Polish antisemitism - reasons

[Bonobo]

Jews have lived in Poland since the Middle Ages, creating the biggest Jewish population in Europe.


It was in Poland where Jews could find a place to live safe from persecution - many Jews moved here after they had been expulsed from Western Europe.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews#Western_and_Christian_antisemitism
During the High Middle Ages in Europe there was full-scale persecution in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. An underlying source of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries. The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed, a prime example being the Rhineland massacres. In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including in 1290, the banishing of all English Jews; in 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and, in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland.[4]
As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, annihilating more than a half of the population, Jews were taken as scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed by violence in the Black Death persecutions. Although Pope Clement VI tried to protect them by papal bull on July 6, 1348 - with another following later in 1348 - several months afterwards, 900 Jews were burnt alive in Strasbourg, where the plague hadn't yet affected the city.[5]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland
Poland became more tolerant just as the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, as well as from Austria, Hungary and Germany, thus stimulating Jewish immigration to the much more accessible Poland. Indeed, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Poland became the recognized haven for exiles from Western Europe; and the resulting accession to the ranks of Polish Jewry made it the cultural and spiritual center of the Jewish people.


Finally, before WW 2 the Jewish population in Poland amounted to over 3 million.


Cases of Polish antisemitism have appeared with various intensity throughout centuries, for different reasons which depended on historical context.


Reason No 1, the oldest

Religious -

"Jews crucified Jesus"


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_antisemitism
Antisemitism was widespread in Europe during the Middle Ages. In those times, a main cause of prejudice against Jews in Europe was the religious one. Although not part of Roman Catholic dogma, many Christians, including members of the clergy, held the Jewish people collectively responsible for the death of Jesus, a practice originated by Melito of Sardis.



Poland was Christian like most countries in Europe then. Although Jews were protected by royal laws, they were viewed with suspicion by Christian non-Jews and sometimes persecuted.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Poland
The first extensive Jewish emigration from Western Europe to Poland occurred at the time of the First Crusade in 1098. Under Bolesław III (1102–1139), the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant regime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border in Lithuanian territory as far as Kiev.[33] Bolesław III recognized the utility of Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country. Jews came to form the backbone of the Polish economy. Mieszko III employed Jews in his mint as engravers and technical supervisors, and the coins minted during that period even bear Hebraic markings.[31] Jews worked on commission for the mints of other contemporary Polish princes, including Casimir the Just, Bolesław I the Tall and Władysław III Spindleshanks.[31] Jews enjoyed undisturbed peace and prosperity in the many principalities into which the country was then divided; they formed the middle class in a country where the general population consisted of landlords (developing into szlachta, the unique Polish nobility) and peasants, and they were instrumental in promoting the commercial interests of the land.


....
During the next hundred years, the Church pushed for the persecution of the Jews while the rulers of Poland usually protected them.[37] The Councils of Wrocław (1267), Buda (1279), and Łęczyca (1285) each segregated Jews, ordered them to wear a special emblem, banned them from holding offices where Christians would be subordinated to them, and forbade them from building more than one prayer house in each town. However, those church decrees required the cooperation of the Polish princes for enforcement, which was generally not forthcoming, due to the profits which the Jews' economic activity yielded to the princes.[31]



.....
Nevertheless, while for the greater part of Casimir’s reign the Jews of Poland enjoyed tranquility, toward its close they were subjected to persecution on account of the Black Death. In 1348, the first blood libel accusation against Jews in Poland was recorded, and in 1367 the first pogrom took place in Poznań (Posen).[39] Compared with the pitiless destruction of their co-religionists in Western Europe, however, the Polish Jews did not fare badly; and the Jewish masses of Germany fled to the more hospitable cities in Poland.

.....
In 1454 anti-Jewish riots flared up in Wrocław and other Silesian cities, inspired by a Franciscan friar, John of Capistrano, who accused Jews of profaning the Christian religion. As a result, Jews were banished from Lower Silesia. Zbigniew Olesnicki then invited John to conduct a similar campaign in Kraków and several other cities, to lesser effect. In 1495, Jews were ordered out of the center of Kraków and allowed to settle in the "Jewish town" of Kazimierz. [31]



Cases of antisemitic acts happened in main cities and were a direct imitation of what was happening to Jews in Western Europe.



www.jewishrenaissance.org.uk/taste-jr/jews-of-krakow.pdf
1407
In Kraków Jews are accused of ritual murder and start to move to Kazimierz.

