stand trial for war crimes, including the death of at least 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor Nazi death camp in southeast Poland during WW II.


Demjanjuk served as a guard at the Treblinka, Sobibor and Majdanek death camps and was known as "Ivan the Terrible" by the prisoners because of his extraordinary violence.


Der Spiegel cites the case of Demjanjuk to prove that it was not only Germans who were responsible for mass murder during the Holocaust. If it had not been for Ukrainian gendarmes, Latvian auxiliary policeman, Romanian soldiers, Hungarian railway workers, Polish farmers, Dutch land register officials, French mayors, Norwegian ministers and Italian soldiers, the Nazis would not have been able to mastermind the Holocaust, claims the weekly.


Historian Dieter Pohl, quoted by Der Spiegel, estimates that more than 200,000 non-Germans were involved in war crimes, which almost equals the number of Germans and Austrians responsible for the Holocaust.


The weekly gives reasons why it thinks non-Germans collaborated with the Nazis, mentioning fear, perversion, anti-Semitism, and a willingness to help the presumed victors of the war.


Der Spiegel claims that while Italians and the French are aware of the scale of collaboration with the Nazis in their countries, Poles fail to admit it. According to the weekly, this is surprising, considering the fact that in Poland hatred for Jews is "deep rooted" and pogroms took place in Poland even after WW II was over.


Most countries, especially from Central and Eastern Europe, have to take the responsibility for the Holocaust instead of throwing the blame entirely on Germans, claims Der Spiegel.

Spiegel divides Polish politicians

"There is freedom of press in Germany, as there is in Poland," said Poland's Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, commenting on the article by Der Spiegel, accusing Poles of collaboration with the Nazis.

Unlike Sikorski, however, the head of the Law and Justice party (PiS) Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is outraged at Der Spiegel's claims. "Germans are trying to free themselves from taking responsibility for the major crimes of Holocaust," said Kaczynski and added that, to his horror, some circles in Poland support the opinion.

"If we allow Germans go in for this sort of practice, in the future we will have to pay damages to German soldiers who died during the Warsaw Uprising," said the head of PiS.

[Bonobo]

Personal Journey: From the Krakow ghetto, life goes on

By Ellen Tilman

The Philadelphia Inquirer

6/7/09



A memorial of the Krakow ghetto that the Nazis established. Large and small chairs are a stark reminder of emptiness.


A visit to a former pharmacy in Krakow, Poland, became a poignant moment of a trip with my husband to Eastern Europe.

I was accompanying him on a concert tour with the men's choir from Beth Sholom in Elkins Park, and visiting the Krakow ghetto, which the Nazis established in March 1941 in a city where the Jewish community dates from the 15th century.

The only non-Jewish resident there had been a pharmacist, Tadeusz Pankiewicz. Jews would come to the Eagle Pharmacy for medications and messages; some evidence suggests that the pharmacy was part of the Polish underground. In 1993, the building was turned into a National Memorial Museum and now contains pictures of the roundup and deportation of Krakow's Jews.

Outside is Plac Zgody, now called the Ghetto Heroes Square, and known as Umschlagplatz by the Nazis. It was where the Jews assembled before being transported to death camps. The Podgorze Ghetto, as it was known, was liquidated on March 13, 1943. The Jews able to work were sent to the Plaszow forced-labor camp (featured in the film Schindler's List), and the rest were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In 2005, a memorial was constructed at this site. It consists of 33 oversized and very large empty chairs and 37 smaller chairs. This stark permanent reminder of emptiness recalls the people who were never to return.

One letter in the pharmacy captured my attention. Dated May 1993, it was sent from New South Wales, Australia. It read:

"Enclosed please find a modest cheque for $250. Please accept it in the spirit in which it has been sent to you and consider it as a symbolic payment for the 3 pills of Panflavin, which you gave me in 1943 and for which I could not pay you then. I consider it a great honour to have had the privilege of sharing your warm hand. In fact, I have never forgotten your kindness for all those years. . . . "

It was signed Martin Baral.

Upon arriving home, I decided to learn more about the letter's author. I Googled his name and found a Web site of Baral family pictures. I discovered that Martin was a child while in the ghetto. He and his family escaped and spent the rest of the war hiding in Budapest. They moved to Israel and eventually settled in Australia. I sent an e-mail to the Webmaster asking if this Martin Baral was the same person whose letter was in the Eagle Pharmacy.

I quickly received a reply from Martin Baral's son. He said Martin did not return to Krakow for 50 years. Once there, he immediately looked up the pharmacist who had saved his life. He found Tadeusz destitute and in ill health. He emptied his pockets to help this noble man. Unfortunately, Tadeusz died later that year.

My emotional journey to Eastern Europe was not over until I returned home and was able to learn the fate of Martin Baral. Sometimes one must become an armchair traveler in order to complete an overseas journey.

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Poland and Ukraine resist restitution of heirless Holocaust property
By Cnaan Liphshiz
Ha'aretz
6/3/09

Just three weeks before an international conference on Holocaust assets, Jewish and Eastern European delegates are still debating whether countries like Poland and Ukraine should give back heirless property that belonged to murdered Jews.

While those countries have opposed restitution of property whose owners left behind no heirs, Jewish representatives of the Holocaust Era Assets Conference, scheduled to open in Prague on June 26, say such property should go to Jewish organizations in lieu of heirs.

"Until now, certain countries have resisted restitution for lost heirless property, citing laws that state that such property should go to their treasuries," said David Peleg, the newly appointed director of the World Jewish Organization for Property Return. "We don't agree with this assertion."
Advertisement

Peleg estimates the value of heirless Jewish property in Poland alone at billions of dollars.

"The reason there's so much unclaimed property is because the Nazis killed off whole families," he said.

The conference, which will bring together representatives of some 50 countries and 30 non-governmental organizations, is the first wide-scale forum involving assets from several countries to convene in over a decade, since the Washington Conference of 1998. Israeli officials say the conference may be the last opportunity to set principles that could lead to wide-scale compensation for lost Jewish property.

Asked whether he thought the recalcitrant Eastern European countries would eventually come around, Peleg would only say that "this is achievable." He said the U.S. State Department's involvement in the issue "has been very helpful."

Former Mossad official Reuven Merhav, who will head Israel's delegation to Prague, called the negotiations "intensive" and "delicate."

[Bonobo]

The article concerns Lithuania


In Other Words: Baltic Ghosts, Lithuania is investigating Jewish Holocaust survivors as war criminals
Pakistan Daily
14 June 2009

Lithuania is investigating Jewish Holocaust survivors as war criminals—and using their own memoirs as evidence against them.

Yitzhak Arad escaped to the forest at the age of 16, days before the Jews in his native Lithuanian village were massacred. He is proud he joined the Soviet partisans to fight the Nazis and their collaborators. For a Jew, just to survive the Holocaust was a victory, he says; to tell about it was an obligation. That's why Arad wrote his memoir, The Partisan: From the Valley of Death to Mt. Zion, published in English in 1979.

The book is a raw account of an orphaned teenager fighting the Nazis in desperate conditions after the murder of 40 members of his family. Arad describes his main activities with the Soviet partisans as blowing up German military trains, and he also details some of the grislier aspects of forest warfare. In one passage, he describes a "punitive action" against the village of Girdan, where two partisans had been killed: "We broke into the village from two directions, and the defenders fled after putting up feeble resistance. We took the residents out of several houses in the section of the village where our two comrades fell and burned down the houses. Never again were partisans fired on from their village."

"It was a cruel war," the 82-year-old Arad recalled recently. "We did the best we could to survive." He dedicated his memoir to those who fought with him and died along the way—his "heroic friends."

But when Lithuania's chief war crimes prosecutor, Rimvydas Valentukevicius, read Arad's book, nearly 30 years after its publication, he didn't see a hero. He saw a possible war criminal. And in September 2007, when the prosecutor's office publicly announced an investigation into Arad, it was clear The Partisan would be Exhibit A against him. More war crimes investigations of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors have followed, and in each case, memoirs are playing a central role.

These events are all the more shocking to those who remember that the country was once a sort of Jewish promised land. Lithuania's capital, Vilnius, was known as "the Jerusalem of the North." About one third of its population in the 1920s and 30s was Jewish. Yiddish was in the air then. Synagogues welcomed the faithful. Cafes overflowed with young Jewish painters, writers, and poets. Vilna, as the city is called in Yiddish, was the seat of intellectual, spiritual, and artistic life for Eastern European Jewry.

All of that is long gone, destroyed by the Nazi war machine with the active assistance, in a dark chapter for Lithuania, of many local collaborators. Vilnius today has only one synagogue. Lithuania's once flourishing community of more than 200,000 Jews—over 90 percent of whom were annihilated during the war—is now about 4,000. All that is left are the Holocaust survivors' stories, and now those, in the case of Arad and several others, are being used against them.

How a country that was once a center of Jewish life has now begun targeting the few remaining victims of history's worst crime is a story of foreign occupiers, former Jewish partisans, and modern-day Lithuanian ethnic nationalists. But more broadly, it is a story of books, memory, and a small country's ongoing struggle to make sense of its tangled, bloody historical narratives—a struggle facing all of Eastern Europe.

In a strange twist, this whole affair began with a good-faith effort to heal those deep, lingering ethnic divisions. In 1998, President Valdas Adamkus created a high-level commission to try to establish the "historical truth" about Lithuania's horrific occupations during the 20th century: first by the Soviets from 1940-41, then by the Nazis from 1941-44, followed again by the Soviets from 1944-90. The commission attracted a prestigious collection of international scholars, including Arad, who had gone on to become a brigadier general in the Israel Defense Forces and director of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust remembrance center. However, as the commission began excavating the layered narratives of guilt and suffering from this period, ethnic tensions flared.

The biggest obstacle for Lithuanians in confronting their history is the now well-established fact that hundreds, if not thousands, of Lithuanians voluntarily participated in the Holocaust. Many of the country's Jews were shot by local police and by a special unit of Lithuanian killers incorporated into the Nazi SS. Since its independence in 1990, only three Lithuanian collaborators have been charged with war crimes, and none was punished.

"The genocide of the Jews is the bloodiest page in the country's history," said Saulius Suziedelis, a Lithuanian historian and member of the presidential commission. But for many Lithuanians, he said, "just to mention that obvious fact turns them off because they want to talk about their own victimization. "

That victimization came during the brutal Soviet occupation. It was marked by the repression of Lithuanian culture, the deportation of many thousands of Lithuanians to Siberia, and the murder of Lithuanian independence fighters. The Soviets strictly controlled information and wrote Lithuania's history books. Today, as the country struggles to write its own narrative, most Lithuanians see the Soviets as the real villains of World War II. "The Spielberg view of the war is totally irrelevant to [Lithuanians] because that was not their experience," Suziedelis said. Instead, Lithuanian Jews, who allied with the Soviets to fight the Nazis, are today often regarded as deserving of punishment for Soviet crimes.

This is certainly the view of many Lithuanian "ethno-nationalists ," according to Antony Polonsky, professor of Holocaust studies at Brandeis University. In 2006, after the presidential commission published interim findings for a report that Polonsky called "a devastating account of the Lithuanian involvement in the mass murder of the Jews," these firebrands mobilized, he said. They took to the pink-tinted pages of the right-wing Respublika newspaper—Lithuania' s second-leading daily, which has been sanctioned for running anti-Semitic material. Their target was Yitzhak Arad. In an April 2006 article, Respublika published portions of his memoir and denounced him as a murderer and war criminal. The following month, Lithuanian prosecutors opened their investigation into Arad.

Some might dismiss this timing as coincidence. But not Rytas Narvydas, head of special investigations for the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, which investigates and memorializes past state crimes. He and the lead prosecutor, Valentukevicius, acknowledge that the Arad investigation started in response to the Respublika article. When asked whether anti-Semitic elements in Lithuania had manipulated the war crimes prosecutor's office, Narvydas conceded, "It does happen from time to time."

Lithuanian Foreign Affairs Secretary Oskaras Jusys criticized the prosecutor for getting pushed around by "outside" elements and said the investigations never should have been opened. "The mistake was made by the prosecutor's office from the very beginning," he said. "Their mistake was to go ahead without clear evidence."

The Arad case "created so much damage" for Lithuania, Jusys said, referring to the significant diplomatic pressure imposed by the United States, the European Union, Israel, and international Jewish groups. Lithuania's foreign minister and president appealed personally to the prosecutor to drop the Arad investigation, Jusys said, and in September of last year the case was closed. But in the meantime, prosecutors had opened investigations into several other Holocaust survivors. "We have been able to clean one mess," Jusys said in frustration, "and now other things are happening again."

The most public of the ongoing investigations involves Rachel Margolis, an 87-year-old former biology professor living in Israel who joined the Soviet partisans after escaping the Vilnius ghetto. Here, too, a book is at the heart of the case. In Margolis's memoir, published in 2005 in Polish (and later in Russian and German), she recounts a partisan raid on the village of Kaniukai on January 29, 1944. Facts about the raid are heavily disputed, including whether the villagers were acting in concert with the Nazis, but the war crimes prosecutor alleges that 46 people were murdered, 22 of them children.

According to Margolis's memoir, she did not take part in the Kaniukai raid, but her longtime friend and fellow partisan, Fania Brancovskaja, did. Now an 87-year-old librarian at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, Brancovskaja was attacked in print last year by the ultraright-wing nationalist newspaper Lietuvos Aidas. It labeled her a murderer, called on investigators to charge her with war crimes, and demanded they summon Margolis as a witness. And, last May, Lithuanian prosecutors publicly announced they were seeking to question the two women.

The heightened scrutiny of these investigations clearly frustrates Valentukevicius, the prosecutor, as does having to defend himself against accusations of anti-Semitism. When asked about it recently, he raised a copy of Lithuania's procedural code and said he's just doing his job—investigating all war crimes allegations as the law requires. But with dozens of potential cases of Lithuanian collaboration yet to be examined, the decision to focus on Jewish Soviet partisans has attracted suspicion.

So has the very public nature of the prosecutor's investigation. Faina Kukliansky, Brancovskaja' s attorney and an ex-prosecutor, complained that the former partisans are being tried by "innuendo" in the court of public opinion because prosecutors lack any evidence to try them in a court of law. "Everything has been done with a wink and a nod," she said.

Many critics agree and say it is no coincidence that nationalists sought out Margolis's memoir, a light seller at best. Prior to its publication, Margolis had detailed aspects of Lithuania's history that many would rather ignore. She helped publish works on the Holocaust, including the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a searing account of the heavy participation of Lithuanians in the murder of 50,000 to 60,000 Jews in the Ponary forest outside Vilnius. The 2005 English edition of the book, for which Margolis wrote the foreword, was edited by Yitzhak Arad.

Margolis has not returned to Lithuania since prosecutors came looking for her. Brancovskaja met with prosecutors last May to explain that she was recovering from an operation at the time of the Kaniukai raid and had not taken part in it. Margolis sent her old friend a letter backing up Brancovskaja' s account, and said her memoir should be regarded as literature, not historical fact. That may be true of all memoirs, but the distinction takes on a special significance in the context of the Holocaust, where survivors write to bear witness and deniers have long seized on small inconsistencies to discount the larger event.

For his part, Arad stands by the accuracy of his account as vehemently as he denies committing any war crimes. "I am proud of what I did during the wartime," he said. "If I would feel I did something not to do, I wouldn't write a memoir."

As during the Arad affair, the world is watching Lithuania's investigations of the elderly Jews who fought with the Soviet partisans, and Brancovskaja and the others will likely escape war crimes charges. But charges may never have been the point. The prosecutor's simple act of initiating the Arad investigation was enough to derail the half of the presidential commission researching Nazi crimes and Lithuanian complicity in them. It has not published anything since 2006. This may be the investigations' most enduring harm.

"You have to do what's right, not what's easy," said David Crane, a law professor at Syracuse University and founding chief prosecutor for the U.N. war crimes court in Sierra Leone. "Some people in society may not want these things found, and in the short term, that may seem like a solution. But in the long term, 25 years from now, they'll still be arguing about this."

Other consequences are more personal. The relationship between Brancovskaja and Margolis, a friendship that started before the war, has suffered. The two women have been divided by a 65-year-old memory and a passage in a book. "It is very painful what they are doing," Brancovskaja said, sitting in the Yiddish library surrounded by the many volumes she tends. But then she added, "I have lived through so much. This is not the worst."

[Bonobo]

Poland's Jewish heritage is about more than just deathBy Ruth Ellen Gruber
June 1, 2009

BIELSKO-BIALA, Poland (JTA) -- Outside the elegant theater in the city of Bielsko Biala in southern Poland, a billboard advertises an upcoming play. Stark letters spell out the title: "Zyd" -- Jew.

The lettering looks almost menacing, like scrawled graffiti, and I am a little taken aback.

But then I remember where I am.

This is Poland.

And the play, in fact, is an award-winning exploration of anti-Semitism and the power of stereotypes -- part of the endless continuing discussion here about the Jewish past, the Jewish present, and the long, complex and troubled relationship between Jews and Catholic Poles.

"There is no theme that Poles are more likely to discuss than Jews," the play's author, Artur Palyga told the Polish media. "It can be said that Judaism is our national passion."

"Zyd" deals with teachers in a provincial Polish town preparing for the visit of a former student, a Holocaust survivor who had attended their school before the Shoah, when Jews made up more than half the town's population.

Its portrayal of grassroots prejudice is graphic and sometimes grotesque. Indeed, the play came under fire in the right-wing press, and its premiere last year sparked protests.

Still, it won the main prize at a national festival of contemporary Polish drama for being "an honest, brave and theatrically precise attempt to settle accounts with the difficult Polish past."

The play is essentially about memory. In particular, it's about the various uses to which memory is put, and how memory differs in the minds of different people considering the same past.

These issues have suffused much of my own work over the past two decades, as I have researched Jewish heritage sites in East and Central Europe and chronicled the Jewish experience in places were few or no Jews live today.

How are Jews and Jewish heritage remembered? Which Jewish places and personalities are incorporated into the local consciousness? How do local people choose to portray an important part of the population that was savagely removed, almost overnight?

I found Bielko Biala permeated with examples of how perspective influences memory.

They ranged from indifferent disregard to the kitschy commercialization of a "Jewish-style" restaurant called Rabbi, to an earnest attempt to acknowledge the contribution of Jews to the city.

Bielsko Biala was officially established in 1951 with the amalgamation of two towns on opposite sides of the Biala River, which for centuries formed the border between the Austrian Empire and Poland, and then the regions of Silesia and Galicia.

Before 1939, the population was divided among ethnic Germans, Jews and Poles, and the city remains a stronghold of Protestantism. The Nazis absorbed it into the Reich, and almost all the Jews were killed. After World War II, Poland took it over and expelled the ethnic Germans.

Only a small Jewish community lives here today, but Jews played a major role in local history. In the 19th century, Jewish industrialists helped build the city into a major textile center, and a local Jewish architect, Karol Korn, designed key buildings that still define Bielsko Biala.

Korn's grandest building -- the Moorish-style great synagogue -- no longer exists. Erected in 1881, it dominated the city's main avenue until it was blown up by the Nazis in 1939.

Today, a contemporary art gallery occupies the spot; a small plaque on an outer wall commemorates the destroyed building but says nothing about the community it once served.

There's a puppet theatre now next door, where the Jewish culture center once stood, and a courthouse occupies the former Jewish community building across the street. Its elaborate decoration, I was told, represents the seven fruits mentioned in the Torah.

The Jewish cemetery, whose red-and-orange striped ceremonial hall is another Korn design, is well maintained and designated a cultural monument. Among the tombs is a poignant memorial to Jewish soldiers who fell fighting for the Austrians in World War I.

All these sites, and more, are noted on Jewish heritage itineraries included in local guidebooks available at the tourist information office and the city museum. On sale in both places I found reproductions of old postcards portraying the synagogue in all its glory as a major pre-war landmark.

I have no way of knowing who follows these itineraries or purchases the postcards. But, at least for tourists, they clearly acknowledge the Jewish contribution to the town and set Jewish history and heritage here within the general matrix.

This marks a welcome contrast to the "Jewish heritage package" offered by one of the city's leading hotels.

Far from exploring the rich historic contribution of Jews here, its itinerary is simply a round trip to Auschwitz, with "sightseeing" at the memorial museum there, then dinner back at the hotel's restaurant.

Bielsko Biala is only 25 miles from Auschwitz. I would certainly urge anyone visiting the town to take a day and go there. But promoting a tour of the Nazis' most notorious death camp as a Jewish heritage package banalizes Jewish heritage and the Holocaust, and both ignores and insults the memory of the generations of Jews who lived here (and often prospered).

In Bielsko Biala, Poles have begun to offer up a more nuanced take on history -- Jewish and Polish. Unfortunately, however, hotel tourist packages tend to offer only what their clients demand. Jews should take the lead in demanding more.

Even in places where few or no Jews live anymore, Jewish heritage must not be equated with its destruction. Nor, indeed, should the centuries-old Jewish experience be defined solely in terms of death.

[tufta]

Jun 16, 2009 21:48:50 GMT 1 Bonobo said:

Poland's Jewish heritage is about more than just death

It's a great day today:

at last you've noticed! ;D ;D

[Bonobo]

Jun 17, 2009 18:36:22 GMT 1 tufta said:

Jun 16, 2009 21:48:50 GMT 1 Bonobo said:

Poland's Jewish heritage is about more than just death

It's a great day today:
at last you've noticed! ;D ;D

I knew it from the beginning. I always (especially after you started Good POL-JEW Neighbourhood) wanted to draw your attention to the fact that the name of the thread is NEIGHBOURHOOD. That it was troubled is a fact of history, but it WAS neighbourhood with all its consequences....

See the photos from a site with English commentary:
www.eilatgordinlevitan.com/krakow/krakow.html







About Jews in Krakow
www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005169

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[Bonobo]

Poland's Jews Emerge From Shadows
Tad Taube
JTA Wire Service
6/18/09
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of communism in Poland and the rebirth of Jewish life. Today's Jewish revival is viable because Poland is a stable democracy for the first time in its history.

Today's society, based on law and respect for individual rights, provides an environment in which Poland's citizens can reconnect with a Jewish past that they may hardly know.
The generations born after 1989 no longer harbor fears that the practice of a Jewish religious tradition may bring danger, whether from fascism and the desperations of war or from communist repression. In fact, the emergence of energetic new Jewish institutions and cultural life and traditions promises that the New Poland will regain its visible and important position in the international Jewish community.
It is an incredible outcome following 50 years of Nazi and Soviet domination. But New Poland and the Jewish cultural revival taking place there must be understood against the backdrop of 1,000 years of vibrant Jewish civilization in Poland. This extensive period, often referred to as the "Jewish Golden Era," is the foundation of today's global Jewry:†More than 70 percent of the Jews in the United States and mo re than 60 percent of the Jews living in Israel come from families with roots in Poland.
As Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich has noted, "Where would Israel and American Jewry be without their Polish history?"

Rabbi Schudrich's question recognizes that Jews, above all others, live their history. Their sense of peoplehood supersedes differences in practices, and their commitment to Israel helps bind them together. It is continuity with the past and the promise of the future that Jews share with one another and with the world around them. Their deep and long heritage also serves as the underpinning of Judeo-Christian Western culture. Where would Western civilization be without Judaism and Jewish history?

Indeed, the Western view embodies a Judeo-Christian perspective that Western culture owes much of its foundations to that Jewish Golden Era. The Jewish millennium in Poland began in the 11th century, when European Jews started moving eastward into Poland and its neighboring states. Across shifting political allegiances and boundaries, these Jewish pioneers held a single religious and cultural identity. The communities they built performed a critical role in the development of Eastern Europe, with Poland at its center.