1495
A huge fire stimulates a wave of anti-Jewish riots. Jews are expelled from Kraków, the majority moving to Kazimierz. Only a few privileged Jews, mainly connected with the kings’ courts, are allowed to live in the city.

other attacks
1399 Poznan 1423 Cracow 1434 Poznan 1445 Bothnia near Cracow 1447 Poznan 1454-55 Cracow 1455 Warsaw 1463 Cracow, etc. 1464 Poznan 1477 Cracow 1483 Warsaw 1495 Lithuania 1498-1500 Lwow, Kazimierz- Cracow

books.google.pl/books?id=K2DgBdSCQnsC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=1454+pogroms+in+krakow&source=bl&ots=fW2R-oGmp5&sig=BSsqdZMNAa0-XkZA1Vk6XuWQ-Ks&hl=pl&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwii6qmD4OfaAhWmCpoKHdosCAcQ6AEIVTAE#v=onepage&q=1454%20pogroms%20in%20krakow&f=false


Today Poland is still a Christian country with the majority of the population belonging to RCC denomination.

A religion schoolbook crossword: Who betrayed Jesus? Jews.

wiez.com.pl/2016/11/19/krzyzowka-zydzi-wydali-jezusa/


The tradition of including a Jew as one of the characters into nativity plays staged in Poland at Christmas time is slowly disappearing, but such cases still take place.

[Bonobo]

Reason 2

Economic (Part 1)

"Jews exploited Polish peasantry"

For centuries Jews worked as estate managers, administrators and agents for Polish gentry and nobility. It was Jews who collected taxes, increments and lease payments for their Polish lords. They also constituted a major link between Polish peasantry and commercial sphere. They ran rural inns where alcohol was sold under the so called propinacja system which contributed to the plague of drunkeness and debts among peasants. Naturally, it caused the enmity among the Polish population who felt, rightly or not, exploited by Jews. Generally, Jews were perceived by Polish lower classes as the main representatives of the exploitative economic system.


info-poland.icm.edu.pl/web/pop_people/jews/jewish_heritage/shtetls/Wells.shtml

Jews, being middle class and more educated than the Polish peasant, achieved intelligentsia status, and were thus hired by the ruling Szlachta poretz to super vise their estates. The poor peasants, the majority of the population, had contact only with the Jews and not with the rich Polish Szlachta. The Jews thus represented the rich oppressors of the poor. The Polish child grew up knowing that Jews were in supervisory positions. A few admired them, but most felt envy and resentment, which led to hatred. They felt that Poland was their country. I remember hearing a story about a poor small child who, coming home from school, asked her mother to teach her Yiddish. When the mother asked why Yiddish, the child answered that Jesus must under stand prayers better in Yiddish than in Polish, because the Jewish children brought better breakfasts to school.



www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=24461&i=Introduction.html
Only with the weakening of royal authority in Poland and Lithuania in the sixteenth century, especially following a law of 1539 that removed Jews living on noble estates from the king’s jurisdiction, did Jews began to look to the szlachta for effective protection and guarantees of their rights.14 At the same time, the nobility, the rising power in the state, began to take advantage of the Jews’ economic talents, first to undercut the urban monopoly of trade in the royal towns that was not in their favor, and then to help develop the markets and economic functioning of their estates. This was of enormous importance to the nobles because it was their estates that provided their income and the basis of their social status. Any means of enhancing their revenues was thus pursued with vigor.

An economic tradeoff between nobles and Jews resulted. Jewish merchants and businessmen served the economic needs of the nobility, and the nobility gave the Jews protection against their competitors and enemies. As a result, more and more Jews left the royal towns to settle on the noble estates.