In the 16th century, the culture and life of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews was co-extant with the Polish empire, which at its height extended from the Baltic in the north through parts of Russia and Ukraine in the east and south into the Balkans.
The emergence of Yiddish literature, centers of rabbinic learning, and new Judaic practices during the 17th and 18th centuries reflected a richness of traditional culture in a changing, more secular world. Migration west, to northern Europe and to the Americas during the 19th and early 20th centuries, was matched by a new Jewish urbanism and an emerging Jewish middle class throughout central Europe. On the eve of World War II, one in seven Warsaw inhabitants was Jewish.
After the devastation of the Holocaust, few could imagine that again there would be functioning synagogues in eight Polish cities, Jewish day schools and academic programs with enrollments in the thousands, and community centers where Jews of all ages share companionship and deepen their understanding of Judaism.
Who could have predicted during the long years of Soviet domination and precarious Jewish life that Poland would ever become a democracy with Jewish legislators in Parliament, Jewish cabinet members and Jewish politicians active in towns across the land? Did anyone foresee that Poland and Israel would become important trading partners and strategic allies, or that Israeli visitors would be commonplace in Polish cities?
Moreover, Jewish cultural life is stronger for the will ingness of non-Jewish Poles to support their fellow citizens in the exploration and celebration of a long-shared culture. Education in democratic norms has made both Poland's government and its people increasingly intolerant of anti-Semitism. Growing tolerance and an awareness of Jewish participation and integration in civil society have opened Polish eyes to their newly rediscovered culture of Judaism.
Witness, for example, the Jewish Culture Festival held in Krakow each summer. This national and international celebration of Jewish culture attracts nearly 20,000 non-Jewish and Jewish participants from Poland, Europe, the United States and Israel.
Through support of events like this, with all their positive implications, the Taube Foundation joins with other international Jewish organizations and individuals to renew our shared commitment to strengthen the institutional life of Polish Jewry and broaden the world's understanding of Jewish peoplehood as viewed through the historical role of Polish Jews.
Tad Taube is the chairman of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, and honorary consul for the Republic of Poland. This summer, the foundation will celebrate a new sister-city relationship between Krakow and San Francisco. This story courtesy the JTA Wire Service, www.jta. org .

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Construction set for Polish Jewry museum
June 18, 2009

ROME (JTA) -- Construction on the long-planned Museum of the History of Polish Jews is set to begin in Warsaw.
Poland's culture minister, Warsaw's mayor and other officials signed a contract Wednesday authorizing Poland's largest construction engineering company, Polimex-Mostostal, to begin work on the multimillion- dollar project on June 30.
Polimex-Mostostal chairman Konrad Jasko said the building, a glass-walled structure designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamaki, would be completed in 33 months.
The museum will be located in the heart of what was the World War II Warsaw Ghetto, facing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument that was erected there in 1948.
In a statement released Thursday, the museum said that a gala ceremony will mark the start of construction. A group of 100 American cantors on a concert tour of Poland are scheduled to perform.
Meanwhile, the future museum launched a Virtual Shtetl Web site Tuesday to help build the museum's collection, the French news agency AFP reported.
The site contains information about 800 Polish cities and towns that were home to Jewish shtetls before the Holocaust. Users can add information and eyewitness testimony to the site.

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New anti-Semitic incidents in Poland
by: Gigi Luz 17/Jun/2009

WARSAW (EJP)---A synagogue in the Polish city of Wroclaw was desecrated last weekend by unknown people who painted a swastika, the SS symbol as well as the inscription "Jude Raus" (Jews out).
The incident at The White Stork Synagogue ('Synagoga Pod Bialym Bocianem') was reported to the local police.
Similar graffiti were also found at a nearby Jewish Information Center which had already been targeted earlier this year by people who painted the words "Free Palestinien" in English on the house.
Cleaning the graffiti will cost the Wroclaw municipality about 1500 euros (2080 dollars).
On Tuesday, an anti-Semitic inscription in Polish was also found on the entrance sign of the Gdansk-Chelm Jewish cemetery. The inscription translates to "Jews to the oven, for this is your place".

The Chelm cemetery is one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe, dating back to 1694. It was recently renovated.

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Remembering Poland's Jewish heritage
thenews.pl
15.06.2009

A Festival of Jewish Culture is being held in the north east town of Bia³ystok.

Held under the motto Zachor (`Remember!' in Hebrew), the event is a tribute to Jewish artists whose roots are in eastern Poland. The programme includes exhibitions Israel – yesterday and today and paintings by the Danish artist Hans Oldau Krull, theatre performances, films and an open-air concert featuring ensembles from Poland (Di Gallitzyaner Klermorim) and Israel (Meleh-Maim) as well as American musicians (Yael Strom, Elizabeth Schwartz and Peter Stan).

The Festival's special guest is Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, who after the liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Bia³ystok was a prisoner of the Nazi German death camp of Auschwitz. She remained in the camp from January 1944 until 1945, when retreating Nazis evacuated it and was then transferred to Ravensbruck, Germany, and finally liberated by the Allied forces.

Nomberg-Przytyk is the author of two books of reminiscences: Samson's Column and Auschwitz. True Tales From a Grotesque Land (both translated into English).

In its review of the latter, the New York Times write: `Mrs. Nomberg-Przytyk' s book doesn't provide new factual information about Auschwitz, but her unusual attention to the details of human character that emerged under the cruel and extreme conditions of the death camp sets `Auschwitz'' apart from the many important and moving books written by other survivors.

[Bonobo]

Jewish-born Polish priest dreams of Aliyah
By Donald Snyder
The Forward
6/21/09

When Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel applied to immigrate to Israel as a Jew under the Law of Return last October, Israeli authorities delayed responding to his request for months.

Perhaps it was the priest's white-band collar around his neck that had something to do with this.

Yet ultimately, Israel's Interior Ministry did issue the 66-year-old Polish cleric, scholar and professor at Catholic University of Lublin a two-year residency visa. It was, it seems, an imperfect compromise with a priest who insists: "I am Jewish. And my mother and father were Jewish. I feel Jewish."

Speaking through an interpreter during a phone interview, he said, "Going to Israel would be the return of the Jewish child who took the long way home."

Born in 1943 in Nazi-occupied Poland, Weksler-Waszkinel did not know that he was Jewish until he was 35 years old, 12 years after he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. Nor did he know that his birth parents, both ardent Zionists, were murdered by the Nazis after entrusting his care to a Polish Catholic family to save his life. It took him 14 years after he learned he was Jewish to find his real name and the names of his parents. "So in a way, it took me 14 years to be born," the priest said.

"My mother?s dreams went up in the flames of Sobibor," he explained, referring to the death camp in Poland where some 260,000 Jews were murdered.

Weksler-Waszkinel is not the only one who grapples with a dual identity. Mark Shraberman, chief archivist at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and research institute, said in an interview in Jerusalem that he receives many letters from Poles who are discovering that they are of Jewish origin. "They find out the truth when one of their parents is dying," Shraberman said. He added that he recently received a letter from another Polish priest in a small town who just found out that he is Jewish.

But Weksler-Waszkinel, in seeking to rediscover his lost identity by immigrating to Israel, is taking his search for that identity further than most. Though he sought originally to become recognized by the government as a Jew under the Law of Return ? the law that grants any Jew immediate Israeli citizenship ? he pronounced himself "very satisfied" with his two-year visa.

Weksler-Waszkinel says that he plans to immerse himself in Jewish life. "I don?t know what that means; after all, I am a Catholic priest. But I will find out," he said. "I thought, perhaps, I could be a volunteer at Yad Vashem as someone who survived the Shoah and who participates in the Christian-Jewish dialogue, which is so important." He says that the first thing he will do is learn Hebrew.

Weksler-Waszkinel was born in the town of Stare Swjeciary - which was then in Poland but is now known as Svencionys in Lithuania - four years after the Nazi invasion of Poland started World War II. His mother, Batia Weksler, gave him as an infant to a Christian woman to save his life.

Emilia Waszkinel, his Christian mother, initially hesitated to take him because she and her husband, Piotr, risked death for hiding a Jew. Emilia was reportedly convinced to accept the baby in response to his Jewish mother?s plea: "Save my child, a Jewish child, and in the name of the Jesus that you believe in, he will grow up to become a priest."

The couple raised the boy as their own child in Eastern Poland, where they lived after the war, without telling him that he was Jewish. The boy attended secular schools.

Perhaps because of this, his parents were shocked when, at the age of 17, Weksler-Waszkinel told them he planned to become a priest. His father tried to discourage him, saying he should instead become a doctor, and cried uncontrollably when visiting his son at the seminary. Weksler-Waszkinel felt enormous guilt when his father died shortly after this visit. Briefly, he considered ending his studies.

Even before discovering his Jewish background, Weksler-Waszkinel had harbored doubts about his true identity. The young man had been aware of the fact that he did not have the pronounced Slavic features of his parents. He had been called "a Jew bastard" by town drunks, so he asked his mother if he was Jewish. She assured him that he was Catholic. When he was 35, long after his ordination, he again inquired about his identity, and Emilia, weeping, told him about his Jewish mother.

Emilia told Weksler-Waszkinel that he had wonderful parents who were murdered by the Germans in the Holocaust and that she had saved his life.

"My head spun, and I asked her why she hid this from me," the shocked priest wrote in a 1994 essay. "My heart was pounding as I thought that I had become a priest, something my mother said I would become."

The priest had fulfilled the prophecy of his Jewish mother, a woman he had never known.

He felt he needed to confide in someone, so he wrote to Karol Wojtyla, who by then was Pope John Paul II but who had been Weksler-Waszkinel' s professor in Lublin. The pontiff responded, "My beloved brother, I pray so that you can rediscover your roots."

Weksler-Waszkinel eventually traveled to Israel. There he met his Jewish father's brother, who showed him a photograph of his parents. He realized that he resembled them. "My mother?s eyes are in me, my father?s mouth and the fears and tears of my brother," he wrote in the 1994 essay.

Weksler-Waskinel? s uncle embraced him as a long-lost relative, but said that he could not understand how his nephew could be a priest and represent the church that has persecuted Jews for 2,000 years. The priest responded: "To really belong to Jesus means to love Jews. Jesus never betrayed me, and I will not betray him."

Nevertheless, Weksler-Waskinel grapples with his tangled identity.

"His double identity is a problem for him that he struggles with all the time," said Zbigniew Nosowski, a friend of the priest and editor of Weiz, a Polish-Catholic intellectual magazine in Krakow.

According to Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, "Father Waskinel is incredibly honest in saying that he is Jewish, and he is also honest in not wanting to turn his back on the church."

Some close friends grasp the enormity of the priest's conflict. "He has an impossible task to find a place for himself," said Stanislaw Krajewski who is a friend of the priest and teaches mathematics at the University of Warsaw. Krajewski said the 66-year-old priest has been "an uncomfortable presence" to some Jews and Christians because of his dual religious identity.

"He is very Jewish and very Christian," said Hanna Krall, a prominent Polish journalist and novelist.

Weksler-Waszkinel says Poland will always be his fatherland and Israel will be his homeland.

The priest has devoted most of his academic life to writing about Jewish-Christian relations. He praises the reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council, calling them "a radical change, a revolution."

He is working to further improve ties between Christians and Jews, inspired by Pope John Paul II?s call for greater Catholic respect and understanding for Jews. When asked how Weksler-Waszkinel promotes ecumenism, Schudrich said, "When he gets up in the morning and breathes... his life?s message is that strong."

According to a number of Polish intellectuals, Weksler-Waszkinel? s story brings Jews and Christians closer. "When he tells his personal story, he has tears in his eyes," Krajewski said. "And audiences cry with him. It is a very sad story."