This proved a highly successful strategy. Agricultural productivity grew rapidly, as did Polish grain exports to Central and Western Europe, and the estate owners profited handsomely. Jews, originally brought to the towns to enliven the urban markets, then moved into estate management by taking estates on leasehold (called arenda in Polish). They also contributed to the estate economy by managing the manufacture and sale of alcohol—a key growth sector. They did this by leasing the income from the estate owners’ monopoly on the alcohol business (prawo propinacyjne). As a result, the economic ties between Jews and magnates grew ever stronger.16

The export market for Polish grain collapsed following the end of the Thirty Years War, so the magnate estate owners began to exploit the home market much more intensively in order to extract the revenues they needed. Alcohol sales were key to this process and grew dramatically during the eighteenth century.

The Jews’ activity as merchants, leaseholders of entire estates or of monopoly rights on estates, and in a few cases even as salaried managers, expanded, further deepening their integration into the estate economy. Their roles in the markets for commodities and particularly alcohol became highly significant. As a result, Jews also became an integral part of the estates’ social structures—a situation that, as we will see in the course of this study, was reflected in the development of Jewish society itself.

These complex processes seem to have reached their apogee in the eighteenth century, as the magnate class grew ever stronger socially, economically, and politically. Since the magnates appreciated the ways in which Jewish businessmen helped improve their revenues, they made their estates particularly comfortable for Jewish life. A vibrant Jewish society developed.



www.persee.fr/doc/cmr_0008-0160_1976_num_17_2_1262

yivo.org/the-jewish-tavern-as-part-of-the-polish-landscape-interview-with-glenn-dynner

In Yankel's Tavern: Jews, Liquor & Life in the Kingdom of Poland (Oxford University Press, 2014), Glenn Dynner examines the iconic Polish Jewish tavernkeeper in the Kingdom of Poland.

In nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, the Jewish-run tavern was often the center of leisure, hospitality, business, and even religious festivities. This unusual situation came about because the nobles who owned taverns throughout the formerly Polish lands believed that only Jews were sober enough to run taverns profitably, a belief so ingrained as to endure even the rise of Hasidism's robust drinking culture.

As liquor became the region's boom industry, Jewish tavernkeepers became integral to both local economies and local social life, presiding over Christian celebrations and dispensing advice, medical remedies and loans. Nevertheless, reformers and government officials, blaming Jewish tavernkeepers for epidemic peasant drunkenness, sought to drive Jews out of the liquor trade. Their efforts were particularly intense and sustained in the Kingdom of Poland, a semi-autonomous province of the Russian empire that was often treated as a laboratory for social and political change.



www.glaukopis.pl/images/artykuly-obcojezyczne/JewishAttitudes1.pdf

Rather, it was the Polish peasantry that occupied the position of Blacks, at least up to the end of the 19th century. In pre-partition Poland, the Jews occupied a position between the landowners and the peasants that perpetuated inquities against the latter class. The primary exploitative device was the so-called propinacja, a liquor production and sale monopoly enjoyed by landowners on their estates and private towns, which was usually operated by Jewish leaseholders. As Jan Peczkis points out in his review of Hillel Levin’s book Economic Origins of Anti-Semitism: Poland and Jews in the Early Modern Period,67
Poland’s Jews did not simply transmit the policies of the Polish landowners to the peasants. These Jews had considerable autonomy, and assumed considerable powers of their own. To begin with, the Polish owners were often absent (p. 10) or only remotely involved with their estates (p. 62). Jews became leaseholders, or arendars. They often managed the estates. In fact, they sometimes managed entire villages, and oversaw the economic development of forests, mines, mints, breweries, etc., using serf labor (p. 62). Clearly, the Jews were less middlemen, and more an economic class. Author Levine leaves many questions unanswered. How was the exploitation of Polish peasants apportioned by Polish landlord and “middleman” Jew? To what extent were the landlords actively driving the liquor enterprises, and to what extent were they taking their “cut” of the already-functioning Jewish-run alcohol trade? One quoted Russian official, Kachovsky, who visited an area after the First Partition, contended that the Jews were the ones primarily responsible for the exploitation of the peasants (pp. 172–173). A quoted visitor, Stephens, reported observing a Jewish innkeeper wrangling with, and extorting money from, intoxicated peasants (p. 143). The scale of the Jewish liquor enterprise was staggering. Around 1750, about 85% of Polish Jews were in some way associated with the liquor trade (p. 9). Moreover, the very sustenance of many Polish Jews was dependent upon the propinacja (taproom) (p. 12). It is obvious that the Jews, most of all, had a vested interest in its perpetuation. Levine suggests that the Jewish role in the dysfunctional late feudal Polish society only postponed its end (pp. 237–238). However, the “cultural inertia” actually worked in several ways. Consider the “laziness” of the landowners. To what extent was it an outcome of the fact that the Jews had assumed such dominance in estate affairs? In Poland, unlike many western European nations, the Jews did not identify with Polish society (p. 236). Why should they, in view of their huge size and economic power in Poland? Now consider the complaints, repeatedly stated by
67 Hillel Levine, Economic Origins of Anti-Semitism: Poland and Jews in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 1991).
34
Levine, that Polish society suffered from decentralization and backwardness, and that the landowners were, for a long time, disinterested in modernization. Why should they, in view of the fact that most of the benefits would accrue to the Jewish economic class? Author Levine suggests that anti-Semitism developed as Poles, more and more, unfairly blamed the Jews for the propinacja. However, Levine acknowledges that Jewish prejudices also existed against Poles, and that the Jewish tavern-owner or liquor-dealer could use them to rationalize his role in the degradation of the Polish peasant. He comments, “The drink was both the effect and the cause of that broken resistance and degradation. The Jew, as the primary representative of this system, as the monetizer of unmarketable grain, could avert facing his contribution to the plight of the serf—a ‘Goy’, he might mutter in self-righteousness, ‘drunken sloth is the essence of the Gentile.’” (P. 10.)















en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propination_laws

Propination laws were a privilege granted to Polish szlachta that gave landowners a monopoly over profits from alcohol consumed by their peasants. In many cases, profits from propination exceeded those from agricultural production or other sources.
These laws usually included:
peasants were not allowed to purchase any alcohol not produced in their owner's distillery
alternatively, they could be allowed to brew their own drinks but had to pay a fee according to the amount produced
peasants had to buy at least a given quota of vodka or okovita. Those who didn't comply had the remaining amount dumped in front of their houses and had to pay the costs.
These laws first appeared in the 16th and were widespread by the 17th century. They lasted until 1845 (Prussian partition), 1889 (Galicia) and 1898 (Russian Partition).
Propination was the main cause for massive alcoholism in Poland; also, because taverns in rural region were leased nearly exclusively by Jews who took part in enforcing these privileges (being banned from most other occupations), it was also a major reason for anti-semitism among peasants.[1]

[Bonobo]

Reason 2

Economic Part 2

"Jews competed against Polish business and commerce and exploited Polish workforce"




After the long period of economic cooperation between Jews and the Polish elites, tensions rose when Poles started to open their own small and big businesses - both szlachta and lower classes.


For Jews, much more important than the money trade was the trade in merchandise and commodities. There were international Jewish merchants often acting, at least officially, as agents of the king or aristocratic magnates. They played a major role in the commonwealth’s import–export trade with Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Muscovy.
Within Poland, Jews were noteworthy as suppliers to large European trading firms that established branches in the big Polish cities. These Jews were at the high end of a commercial chain beginning in the countryside with the Jewish peddler, innkeeper, or market vendor who purchased the surplus produce or handicrafts of particular peasants or small landowners. This produce was marketed by the purchaser or by subsequent retailers, jobbers, or wholesalers. They sold it either in the local town on market day, or farther afield at regional fairs, in a provincial town market, or in a large commercial city. It was not unusual to find a Jew from a small town in Ukraine selling thread, flax, furs, nuts, honey, tallow, or cloth in a large city such as Lwów or even at international fairs in Breslau, Frankfurt, or Leipzig.
Beginning in the 1580s, legal sources began recording leasing (arenda) contracts between nobility latifundium owners and Jews. In 1594, for example, Prince Piotr Zabrzeski completed an agreement with Efrayim of Międzyboż and Efrayim’s Christian partner, Mikolaj Wransowicz. For the sum of 9,000 zloty, Zabrzeski leased all his possessions located in the district of Krzemieniec, including “all the villages and settlements appertaining to these estates, together with the noble boyars, the burghers, and the serfs of those cities and villages . . . all their debts, obligations, and privileges, with the arendas, taverns, tolls, ponds, mills, and their revenues, with the manors [folwarki], the various tithes paid by the boyars, burghers, and serfs of those districts, and all the other revenues . . .” (Arkhiv Yugo-Zapadnoi Rossii, part 6, I, article 78).