Weksler-Waszkinel' s speeches to churchgoers and lay people point to the Jewish roots of Christianity and the enormous gap dividing the two faiths. He often criticizes the Catholic Church for not closing the gap between Jews and Christians. In our interview, he told me that Pope John Paul once said, "The New Testament finds its roots in the Old Testament," and that what is significant is the word "finds." Weksler-Waszkinel added, "Those roots have always been there, according to Pope John Paul, but for 19 centuries they were forgotten, and a Jew was considered the worst enemy."

Weksler-Waszkinel' s application to go to Israel as a Jew under the Law of Return is clearly heartfelt. It also has a practical aspect. He said that getting Israeli citizenship would entitle him to benefits he needs to supplement his small pension of $900 a month. Under the two-year visa arrangement he has now accepted, those benefits will not be available. The priest is determined to immigrate, nevertheless, even with little money and just a two-year visa.

Experts doubt that the Ministry of the Interior, controlled by the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, would have granted Weksler-Waszkinel citizenship under the Law of Return.

In 1962, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in a 4-1 decision against Jewish-born Oswald Rufeisen, a Carmelite monk known as Brother Daniel, who sought Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. This was the first narrowing of the statute, which was basic to Israel?s identity from its founding in the wake of the Holocaust. Judge Haim Cohen, the single dissenter, noted that the Nazis sought to kill all those born Jewish, irrespective of their conversion from or rejection of Judaism. But the court ruled that the Law of Return did not apply to Jews who had embraced another religion.

Weksler-Waszkinel' s case for automatic Israeli citizenship seems to be stronger than that of Rufeisen in one respect: He could argue that he never did, in fact, "embrace" another religion. Unlike the Polish-born Carmelite monk, who converted as an adult to Catholicism after finding shelter from the Nazis in a convent, Weksler-Waszkinel never consciously chose to leave Judaism for another faith. He argues that he considers himself a Jew who was raised from infancy as a Catholic without being informed of his true identity.

"The court fight would be lengthy and complicated, and he decided to avoid it," said Schudrich, who is helping the priest relocate to Israel.

"He wants to be in a place where he can see a full, rich Jewish life," Schudrich said of Weksler-Waszkinel' s need to fulfill his dream to live in Israel. "He has this inner longing to be in a place that is surrounded by the culture of his ancestors."

__________________________________________________


Israel artist builds mock kibbutz in heart of Polish capital
6/22/09

WARSAW (AFP) — Construction of a mock Israeli kibbutz complete with fencing and watchtower, began Monday in the heart of the Polish capital Warsaw.

The unprecedented art installation is the brainchild of Israeli video artist Yael Bartana and is to serve as the set of the second in her trilogy of films focused on the symbolic revival of Jewish life in Poland after the Holocaust.

While Bartana usually focuses on Israeli-Palestinian issues, the current project uses imagery from the Middle East to address the history of Polish Jews.

"In this film we are concentrating on the moment when actually the Jews are coming actually back to Poland," Bartana told AFP Monday on the site of the kibbutz set.

Kibbutz are collective communities based on agriculture, originally built by Jewish settlers from Europe in Palestine in the early 20th century, well before the May 1948 declaration of independence by the modern-day state of Israel.

Bartana's grandparents, as Jewish immigrants to Palestine prior to World War II, had no direct experience of the Holocaust. But the idea for the kibbutz installation arose after a visit to Poland in 2006.

"I went to different cities and communities where Jews used to live and I came up with the idea that it would be really fantastic to revive the Jewish spirit again," she told AFP.

"What does it bring to the collective memory? What does it mean for the Israelis, what does it mean for Jews, what does it mean to the Poles? And I wanted to kind of cross over emotional elements."

The symbolic kibbutz is being built in the heart of the Polish capital in a district which was turned into the infamous Warsaw Ghetto by Poland's Nazi German occupiers during the Second World War.

The site is next to to the imposing monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943), the first and only armed Jewish revolt against the Nazis in all of occupied Europe during World War II.

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, chronicling nearly the nearly 1,000-year-long history of Jewish life in Poland prior to the Holocaust, is due to open on the site within three years.

Poland was home to Europe's largest Jewish community prior to World War II totalling some 3.5 million people.

Historians agree that some six million Polish citizens perished during WWII, half of them Jewish.

Today Poland's entire Jewish community numbers between 3,500 and 15,000 out of an overwhelming Roman Catholic population of 38 million.

But experts say it is all but impossible to say how many Poles have some Jewish ancestry.

[valpomike]

What do most people on the streets, think of the Jewish?


Mike

[valpomike]

The streets of Poland, that is, please.


Mike

[Bonobo]

Jul 3, 2009 21:39:22 GMT 1 valpomike said:

What do most people on the streets, think of the Jewish?
Mike

If both Jews and Poles own the street, the thinking is positive.
When Poles own the street while Jews own houses in the street, the thinking is negative, unfortunately.

[Bonobo]

Piecing together Jewish pasts in Poland
By Rachel Pomerance
July 13, 2009

WARSAW (JTA) -- Like many children of Jews who grew up in Poland after World War II, Anna Makowska-Kwapisiewi cz was sheltered from her Jewish provenance for much of her life.

There were clues, of course. Her exotic dark eyes and hair occasionally drew remarks about her "Gypsy" or "Spanish" beauty. Her grandmother would constantly teach her the catechism so she could recite it "when they return." And her grandfather told stories of hiding in the forest.

But it wasn't until she repeated an anti-Semitic joke she heard in high school that her mother broke down and confessed that her father was, in fact, a Jew.

The news set Makowska-Kwapisiewi cz on a path of discovery from Jewish study to ritual observance. Now she is a Jewish educator building a Jewish home and life -- complete with plans for Jewish schooling for her year-old daughter, Nina.

Makowska-Kwapisiewi cz is part of a Jewish awakening taking place in Poland.

Like a country of amnesiacs waking up from the trauma of Nazism followed by the silence and historical whitewashing of communism, Poles are now trying to piece together their collective memory. In doing so they are discovering, often in quite personal ways, their Jewish roots.

"We are so much interconnected, " the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, told JTA at a dinner in Warsaw. "I feel that part of my heritage is Jewish tradition," he said, explaining that his grandmother lived in Vilnus, a heavily Jewish city, and she knew about Jewish dishes like cholent, the Sabbath stew.

If a Pole says "he has not one even drop of Jewish blood in this body," then he is "not right," Kwasniewski said.

While for Poles this awakening is about discovering their Jewish roots, for Jews worldwide it's about discovering their Polish Jewish roots.

Karen Underhill, a doctoral student in Polish literature at the University of Chicago who is a former bookstore owner in Krakow, says Jews visiting Poland used to come by her shop seeking information about their heritage. Poland, she says, has become a place for Jews to rediscover their Jewish roots, particularly those who do not have a strong connection to contemporary Jewish communal life or Israel.

This month, American Jewish visitor Jeff Wachtel said he saw his own family when visiting the Galicia Jewish museum, which houses an exhibit of Mayer Kirshenblatt' s paintings of his boyhood Polish town.

"I had no sense of what their life was like," said Wachtel, a senior assistant to the president of Stanford University. But when he heard Kirshenblatt talk of his Poland, it reminded him of his own family.

"When I was listening to it, I was sure that that's where my mother grew up," Wachtel said. "For the first time, part of my past became very understood in my mind."

Three-quarters of American Jews trace their roots to Greater Poland -- including Poland and parts of Ukraine, Austria and Hungary -- according to Tad Taube, the San Francisco-based philanthropist who is funding a variety of efforts to connect American Jews to their Polish Jewish heritage.

Taube, a Krakow native, argues that "worship" of the Holocaust has prompted Jews to foresake the 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland that preceded it, even though it was a "golden period" of Jewish life that gave rise to important religious and cultural development. Ashkenazi Judaism, in fact, was codified in Warsaw.

Approximately 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland before the war; more than 90 percent disappeared in the Holocaust.

Despite continuing anti-Semitism after the war, some Jews stayed in Poland. Their descendants, typically of mixed heritage, include newly Jewish-identified Poles who are now free to reconnect to their Jewish roots thanks to democracy replacing communism.

As Poles uncover their Jewish pasts, a small Jewish community is re-emerging here. Michael Schudrich, the New York-bred chief rabbi of Poland, says there are about 30,000 Jews in Poland.

Many newly identified Jews find their way to Jewish institutions and groups like Czulent, a young Jewish association whose name references not only the traditional Shabbat stew but also the "melting pot" of its members' mixed heritage.

Taube Philanthropies is trying to reattach the Jewish-Polish umbilical cord with its projects restoring Jewish pride in Poland. They include a Museum of the History of Polish Jews, slated to open in 2011 at the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new Jewish community center in Krakow and Jewish heritage tours to reconnect American Jews with their lost Polish Jewish heritage.

Taube also supports the Krakow Jewish Festival, which held its 19th annual event this month, showcasing a wide range of Jewish culture, from classes in Jewish cooking to Yiddish singing and genealogy research. Like so many Jewish projects in Poland, the festival was organized by many non-Jews and drew nearly 30,000 people, according to festival organizers. Most were not Jewish.

In a country that still suffers from some anti-Semitism, the festival creates a safe space for Jews to express their Jewishness, local community leaders said.

That's the ultimate goal, said Jonathan Ornstein, director of Krakow's new Jewish Community Center.

"Not the Jewish revival," Ornstein said of Polish interest in things Jewish, "but the Jewish, Jewish revival."

[Bonobo]

More Philo-Semitism Than Anti-Semitism In Polish History'
Elliot Resnick
The Jewish Press
Wednesday, July 22 2009

Most people do not generally think of Poland as a historically friendly country to Jews. However, in 1794 a cavalry unit of 500 Jews - the first wholly Jewish fighting force since Bar Kochba's army - joined the Poles under the leadership of Thaddeus Kosciuszko in an uprising against Russia.

As recounted in a recently published biography, Kosciuszko - an Enlightenment man who believed in the equality of all men - was delighted when Jews offered to form a cavalry division, which became known as the "bearded" army because of its soldiers' appearance.

Twenty years earlier in 1776, Kosciuszko's liberal ideas also inspired him to travel to America. With his military and engineering background, Kosciuszko helped design West Point (it was Kosciuszko's plans that Benedict Arnold tried to sell to the British) and devised the battle plan that led to the colonies' victory at the Battle of Saratoga, a turning point in the Revolutionary War.

Among Kosciuszko's American friends were George Washington (who spelled Kosciuszko's name 11 different ways in his personal correspondence) , Thomas Jefferson, (who called Kosciuszko "the purest son of liberty I have ever known"), Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alex Storozynski recently spoke to The Jewish Press about his new book, The Peasant Prince: Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Age of Revolution.

The Jewish Press: What inspired Jews to join the Poles' uprising against Russia?

Storozynski: Kosciuszko reached out to them. When he was sworn in as commander in chief, he mentioned the different ethnic groups that he wanted to be part of his uprising. And the first group he mentioned was the Jews.

In Krakow, he spoke to Rabbi David Hirsch Lewi and said, "Listen, I'm serious, this is a revolution for everyone, including the Jews." At first the Jews didn't know what to make of him, but then they realized that he was for real and that he really was a prince of tolerance who stood up for everyone. And so they started helping.

First they helped with funds, and then with soldiers. In some parts of Poland, as many as 20 percent of Kosciuszko's army was Jewish. Ambassadors from Austria and Sweden wrote to their respective kings that this is an unusual revolution because everyone is taking part - even the Jews.

How did the Jewish cavalry unit come about?

A merchant named Berek Joselewicz, whose primary business was selling horses, approached Kosciuszko and said, "How about if I start a cavalry?"

Kosciuszko was thrilled at the idea. In an article for the Government Gazette, Kosciuszko wrote: "Fearless Jesse, Abner, Joab and others terrified their enemies. Even Hebrew women set an example of courage and prowess for our era. Brave Deborah killed an enemy leader with her own hands. Thoughtful heroine, Judith, beheaded the chief of invaders."