Of chief concern to Christians was the economic competition Jews posed to Christian guild merchants and craftsmen. Jews were continually increasing the number of products in which they traded, expanding their clientele to include more Christians and more areas of the town, and moving from wholesale to retail. Eventually, they also engaged more in crafts. Christians might also complain about Jewish commercial practices such as organizing syndicates to buy in volume, lowering profit margins, and advertising. There were allegations about Jewish failure to bear a fair share of town taxes and defense expenses, illegal Jewish construction, and high Jewish housing density. Another issue was the Jews’ purported privileged status vis-à-vis the Polish higher authorities.



www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Trade
The success of Jewish merchants in competing with their non-Jewish counterparts in all but the long-established royal towns, such as Kraków, Poznań, and Lwów, enabled them to take such a firm grip on the urban markets that foreigners in Poland were often under the impression that trade in Poland was entirely in Jewish hands. This was partly because even Jews whose main occupation was handwork or craft would sell their own produce. Thus, an even larger proportion of Jews were active in trade. Penetration by Jews of the markets means that it is hard to identify particular branches as especially “Jewish.” Among the most prominent branches of trade could be counted foodstuffs (including salt), beverages, furs, skins, and cloth—a commodity in which many Jewish women dealt. On the whole, however, Jews did not make up the wealthiest stratum of merchants but rather formed the secondary ranks of traders, suppliers, and distributors—from established shopkeepers to the poorest peddlers. There were also masses of indigent Jews who eked out a living by brokering small transactions between clients and merchants. Communal authorities often sharply criticized these usually poverty-stricken individuals for taking too large a percentage and ruining the market. All in all, then, despite economic competition and religious hostility, Jews became an accepted part of the Polish–Lithuanian markets, with business partnerships between Jews and non-Jews not uncommon.



www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Economic_Life

As a result, Jews concentrated in towns, often forming a second urban class parallel to that of the non-Jewish burghers. This led to competition between them, which found expression in the medieval urban legal system—Magdeburg Law—that excluded Jews from the urban merchant and craft guild monopolies. The hostility that accompanied competition between townspeople and Jews persisted throughout the history of East European Jewry, finding expression in both legislation and physical violence in every period.

During the eighteenth century, the number of Jewish craftsmen grew rapidly, often leading to new forms of social organization: in some cases, particularly in small towns in which the Jewish population was prominent, Jews were allowed to join local guilds either as individuals or as part of special Jewish sections. In others, among them the large towns of Kraków or Prague, Jews established their own guilds. As the range of Jewish craft activity grew to embrace, among other things, metalwork, carpentry, and soap and candle manufacture, there were signs that craftsmen attempted to avoid unnecessary competition with their neighbors. This led in some cases to a form of “division of labor,” with Jewish craft workers responsible for some professions in town and Christians for others. This arrangement, however, only barely masked the underlying competition and hostility between Jewish and non-Jewish craftsmen.


It was not until the sixteenth century, however, that Jews began to play a crucial role in the field of supply and distribution. Though they were still largely excluded from the retail market, their growing numbers and economic flexibility led more of them to take advantage of Poland’s network of regional, national, and international fairs and thus play a prominent role in the wholesale supply of goods to urban markets. In terms of retail distribution, economic necessity forced them to work in difficult conditions outside the urban monopolies; doing so, however, attracted them clients, particularly from among the nobility, who wanted to evade price-fixing disadvantageous to them. This situation irked non-Jewish burghers, who continued trying to limit Jewish mercantile activity; they seem to have encouraged the spate of anti-Jewish publications that appeared at the turn of the seventeenth century. The circumstances did not succeed, however, in seriously curbing the Jews’ activity in this field.





www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol13/no01/rudzienski.htm

The situation began to change with the development of capitalism in Poland. This development was carried out while the Polish ruling classes did not govern the country, while Poland was partitioned by three powers. The development took place in the intervals between wars and national revolutions, while the liberal nobility and the nascent bourgeoisie, ruined and impoverished by the revolutions, wasted away in Siberia and the dungeons of the Czar. With the growth of industries and cities, the Jews, who replaced in large measure the Polish Third Estate (bourgeoisie), began to acquire more and more economic importance and leaped from social and cultural isolation to dedicate themselves to the active tasks of economic life. Toward the end of the Nineteenth century, the ruined nobility, the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals and the petty-bourgeoisie found themselves face to face with a powerful Jewish bourgeoisie, both commercial and industrial, and with an energetic Jewish middle class which demanded not only an economic role but a political and cultural role as well, in the national life.

The small Jewish industrialist and merchant was much more skillful in the economic struggle than the “noble” Pole who felt himself compelled to engage in commerce and industry. The small Jewish artisan, and the poor shopkeeper labored much more cheaply than the Polish artisans and shopkeepers, forcing a terrible competition on the latter. Here then was the “economic” source of modern anti-Semitism in Poland. Since the Jews, a considerable part of the population, dominated almost all of commerce, small and medium-sized industry and the banks, and since they were an energetic, skillful people dedicated to business constantly, the Poles, with their feudal traditions could not compete successfully with them in the economic life of the country. Marx said in Capital that the Jews were parasites of Polish society. This, however, did not apply to Polish capitalist society where the Jews played an active role as merchants, industrialists and artisans, taking the place of the weak and embryonic Polish bourgeoisie and middle-class. This fact inspired the economic struggle between the Jewish and Polish bourgeoisie, and above all between the respective petty-bourgeoisie. The struggle was intensified by the fact that the Jews adhered to the culture of the occupying powers; German in the Austrian and Prussian sphere, and Russian in the Russian sphere, while the Poles stubbornly combated these cultures, holding fast to the Polish language, culture and literature.

[Bonobo]

Reason 3

Social/National

"Litvak Jews were an alien intrusion into Polish culture and social system"

The arrival of Litvaks to Poland took place at the end of 19 century. Most Poles, including contemporary writers, journalists, sociologist etc considered them a group very harmful to Polish interests.

www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Litvak


Only one source but very informative

www.glaukopis.pl/images/artykuly-obcojezyczne/JewishAttitudes1.pdf

The role of the so-called Litvaks (Litwak in Polish), Russian-speaking Jews who flooded into the ethnically Polish part of the Russian Empire in the latter part of the 19th century, in exacerbating Polish-Jewish relations has been remarked on by many authors. Poles were concerned, in particular, about the depolonization of the country’s historic capital. Historian François Guesnet comments:
The settlement of a considerable number of Russian-Jewish businesspeople and tradesmen in the Polish capital in the 1890s enlarged a pre-existing visible sub-community of Russian Jews who had kept close ties with the Empire, and were familiar with the Russian language and administration. Culturally, they were unreceptive to the Hasidic movement, indifferent to the Polish cause, and rather unsympathetic to those local Jews who would consider Polonization a viable cultural trajectory.175
This growing antagonism is one of the thorny matters raised by Julian Unszlicht, a Pole of Jewish background, in his controversial book O pogromy ludu polskiego: Rola socjal-litwacwa w niedawnej rewolucji [On the Pogroms against the Polish People: The Role of the Social-Litvakdom in the Recent Revolution], published in Kraków in 1912. Reviewer Jan Peczkis summarizes some of Unszlicht’s arguments as follows in an Amazon review:
Litvak (Litwak) publications (for specific citations, see, for example, pp. 127–129) made very derogatory remarks about Poland. Moreover, Unszlicht cited statements from the respected assimilationist Jewish periodical Izraelita, which echo Litvak positions, in stating that Polish culture is “a stinking pond”, “a corpse”, “a bankrupt cheater’s playing card” (p. 5). … The “Polish corpse” innuendo was a common feature of Jewish publications (e.g, pp. 19, 38, 58, 121, 127–128).