Then Joselewicz wrote an article for the Government Gazette as well, in which he writes, "Listen, children of the tribes of Israel! Ye, who have in their heart implanted the image of God Almighty, all that are willing to help in the struggle for the fatherland, we people should act, the time has come to consecrate all of our strength .

"Awaken then like lions and leopards; with the help of God we'll swallow these conceited great ones."

What happened to this cavalry division?

Unfortunately Kosciuszko's forces and the Jewish cavalry were wiped out because they were attacked by the Russians, Prussians and Austrians all at once.

Most Jews usually think of Poland as being historically anti-Semitic, especially when one thinks about the 1930s and '40s. Were matters better in 1794 or is this conventional wisdom simply false?

I think the situation in 1794 was much better. But throughout Polish history, although there was anti-Semitism, there was more philo-Semitism than anti-Semitism. If you look at Yad Vashem you'll see how many Poles risked their lives even in the darkest and most horrible chapter of history in Poland .

We also have to remember that Jews were not dragged to Poland on slave ships. They went there of their own free will. They created their own villages and kahals, and lived for the most part in peace for centuries. Their culture and religion flourished; Chassidism started in Poland.

Also, if you take a look at Polish history, every time Poland had freedom to elect its own leaders, the leaders chosen were extremely friendly to the Jews: Kosciuszko, Jan Sobieski, Jozef Pilsudski. The Jews called Pilsudski Uncle Joe; he had a very good relationship with the Jews and he is the most popular Pole of the 20th century, even more popular than Pope John Paul II - who himself was very friendly to the Jews.

So yes, there was anti-Semitism. But philo-Semitism was just as great - if not greater.

How about Jews who were murdered by Poles after the Holocaust when they came back to claim their homes, or the pogrom of Kielce in 1946, which left 40 Jews dead?

Those were horrible, horrible events. But I think those were exceptions, not the rule. Also, let's not forget that the Poles involved in the Kielce pogrom were prosecuted and received the death penalty. It was not tolerated.

How would you describe Polish-Jewish relations today?

The relationship between Poland and Israel today is very good. When Israel was attacked three summers ago, the Poles sent troops for the buffer zone.

Also, the current president of Poland has set aside land in the center of Warsaw and given millions of dollars for the creation of a Jewish museum. It will show the Holocaust, but it will also show the thousand-year history of Poland and what role Jews played in that history.

Back to Kosciuszko: If he played such a significant role in the American Revolution, how come he's virtually unknown in this country?

Because no one can pronounce the name and because he was this humble guy who didn't seek the limelight. Unfortunately too often our leaders make the whole battle about themselves. He didn't.

[Bonobo]

BBC NEWS
Long quest for Polish restitution

During the last century Poland endured both Nazi and Communist totalitarianism with atrocities on a colossal scale. Many decades later there are still those who remain determined to see compensation paid and in Krakow Nick Higham has been following a baroness's quest for justice.

Eugeniusz Waniek

Eugeniusz Waniek looked after the silver cutlery for 66 years

In September 1942 the Nazis arrived in the village of Ustrzyki Dolne in south-east Poland.

Eugeniusz Waniek remembered the day vividly. The Nazis rounded up all the Jews and ordered them to hand over their valuables. He saw two women who refused shot in the street.

Then his Jewish neighbour Hella came and thrust a small bundle into his hand. It contained some silver cutlery, wrapped up in a linen tablecloth.

Mr Waniek had grown up with Hella and her sister and brothers. They were the children of a prosperous local man, Moshe Fraenkel, who owned an oil refinery.

Mr Waniek went on to become an art teacher in Krakow, but in 1939, he caught pneumonia and went home to Ustrzyki to convalesce.

He was still there when the Nazi-Soviet pact divided Poland into two occupied zones. Eugeniusz and his wife found themselves trapped in their village.

After Hella was taken away, Eugeniusz wrapped her silver in newspaper and buried it in the garden. And there it stayed for the next three years.

And in 1946, when he returned to Krakow, the silver went too.

Symbolic return

That might have been the end of the story but last year, a neighbour read in the newspaper about an English Baroness, Ruth Deech, who was threatening to sue the Polish government to recover properties seized from her family - the Fraenkels - in a place called Ustrzyki Dolne.
Baroness Deech

Baroness Deech's believes proposed restitution does not go far enough

Last September Baroness Deech paid a visit to Eugeniusz Waniek, now aged 101. Hella Fraenkel had been her aunt.

Mr Waniek told his story and the silver and the linen tablecloth were handed over.

Photographs taken at the time show him sitting, frail and shrunken, in an armchair in his apartment. An audio recording captures his voice, quavering with age and emotion.

Eugeniusz Waniek has since died, but earlier this month Baroness Deech went back to Krakow to collect the cutlery from the flat of a friend, the distinguished historian Norman Davis.

There were 16 items in all, mostly tiny knives and forks for eating cakes or fruit, plus a larger two-pronged fork and the detached handle of a knife.

They were, she said, the only thing she had ever touched which had also been touched by those she had lost, and so they had immense symbolic value.

But Baroness Deech's campaign to recover her family's other belongings - or secure compensation for their loss - looks less likely to have a happy outcome.

Draft laws

Poland still has no law covering the restitution of private property seized by the Nazis or nationalised by the communists.

Historian Norman Davies says tens of millions of people in Poland were killed, deported, displaced or resettled during those eras, and millions lost their property.

They include his own wife Maria. Her parents abandoned their home in what is now part of Ukraine in 1944, when they fled before the advancing Red Army.

They ended up in a small town outside Krakow where they took shelter in an empty house and where Maria was born. That house, she says, may well have belonged to Jews deported in the Holocaust.

Norman Davies says the sheer scale of the problem and the cost of compensation - estimated a year ago at more than $8bn (£5bn) - has terrified successive Polish governments.

Several draft restitution laws have been published. None has been enacted. What is more, many younger Poles see no reason why their taxes should pay for the errors of previous generations.

But that argument does not wash with Baroness Deech.

To argue that all Poles were victims does not absolve the country of responsibilities others have embraced, she says.

If Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania and many other countries can offer restitution, why not Poland? No-one, she says, is asking for full compensation.

The latest draft law offers 20% of the value of an item over 15 years.

Twenty per cent, she says, may be reasonable.

But to offer to pay it over 15 years to men now in their 90s - that, she says, is an insult.

[Bonobo]

`Katyn was not like the Holocaust'
thenews.pl
02.09.2009

A German Jewish group has said that President Kaczynski's likening the 1940 Katyn massacre to the Holocaust was "inappropriate" .

"Despite total understanding of the pain caused by the memory of Polish officers murdered in Katyn, the comparison is inappropriate and out of place," said Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan Kramer, quoted in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper.

President Kaczynski referred to the massacre of over 22,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD in 1940 in his speech commemorating the outbreak of WW II. "Though not comparable in scale, what Katyn and the Holocaust have in common is that Nazis killed Jews because they were Jews – the Soviets killed Polish officers because they were Polish," he said.

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Renovation begins on medieval Polish synagogue
Sep. 5, 2009
Michael Freund
THE JERUSALEM POST


Zamosc synagogue

Nearly 400 years after it was built, the grand Renaissance- style synagogue in the southeastern Polish town of Zamosc is getting a much-needed facelift.

At the initiative of the Warsaw-based Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland, extensive restoration work has begun on the multi-story structure, which had fallen into disrepair and suffered widespread water damage in recent years.

"Our goal is to renovate the synagogue and make it a vibrant center which will serve all the people from Zamosc and its environs," foundation president Monika Krawczyk told The Jerusalem Post.

Zamosc is located in the Lublin district, approximately 70 km. from the Ukrainian border.

In addition to a hall that will be used for prayer services, lectures and concerts, plans call for the structure to house a tourist information center as well as a museum that will celebrate the history of the area's Jews.

The exhibits will utilize advanced multimedia technology, and will incorporate innovative programs such as a "virtual tour" of Jewish shtetls that dotted the region before the Holocaust.

Considered an architectural gem, the Zamosc shul was one of the first properties to be officially returned to the Jewish community by the Polish government nearly a decade ago, noted Krawczyk, whose foundation is responsible for safeguarding Jewish cultural, historical and religious sites throughout the country.

Zamosc's synagogue is believed to have been built between 1610 and 1618. Among those who preached there was the famed Dubno maggid, Rabbi Yaakov Kranz, who passed away in Zamosc in 1804 and was buried in the local Jewish cemetery.

The synagogue was in continuous use until the German invasion of Poland in 1939, after which it was damaged and later used as a carpentry workshop.

Poland's post-war Communist regime turned it into a public library, which was moved to a new location five years ago.

Only a handful of Jews remain in Zamosc, which was home to 12,000 Jews, or nearly half the town's population, on the eve of World War II.

"We have a dream that the Zamosc synagogue will be used for the holy purposes of the Jewish people," Krawczyk said, "but the reality is what it is. I hope that Jewish groups from all over the world who visit Poland will come to see it and use it, as it is specially designed to allow the main hall to be used to hold prayers for interested groups."

The bulk of the funding for the restoration came from the European Economic Area and Norway Grants, which were established by Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway to support social and economic projects throughout the continent.

Krawczyk is looking to raise additional money to defray the remaining costs of the restoration. "We realize that our organization is only the custodian of these historical sites," she said, "but in fact they belong to all Polish Jews, regardless of where they live, and they are an important part of our people's heritage."

[Bonobo]

Poland's Jewish community holds special ceremony '70 years later…we are still here'

8/31/09



GDANSK (EJP)--- As part of the Polish government's official series of events marking the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of WWII, which paved the way for the onset of the Holocaust, Poland's Jewish community holds Monday afternoon a special ceremony in the northern port city of Gdansk.

The ceremony, co-sponsored by the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland and the Jerusalem-based Shavei Israel organization, aimed at highlighting the current revival of Polish Jewry and recall fallen Jewish soldiers

The ceremony will be held in the Gdansk synagogue, located Ul. Partyzantow 7, and will appear on the official government schedule of events.

World War II officially began on September 1, 1939, when a Nazi warship bombarded Gdansk and German soldiers invaded the city.

In addition to senior Polish and foreign government officials, those participating in the ceremony will include Piotr Kadlcik, president of Poland's Jewish communities, Michal Samet, president of the Gdansk Jewish community and Shavei Israel Chairman Michael Freund.

Poland's chief rabbi Michael Schudrich will recall at the event the 6 million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust, and the Jewish soldiers in the Polish Armed Forces who died fighting the Nazi invaders.

The ceremony will also underscore the nascent revival of Polish Jewry that is underway, as a number of young Jews from across Poland, many of whom have only recently discovered their Jewish roots, will also take part.

It will therefore be held under the slogan, "70 years later.... We are still here."

Today around 4,000 Jews are registered as living in Poland, but according to various estimates, there are tens of thousands of others who have concealed their true identity, or are simply unaware of it.

Many Jews lost all contact with Judaism due to the extreme anti-Semitism that they encountered after the Holocaust, and some of them even converted.

Others concealed their Judaism from the Communist authorities and now feel free to resume their true identity. Another phenomenon pertains to Jewish young people who were adopted by Catholic families and institutions during the Holocaust. They were told nothing of their Jewish identity, and only in recent years have they gradually begun to discover it.

[Bonobo]

Poles, Jews coming to terms with history
Natalia A. Feduschak
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
9/7/09

MAJDANEK, Poland | Rachel Apt has traveled to Poland 15 times since 1993, nearly always leading a group of Israelis visiting this country's Nazi death camps. With each trip, she says, she has witnessed an improvement in Polish-Jewish relations.

"It's getting better, but it is still not enough," said Mrs. Apt, whose groups often include religiously observant Jews. "I would like for the Poles to see our country in order to better understand us and why we feel the way we do."

Nearly 65 years after the end of World War II, Poles and Jews are slowly coming to terms with an often painful shared past.

Recent years have seen the beginning of a discourse about Polish complicity during the Holocaust, as well as a belated recognition that many Polish citizens also risked their lives to save Jews during one of the darkest periods of European history.

"It's a fascinating time now," said Agnieszka Chrabolowska, program director for the Warsaw-based Forum for Dialogue Among Nations Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to building understanding between Poles and Jews.

On the one hand, Poles, including those too young to remember the war, are beginning to have greater understanding of what happened in their homeland.

On the other, they are also recognizing the void left behind with the annihilation of a Jewish community that was, in many ways, an economic and cultural backbone of Polish society.

Poland was home to some 3.5 million Jews when Germany invaded its eastern neighbor on Sept. 1, 1939. By the end of the war, a community whose presence in Poland spanned centuries was largely eliminated.

Since the Nazis built the majority of their death camps in Poland, the country was dubbed by many in the West as being one large graveyard for Jews. Some 3 million non-Jews also perished in Poland during WWII.

While places like Auschwitz-Berkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor became etched into the Western consciousness as Holocaust survivors shared their stories, Poles remained largely ignorant of their past during the communist era, said Ms. Chrabolowska.

It was not until the 2001 publication of "Neighbors," a book by Princeton University professor Jan T. Gross, that the historical floodgates flew open.

Mr. Gross detailed how on July 10, 1941, Poles from Jedwabne, a town in northeast Poland, burned their Jewish neighbors — including women and children — alive in a barn.

The book's publication sparked shock and outrage. While some criticized the book as being unfair to Poles, it also sparked an intensive debate about Polish complicity during World War II.

"It was a breakthrough in Poland," said Ms. Chrabolowska. "It was a shock." Mr. Gross' second book, "Fear Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz," was published in Poland last year.

Mr. Gross, who was born in Warsaw in 1947 to a Jewish father and gentile mother, hit a nerve that was so great, it is virtually impossible to walk into a bookstore in Poland today without coming across literature about World War II and the Holocaust.

That historic introspection has also meant that Poles are beginning to recognize just how many of their fellow countrymen risked their lives to save Jews.

Nearly one-third of all the people who have been deemed The Righteous Among the Nations — an honor bestowed by Israel to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust — are Poles.

Polish television last year broadcast a special honoring those individuals.

"This is something you have never seen before, a society recognizing itself," said Matt Brzezinski, a Washington writer who is now living in Warsaw and working on a book about Polish-Jewish resistance during World War II. "Fifteen years ago, that absolutely wouldn't have been done."

Many American and Israeli Jews remain critical of what they see as Polish complicity during the war and for not having done more to save their Jewish neighbors, Ms. Chrabolowska said.

To help change attitudes and build bridges, Ms. Chrabolowska' s organization has hosted workshops and lectures to raise awareness about anti-Semitism in Poland.

It has joined forces with the American Jewish Committee to bring together leaders and scholars to discuss Polish-Jewish relations. In April, it sponsored a group of Holocaust survivors and saviors who met with President Obama in Washington.

For its part, the Polish government has a special minister devoted to Jewish affairs. Warsaw is working at the highest levels to encourage Jews, particularly those from Israel, to see more of their country than just the Nazi death camps.

As attitudes change, an increasing number of young Poles are beginning to identify themselves as Jews or partly Jewish. Jewish culture has again become chic.

Indeed, the world's largest Jewish festival outside Israel takes place each summer in the picturesque city of Krakow, once home to a thriving Jewish community.

"These are all signs that things are going in the right direction," said Mr. Brzezinski, the Washington-based writer.

The young Israelis who were visiting the Majdanek camp on a warm day agreed. Dressed in T-shirts bearing their country's flag, the group had just finished a lesson on tolerance conducted by Mrs. Apt, a teacher from Haifa.

Walking along a gravel pathway that took them from crematoriums to barracks, they began an animated discussion about who was to blame for the Holocaust.

"It was the Germans," said one young man.

"No, it was the Nazis," corrected Achikam Zipkis, a 16-year-old from Haifa. "It was the Nazis." And what about the Poles? Did they carry any blame? In unison, the group said they harbored no ill feelings toward the Poles.

"We can't forgive, but we don't hate," said Shirel Ben Harroush, also 16. "The Poles suffered, too."

[Bonobo]

Poles apart
By Yuval Ben Ami and Osnat Skoblinski
Ha'aretz
9/21/09

In a fortress overlooking the Polish town of Przemysl, 17 tourists listen to the entertaining tale of "the Good Soldier Schweik," who disappeared among the fortifications surrounding the city. The storyteller is Shulamit Wolner, a Polish-born Israeli. Her audience consists of colleagues, Israeli tour guides who lead groups of Israelis abroad and generally come to Poland with youth groups to see the Nazi death camps.

This week-long trip, billed as "There Is a Polish Poland, too," is different. It is designed to familiarize the guides with a side of Poland that is not specifically connected to Judaism or the Holocaust. It is an annual trip, sponsored by the Polish Ministry of Tourism and the Polish Institute. Each year the visiting Israelis are brought to a different region of the country; this year it is the turn of southeast Poland.

If there is one place where Polish and Jewish history are intertwined, it is in Przemysl, on the Ukrainian border. Before World War II almost half the population of the region's cities was Jewish. The Polish organizers do not ignore the connection, and make a point of adding synagogues and other Jewish and Holocaust-related sites to the itinerary of castles and museums.

Nobody questions that there is a Polish Poland, but how that resonates for Israelis is another matter. "Did they dump Jewish bodies here?" asks one Israeli as they walk along the moat. No, she was told. "Then why did they bring us here?"

Throughout the trip the Israelis try to demonstrate a polite patience for the Polish sites, all the while looking for things related to their own culture. In Kozlowka Castle, north of Lublin, they are distracted as they follow the guide past the painted portraits of members of the noble family of Zamoyski to the restored 19th-century kitchen. Only when they notice the wood-carved coat of arms of the Potocki family, to which the Zamoyskis were related by marriage, do their eyes light up. The Israelis know the name by virtue of the fact that one of the Potockis converted to Judaism, causing a rift in the family. A sawn-off branch on the coat of arms recalls the event, providing visual evidence of anti-Semitism among the old Polish nobility and suggesting its presence in Poland altogether.

Sense of mission

As the tour moves deeper into eastern Poland, the members of the group find less and less interest in Polish sites, and request Jewish ones instead. For example, on the one day in the itinerary when no Jewish sites are included, they insist on seeing the synagogues of every town they go through. In the end, instead of touring a factory for natural oils in the town of Krosno, they visit the synagogue of Rymanow; and by the end of the day, they have added three more synagogues and two Jewish cemeteries to their list.

The group is not homogeneous, and its members have differing views on the trip's itinerary and on Poland itself. The differences become sharper when the discussion touches on guiding Jewish youth there. "I don't tell them what they should learn [from the experience] and what conclusions they should reach," says Ehud Pe'er. "They will take away what they can, each according to his or her own insights. But in general I hear three things from them: It should never happen again; Israel must exist; and it has to be strong."

The Israelis are highly motivated and bring a sense of mission to the youth tours they guide. With one exception, they have all been doing the Israel-Poland route for years now. The itinerary always includes the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Warsaw Ghetto, and interchangeable sites like the Treblinka and Majdanek camps, or the Lodz Ghetto. Exceptions are made if one of the students has a special request, some site or an address with personal significance.

What characterizes the Israeli who feels the need to inculcate the memory of the Holocaust? One of the group confesses that she reads no newspapers, and searches the Internet only for topics related to the Holocaust. Another speaks about the "Holocaust bug" that bit him and changed his life. The general feeling throughout the tour is far from morbid, however. The atmosphere on the bus is light-hearted and pleasant, and it is obvious that the group's members share something powerful, something historical. "There are personal aspects of this as well," explains Oren. "People often take on a responsibility like this because they have some unresolved issue - a family history, for example."

Missed opportunity

These tour leaders identify themselves first and foremost as Israelis, and only after as Jews. The Poles they meet do not make the distinction between Jewishness in Poland and the Israeli version; the Israelis view them as ignoramuses. The comment of a local guide at the Open Museum that "I have learned about Jews, and I expected 'Fiddler on the Roof'" meets with derision from members of the group. "If she wants to find out what Jews are, let her learn about the IDF," one of them says.

The tours are long and arduous, the food is simple, and the group is on the road for some 12 hours a day. They only get to their hotel rooms in the evening, knowing that at 8 A.M. they have to be back on the bus.

The Polish guides do not miss the name of a single nobleman buried in this or that crypt, but they are not accustomed to the Israeli style of flavoring their explanations with colorful stories and anecdotes. The Israelis, on the other hand, are an impressive source of original ideas. On this particular tour, however, their unique guiding abilities are secondary: What counts is their ability to listen.

In light of reports about departures from the planned itinerary and cancellation of visits to Polish sites, the Polish Ministry of Tourism is considering suspending the "Polish Poland" program. Is the missed opportunity just an example of a characteristically Israeli lack of interest? Not necessarily.

"Polish Poland," as per its Ministry of Tourism, is a string of formal gardens and open museums that present examples of rural architecture.

Rzesznow, on the other hand, is an example of urban renewal, where the key is culture, creativity, a certain local chic and a sense of design, yet the visit there gets no further than a walk through underground chambers full of not-very-interestin g historical artifacts.

The most interesting aspect of contemporary Poland is its current renaissance. It is an exciting country, but the excitement lies far beyond the windows of the bus as it rolls along toward yet another night of too little sleep.

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'Hitler Youth' Synagogue Restored to Jews in Poland

by Hana Levi Julian
9/21/09

(IsraelNN.com) After decades of remaining empty, a synagogue in Poland formerly used by the "Hitler Youth" (Hitlerjugend) reopened for the Jewish New Year services. The synagogue is in Dzier¿oniów, a town in southwestern Poland which used to be part of Germany.

The building had been in danger of collapse, having been deserted for more than 25 years.

But on Friday, it sprang to life with new vigor, the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE), which provides resources to Jewish leaders and their communities in Europe, having provided at least a significant part of the wherewithal for its rejuvenation.

The story begins during World War II, when the Nazis seized the city of Reichenbach (as it was called when it was part of Germany).

Like almost every other in the region, the synagogue of Dzier¿oniów was in danger of being demolished under the Nazi regime.

To save their beloved house of worship from this disaster, the Jewish community turned to Conrad Springer, a gentile who worked as a maintenance man for the community. Springer was given money by the members of the community to purchase the building from the authorities.

The synagogue was thus converted into the local headquarters for the Hitler Youth movement – The Hitlerjugend.

After the war, when remnants of the Jewish community returned to Dzier¿oniów, Springer returned the keys of the synagogue to them without a request for payment.

"I have finished my task, now the synagogue is returned to you," Springer told the Jews who returned. Springer's grandson, who now lives in Berlin, still maintains a good relationship with the Jews of the community to this day.

Many Jews came to Dzier¿oniów after the Holocaust and it soon became such a thriving Jewish city that many called it "Little Jerusalem".

The synagogue also survived other tumultuous events. In March 1968, anti-Semitic riots broke out in the town, inspired by the communist authorities.

Most of the community fled to escape the persecution, leaving only a handful Jews in the town. The synagogue remained in use, however, until 1984, when at last it closed its doors. Slowly, the building deteriorated, becoming dilapidated and surviving a fire. It was even used as a rubbish dump by the local Poles.

It took 20 years for a rescuer to arrive.

In 2004, former resident Rafael Elias Blau set about returning the synagogue to its former glory. Blau enlisted the other 20 remaining Jews in Dzier¿oniów in forming an association called "Beitenu Chai" (Our House Lives), which bought the synagogue and restored it.

"Now after the five years since we bought the synagogue and restored it, and 25 years since a single prayer was heard, the synagogue returns to its original purpose," Blau said excitedly.

From Israel, the U.S., Sweden, Denmark and Germany, a group of 50 Jews who fled the March 1968 pogroms returned to the synagogue to attend Rosh HaShanah prayer services. The RCE helped make the celebration possible by providing all the necessities, including prayer books, prayer shawls and Shofars (the ram's horn blown during the New Year's service).

[Bonobo]

The Polish embassy has accused Stephen Fry of "slander" after he suggested Poles had played a role in the Holocaust.

By Matthew Day in Warsaw
telegraph.co. uk
08 Oct 2009

The Polish embassy has accused Stephen Fry of slander Photo: PA He made the comments on Channel 4 news while talking about the Conservative Party's links with Poland's Law and Justice party.

The party has members that have faced accusations of anti-Semitism and homophobia, and Mr Fry appeared to hint that Poland may hold some responsibility for the mass murder of European Jews.

Let's face it, there has been a history in Poland of right-wing Catholicism, which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history, and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on," he said.

The remark provoked a furious response from the Polish embassy.

"To suggest, even indirectly, that the Polish people, and Poland as a country, are in some way collectively responsible for the [Auschwitz] death camp, which became the symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust, is completely wrong and frankly – defamatory," the embassy said a statement.

Comment pages on internet news sites in Poland also reflected Polish anger, with many posters accusing Mr Fry of ignorance of wartime history and indifference to the deaths of the thousands upon thousands of non-Jewish Poles who also perished at Auschwitz.

While most Poles accept their nation was tainted by anti-Semitism before the war, any insinuation that Poland played a role in the Holocaust is vehemently rejected.

Poles point out that pre-war Poland contained Europe's largest Jewish population, and, following the Nazi conquest of the continent, Poland was the only country that had no collaborationist regime.

Mr Fry's comments came after he signed an open letter protesting about the Conservative' s ties with Law and Justice.

In particular attention has focused on Michal Kaminski, a Law and Justice MEP who heads the European parliament grouping to which the Tories belong.

A controversial character, in the past Mr Kaminski belonged to an extreme-right party, and he has also earned the scorn of Polish gay-rights groups for referring to homosexuals as "f*gs".

Mr Kaminski denies any accusations of being anti-Semitic or homophobic.

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A Virtual Home for Poland's Vanished Jews
By Gal Beckerman
Forward
September 30, 2009

In the Virtual Shtetl, there is no Tevye the Milkman. Gimpel the Fool doesn't live there, either. And you won't find Marc Chagall's floating goats and violins.

There is no nostalgia to speak of — just facts. Google maps, detailed photos of dilapidated tombstones poking through the earth of forgotten cemeteries, scanned birth certificates, sepia-toned family photos of long ago weddings and sports matches.

An online project of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews — whose physical site will open in Warsaw in 2012 on ground where the ghetto once stood — Virtual Shtetl is an effort to collect this documentation and contribute to what the $150 million Polish initiative calls a "museum without barriers." Using the participatory power of Web 2.0 technology, the descendants of Polish Jews, together with today's Poles, will work together on excavating the past of hundreds of communities where a rich Jewish life once existed.

The Web site, started last June and so far used mostly by Polish history buffs, has, according to its organizers, much the same goals as the museum, a glass-cubed structure designed by Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamäki that will be filled with multimedia exhibits and will be a destination for 450,000 visitors a year, 70% of them Polish and 30% foreign tourists. The museum and Web site are an effort to paint a picture of the Jewish experience in Poland that is broader than the single fact that has come, over the past 60 years, to dominate — namely, the Holocaust. The organizers instead want to animate the story of Jewish life in Poland for the 1,000 years before the war, a narrative whose time they feel has arrived.

"What we have today, this `March of the Living,' is really a march of death," said Sigmund Rolat, chairman of the North American organization supporting the museum, referring to the annual march that brings thousands of young Jews to Poland to commemorate the Holocaust. "Kids come to Poland for three days, and they see the triangle of death: Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek. That's not enough. It's important. But that's only one chapter of the history. They should also find out where Jews lived, where they thrived, where they accomplished so much."

The idea for Virtual Shtetl www.sztetl. org.pl/?lang= en_GB was first proposed by Albert Stankowski, a Polish historian who had spent four years traveling around Poland from one Jewish site to another as part of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage. He wanted to bridge what was a growing interest among Poles about the Jewish history of their towns with the desire of descendants of Jews from those towns to understand where their families came from. Throw in the Wikipedia-like innovation of user-generated content, and the site was born.

"This is a dynamic, interactive way of doing history," Stankowski said, speaking through a translator while on a recent trip to New York. "History is not the private domain of an exclusive group of historians and archivists, but everyone can participate, because everyone's past connects up with history."

A user visiting Virtual Shtetl can now type in the name of a town or city where a Jewish community existed; more than 900 are now listed. A Google map will appear, along with any material that has been uploaded to the site by its users — from photographs of streets to city documents relating to Jewish life — along with various entries about the Jewish history of the place. Stankowski has even more high-tech plans for the future. Eventually the site will be synchronized with GPS so that visitors to Poland can use it to discover their ancestral villages and towns on their own. Stankowski also has a vision of the Web site as an online community, a resource for sharing and updating information on hundreds of sites.

Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, a professor of Performance Studies and Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University who headed the team planning the museum's exhibition, described Jews and Poles as living until now in "parallel universes." Jews perceive Poland as a giant graveyard, she said, and this Web site could potentially be "transformative" both for the relationship of Jews and Poles and for returning their shared history to its proper context.

"It is more than an archive, more than a place to deposit and preserve material," Kirshenblatt- Gimblett said. "It is raising consciousness and creating an ongoing, active engagement with the Jewish past. It's not passive. It's not a monument."

In its first three months of life, 80% of the users of the site have been Polish, Stankowski said. Already, 3,000 photos have been uploaded. Stankowski hopes that Virtual Shtetl will fill out even more with contributions from Jews who have researched their family histories or taken their own trips to Poland. He doesn't even mind if the photos posted to the site show antisemitic graffiti left on tombstones or signs of neglect and abandonment. As he sees it, this is all part of building the online community. He wants it to reflect the full measure of the Jewish world in Poland, as it was and as it is now.

"The term `shtetl' is used here metaphorically, to mean `community,' " Kirshenblatt- Gimblett said. "It's the community of likeminded souls, Jews and non-Jews, who really deeply care about the Jewish past in Poland and want to work together to recover it. And in the process, to actually form new relationships. "

[valpomike]

After all, we all, have just one God, and who knows which church he goes to.

Mike

[Bonobo]

FRY SORRY FOR AUSCHWITZ REMARK
contactmusic. com
10/19/09

British funnyman STEPHEN FRY has apologised after outraging Polish citizens by implying the country played a role in the Holocaust.
The writer/actor was taking part in a feature on Poland's Law and Justice Party for Britain's Channel 4 News last week (begs12Oct09) when he referred to the location of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz.
He told viewers, "Let's face it, there has been a history in Poland of right-wing Catholicism, which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history, and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on."

The remarks sparked anger from the Polish embassy and criticism on various news websites - prompting an apology from Fry on Monday (19Oct09).

In a posting on his official blog, he writes: "I offer no excuse. I seemed to imply that the Polish people had been responsible for the most infamous of all the death factories of the Third Reich. I didn't even really at the time notice the importance of what I had said, so gave myself no opportunity instantly to retract the statement. It was a rubbishy (sic), cheap and offensive remark that I have been regretting ever since.

"I take this opportunity to apologise now. I said a stupid, thoughtless and fatuous thing. It detracted from and devalued my argument, such as it was, and it outraged and offended a large group of people for no very good reason. I am sorry in all directions."

[Bonobo]

You know, folks, nobody's a bigger fan of Poland than me, but there's so much uncritical rhetoric floating around out there in Polonia regarding the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations that it's time for some objective reasoning.

Let's take Pan Szarejko's letter to the editor below. His emotional and subjective blustering represents what we regularly hear from the Polonian leadership and press.

Szarejko: "It is no wonder when some people I meet believe Poles are anti-Semitic. .."

This is statement of ignorance or complete denial. Anyone who has actually bothered to read a book on interwar Poland understands that anti-Semitism was rampant in the Second Republic and was quickly becoming institutionalized after the death of Pilsudski. Hello? Dmowski? National Democrats? Boycotts? OZON? Ghetto benches? Investigating the deportation of Jews? Restrictions on hiring and promotions in the public sector? Hello? Anybody read history besides myself? Anti-Semitic sentiment continued into the war.

Szarejko: "Israel honored more than a thousand of these verified Polish heroes at Yad Vashem."

If Pan Szarejko had bothered to check Yad Vashem's web site as much as he consulted his thesaurus he would have found 6135 Poles have been honored to date as rescuers. Many Poles cite the fact that Poland has the highest number of Righteous as a "proof" of Poland's benevolence towards its Jews. Truth be told, the Righteous list only includes documented cases. Historians believe that tens of thousands of Polish Gentiles were actually involved in the rescue of Jewish Poles. But countless Poles were also indifferent to the Jewish genocide while some even applauded it. The largest party of the underground government, representing conservative Poles, refused to support Zegota (the Council of Aid To Jews) in any way.

With no disrespect to the Polish rescuers, more than half of the European Jewish population lived in Poland at the start of WWII (3,350,000 of 6,000,000). Logic would dictate that it would also have the largest number of Righteous.

One should be extremely cautious about drawing conclusions from the number of Righteous by country as Yad Vashem warns on its website. Their comment is obviously directed to boastful Poles who attempt to twist a comparison of the number of rescuers by country for their own purposes: "The number of rescuers in the different countries depends on a multitude of factors and therefore does not necessarily indicate the attitude of the local population to the Jews and their murder. Moreover, in view of the great difference in circumstances between different countries and regions, one should proceed with great caution when making such comparisons. "

Szarejko: "Poland was the only nation controlled by the Germans where saving or attempting to save a Jewish person was punishable by death to the rescuer and his family."

While this is certainly true at face value, one must also acknowledge that the other occupied countries had comparatively much smaller Jewish populations. "Processing" Poland's mammoth number of Jews necessitated threats and procedures involving the entire population.

Also, millions of Poles were directly involved in a myriad of underground activities throughout the occupation that would have meant instant death if caught. Citing the threat of death as a deterrent or caution to aiding Jews ignores the fact that millions of Poles chose to engage in other life-threatening undertakings on a daily or regular basis. Again, I make this point not to diminish those that chose to defy death by helping Jews, but to counter illogical reasoning.

Since I'm on a run, here's another argument we often hear from Polonia, while having nothing to do with Jews, is equally bereft of reason. I'm surprised Pan Szarejko doesn't also mention this one because it's usually included along with the other group-think statements he repeats in his letter:

"Poland was the only country that didn't collaborate with the Nazis."

In reality, Hitler never had ANY intention of collaborating with the subhuman/unter- menchen Poles in the administration of conquered Poland. The Generalgouvernement (für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete) was a slave state as it was intended to be from the start. The oft-repeated statement assumes that Hitler sought support from the Polish right and was refused. Ridiculous! We all know that few in the Polish right would have worked for the Nazis if asked; they were as anti-German as they were anti-Jewish. But the point is academic: Poles were never asked to help administer the GG.

Now, as for "Polish concentration camps," the main topic of Pan Szarejko's letter, I also used to take great offense to this. And I completely understand why Poles and the Polish government wish better care was taken in identifying who actually operated these camps. But I would argue that designating the camps as "Polish" is lazy journalism rather than some kind of insidious media conspiracy as some Poles wish were true. As a simple example, the media will mention an "Anarctic weather station" rather than an "American weather station located in Anarctica." Of course Poles don't want to be associated with the odious concentration camps but the camps were in Poland and the geographic reference is regrettable although explainable. Confusing? Yes. Worthy of complaint and clarification? Certainly! But let's not see in this another example of the evil world conspiring against us as Polonia's professional victims love to do.

I realize Pan Szarejko's statements are very popular in Polonian circles and that I don't score a lot of points for this forum by pointing out the emperor isn't wearing any clothes, but mindless, subjective, blusterous group-speak just drives me nuts when it applies to Poland or any other subject. Poles have an easier time accepting dark chapters in their nation's history than Polonians who hold to idealized notions of the motherland.

Tom

************ ********* ********* ********* ***

Polish Americans subject to misunderstanding over the Holocaust
Letters to the Editor
Little Neck Ledger
Thursday, October 22, 2009

Your article on the Kupferberg Foundation in your Oct. 8 issue ("Kupferberg Center opens at Queensborough Community College," Little Neck Ledger) contains historical errors which need to be corrected.

Polish Americans are being barraged by historical revisionists who manipulate the news to alter the Polish image and create doubt in readers' minds. It is troubling TimesLedger Newspapers would be guilty of misidentifying the location of a German death camp where hundreds of thousands of innocent victims were murdered.

Your newspaper identified the camp where this horror was perpetrated as "Poland's Treblinka death camp." It is no wonder when some people I meet believe Poles are anti-Semitic and that Poland, under German occupation during World War II, built death camps to murder its own Jewish and Christian citizens.

It is unfortunate this smear was included in the same article that informed readers of the opening of the Kupferberg Holocaust Center. Members of the Polish American Congress have attended numerous meetings at the Holocaust Resource Center and participated in its programs.

At one of these meetings years ago, I brought to the group's attention that holocausts have occurred in other parts of the world and that their victims should be recognized by the Holocaust Center. Subsequently, I was gratified to note that a member of the gay civil rights movement and a member of the Sikh community were included in the Kupferberg's Foundation Advisory Board.

But the glaring and shameful omission in the membership of the Advisory Board of the Kupferberg Holocaust Center of a representative of the Polish Christians murdered in German death camps is considered by many American Poles as an act of discrimination and prejudice.

Americans believe historical verity should always prevail so the world will be reminded how a mind can be poisoned and a people seduced into accepting a mania that could cause such a devastating impact on the sanctity of life.

The members of the Polish American Congress trust the TimesLedger editorial board would be more professional and exacting in reviewing the nature and content of its news before subjecting it to the public. Its credibility can be further challenged by its undocumented charge that Eddie Weinstein was recaptured numerous times by members of the Nazi Party. It stretches the imagination that German occupying forces in Poland were all members of this party when credible sources prove the Nazi Party had, at its highest point, some 10 million members. Media sources during World War II identified the German invasion forces as being German, not Nazi, armies.

It is also pertinent to note that thousands of Polish citizens and their families lost their lives saving Jewish victims of German genocide during World War II. Paul Wos, a member of the Polish American Congress, and his family was one of the many who have been declared "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem.

Several years ago, when asked by a Jewish radio host on a popular New Jersey radio show why he and his family would risk their lives in saving their Jewish comrades, Wos simply responded, "Because I am a Christian." Israel honored more than a thousand of these verified Polish heroes at Yad Vashem. Poland was the only nation controlled by the Germans where saving or attempting to save a Jewish person was punishable by death to the rescuer and his family.

We also request that the Kupferberg Holocaust Center add to its advisory board members representing the Poles murdered by the Germans during the war so those martyred Polish Christians shall never be forgotten.

Chet Szarejko
Little Neck

[tufta]

These photos remind me I have forgotten to put up the Warsaw Jewish cemetary sets!

[Bonobo]

Polish Jews want compensation for nationalized property
RT
16 October, 2009

Pressure is high on the Polish government to pay compensation to people who had private property seized by the Nazis during World War II and saw it nationalized by Communists afterwards.

Henrik Piekelny is a Holocaust survivor. His grandfather once owned a silk factory in Lodz. He died in the Warsaw ghetto. The factory was stolen by the Nazis during the war and was later taken over by the Polish government. After the collapse of the Communist regime in Poland, Henrick Piekelny began efforts to reclaim his family's property.

"When they saw that we wanted to take over the factory they immediately nationalized the factory," Henrikh told RT.

The Polish court refused to consider Piekelny's case because the factory was no longer there. So Henrikh filed a case against Poland with the European Court on Human Rights.

Lawyer Monika Kravchyk deals with such cases. She says there is no difference between Jewish and Polish restitution. It concerns all Polish citizens who lost their property. However, the legal procedure is tougher when it comes to Polish Jews.

"They lost the possibility to identify where their ancestors were killed. If they were killed in Auschwitz, I would say from the procedures of the restitution process, this is not that bad because the Germans kept exact records. But if they were killed in Treblinka, no records were kept," Monika explains.

Many buildings in central Warsaw once belonged to the Jews that perished in Nazi concentration camps. More than three million of them lived in Poland before the War – that's 10% of Poland's population. Only a handful survived.

Until now, Poland is the only country in Central and Eastern Europe that has no law on private property lost during World War Two. Only public property can be reclaimed. The cost of compensation is estimated at eight billion dollars. In addition, who is to pay all the other nationalities that had property in Poland before the war?

"It still strikes me as unthinkable that the same law will allow for the compensation of former German citizens who were expelled from the country after 1945. Legally, there's no difference. Morally – there's an ocean of a difference. And on this I tend to favor the Polish government's position which is that compensation for those people is the responsibility of the German government who started the war," says journalist Konstanty Gebert.

Latest opinion polls show that 60% of Poles are against private restitution. As for the Jewish community, they fear that restitution of Jewish property could result in a new wave of anti-Semitism.


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A stunning commemoration of Jews in Poland before the two World Wars, IMAGE BEFORE MY EYES pays homage to the dynamic and vibrant society of 3.5 million people that was destroyed during the Holocaust. Unearthing the stories of Jewish villagers, aristocrats, socialists, Zionists, and artists who fashioned a thriving civilization with a 900-year history, this triumphant films draws on the sacred and rare artifacts of a crushed world-home movies, forgotten song recordings, and the evocative memories of survivors-to recreate Jewish Poland. Tracing the subtle contours of Jewish Diaspora, IMAGE BEFORE MY EYES visits people as varied as a former mayor of Scarsdale, New York describing his youthful Polish patriotism and a Brooklyn housewife who touchingly sings the Yiddish songs of teachers, tradesmen, and beggars she learned as a child in Warsaw.

From the bucolic, traditional shtetls of the countryside to the freewheeling cultural revolution in the cities led by freethinkers, award-winning director Josh Waletzky (Partisans of Vilna) masterfully memorializes a proud culture that still inspires hope and reverence.

[Bonobo]

U.S. Jews see old horrors, new hope in Poland
By RACHEL POMERANCE
Houston Chronicle
Oct. 30, 2009



David Propis and his daughter Dena sang the Retzei at the Poland National Opera this summer. Propis, president of the American Cantors Assembly, led 70 colleagues on a tour of Poland and Israel.
As a child, David Propis, the Jewish liturgical singer of Houston's Congregation Beth Yushurun, adored singing prayers with his father, Dov Propis, at his congregations in the Northeast.

His favorite was their first duet, a piece called the Retzei that asks God to accept one's prayers. And Propis still recalls the Sabbath performance when his father wrapped his prayer shawl around him, and with it a "feeling of protection."

The prayer was made famous by Gershon Sirota, who sang at Warsaw's Tlomatzka Synagogue and was killed, along with his family, in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

So when Propis, the new president of the Cantors Assembly, the world's largest body of professional cantors, helped lead about 70 of his colleagues and hundreds of congregants on a two-week tour through Poland and Israel recently, he once again performed the Retzei. This time, it was with his daughter, about 100 yards from where the Tlomatzka Synagogue once stood.

Their duet was part of the Cantors Assembly concert with the Polish National Opera, a symbolic evening that honored the life of Irena Sendler, a Pole who rescued 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto.

The group traveled to Poland to commemorate the Holocaust, but also in spite of it. They wanted to honor Poland's significant number of "Righteous Gentiles," the non-Jewish Poles who risked their lives and those of their families to save Jews, said Propis, the child of Lithuanian Jews whose families were murdered in the Holocaust. And they also went to learn about the Jewish heritage of Poland, the center of European Jewish life and home to 3.5 million Jews before the war.

In that spirit, the cantors' tour, which marked the largest assembly of cantors in Poland since before WWII, reflected a message of gratitude and a quest for healing, reconciliation and their own heritage.
The Poland portion of the trip was sponsored in large part by the San Francisco-based Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, which aims to reconnect Jews with their vibrant history in Poland, where Jews lived for 1,000 years. Some 75 percent of American Jews trace their roots to "Polish lands," according to the foundation, an area that extends to parts of Ukraine, Austria and Hungary.

Meanwhile, Poland, in the wake of 20 years of democracy since the fall of communism, is seeking to reclaim its own Jewish heritage by way of preservation and cultural activities. The renewed interest in Jewish culture has helped spawn an emerging Jewish community as Poles uncover their own Jewish roots. But in most cases, Jewish activities appear to be organized by non-Jews, supported by government agencies and enthusiastically received.

Perhaps the most shining example was Krakow's 19th Jewish Culture Festival, a nine-day panoply of Jewish culture. The program featured hundreds of Jewish classes and concerts including a prayer service by the Cantors Assembly before a nighttime throng of thousands.

At its concert with the National Opera, sponsored by the Office of the Prime Minister of Poland, the Cantors Assembly received a standing ovation from a crowd of 2,000.

That kind of reception helped undo some of the stereotypes held by those on the tour.

"They welcomed us as cultural and musical ambassadors, " Propis said, describing the Polish appreciation "like a hunger."

Propis said he initially felt uncomfortable about visiting Poland.

As a child of survivors, "many of us harbor difficult feelings," he said. Propis' mother, who was sent to a forced-labor camp, was the only member of her family to survive; his father escaped with two brothers.

However, "it was important that basically a new narrative be created," he said. "We know the harshness and the horrors that have happened, but I think not enough is being said about the goodness in Poland," he said. "I think this trip kind of cleared the clouds away."

Still, the group's visit to the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau marked a seminal moment on the tour.
At Auschwitz, the cantors held a prayer service and unfurled the Torah scroll around Holocaust survivors and their children. And at Birkenau, the group's visit coincided with a tour by hundreds of Israeli soldiers, who marched down the rail tracks.

"It's very hard to put in words," said Steve Lee, reflecting on the trip.

These ceremonies, combined with the religious singing, strengthened his Jewish identity, said Lee, a member of Congregation Beth Yeshurun, whose paternal grandparents emigrated from Poland. At the same time, Lee says the tour "changed my entire view of Poland," explaining that he began to see Poles also as Nazi victims and not only as Nazi collaborators.

Some 3 million Poles were killed during World War II.

For his part, Propis also came to new realizations. He marveled at the extent of Poland's Jewish and cantorial heritage and its current friendship with Israel, along with the Polish interest in Jewish culture and the stories of "Righteous Gentiles."

And the National Opera, of course, provided him with his own kind of homecoming.

"I had a dream come true," Propis says of performing the Retzei with his daughter, Dena, a junior at Northwestern University who sings at a Chicago synagogue.

It "just came full circle."
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[Bonobo]

Don't `wear' Israeli flag in Poland, students told
November 5, 2009

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Israeli students visiting Poland have been asked to stop wrapping themselves in the Israeli flag.

Two longtime leaders of youth delegations to Poland said in a pamphlet that wearing the flag is disrespectful and against the 1949 Flag and Symbol Law, Ha'aretz reported Thursday.

They also are trying to draw a distinction between the serious visit and "stadium culture," according to the newspaper.

"The students' use of the flag is more reminiscent of behavior in football stadiums than memorial services," said Gideon Goldstein.

About 25,000 students participate each year in delegations to Poland organized either by the Education Ministry or by the schools. The Education Ministry has previously ordered students not to wear flags, but it has not been enforced, Ha'aretz reported.

The flag "helps students cope with the intense feelings aroused during the visit," a teacher told Ha'aretz.

Another teacher said the students' use of the flag demonstrates "defiance against the Poles and a sort of revenge. It is entirely unnecessary. "






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