Far from being marginal, the Litvaks and their avant-garde, the Socialist-Litvaks (in contradistinction with Polish socialists), were the representatives of Polish Jewry under tsarist Russian rule (pp. 6, 370). Jewish nationalists, whether of the Zionist or Bundist variety (notably the latter: p. 361), actually harmed Jews by keeping them in medieval-like isolation, and in aggressive separatism from, if not enmity against, Polishness. The foregoing was the conclusion of not only the Endeks, but also of Polish socialists, as shown in their publication (which equally condemned the Litvaks and the Endeks: pp. 183–184). The most dangerously anti-Polish organizations, controlled by the Litvaks or Jewish nationalists, also included the Marxist so-called Social Democrats (SDKPiL; hereafter SD) (pp. 8, 13), often acting in unison (p. 295). What’s more, SD positions often enjoyed the support of larger Jewish parties, such as the Bund (pp. 58, 361, 284, 368). The cancer ran deeper. Sometimes, apparent advocates of Polish independence, such as the monthly Krytyka run by the Jew W. Feldman in Kraków, turned out to be allies of the SD and enemies of Polish independence (pp. 27–28). The Litvaks were agents of Russification, of turning the remaining Jews against Poles, and of trying to turn Poles against their national interests by defamation (pp. 12–13). Thus, the Polish Eagle was vilified as a symbol of the unchecked power and oppressiveness of the Polish nobility (p. 127). Polish heroism at the Battle of Grunwald was merely an escapade of one set of kings, nobles, and clergy fighting against another set, with the Pope switching sides to be on the side of the victor (p. 130). The National Democrats (Endeks) were bourgeoisie reactionaries stifling class-consciousness by turning Polish workers against German and Russian workers, and trying to bring back the pre-Partition Poland of privileged and non-privileged (pp. 130–131).

As for the Wilno-area Litvaks, they were not only hostile to Poland, but remained so long after the reborn Poland had become a reality in 1918. Kalman Weiser writes:

Much of Vilna’s [Wilno’s] Jewish intelligentsia came to embrace a demonstratively pro-Yiddish stance during World War I and continued to do so throughout the interwar period, even if, as elsewhere in the former tsarist empire, its members continued to speak Russian in private. This strategy was conditioned by a combination of factors: their lack of identification with Polish culture and the Polish nationalist cause (despite Vilna’s eventual re-incorporation into independent Poland), their distinctive Jewish nationalist aspirations, and their desire to maintain a relatively neutral positioning the conflict between Poles, Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Russians over control of the city and its environs.176
In fact, they mostly supported the Lithuanian cause, despite the fact that the 1916 German census made it clear that both the city of Wilno and the surrounding area had a Polish majority, and Lithuanians formed only a few percent of the city’s population. Jews who fled to Poland from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution mirrored the arrival of the Litvaks in the 19th century. Paradoxically, like their predecessors, they were overtly pro-Russian culturally and manifested a negative attitude toward Polish statehood.177 Polish Jews often called derogatory terms such as Litvak Khazir (“Lithuanian pig”) and Litvak Tseylem Kop (“Lithuanian cross head”).178







Polish sites about the issue of Litvaks

The devilish concept by Russians - Litvaks
polmedia.pl/litwacy-czyli-diabelski-pomysl-rosjan-zgodnie-z-planem-ich-sprowadzenie-do-polski-rozpalilo-konflikty/

Your streets, our tenement houses.
www.wykop.pl/ramka/1597769/wasze-ulice-nasze-kamienice-geneza-powiedzenia/

How a Jew turned into an enemy
www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/kraj/256497,1,jak-zyd-stawal-sie-wrogiem.read

[Bonobo]

Reason 4
Political Part 1

"Jews supported bolshevism which aimed at destroying Polish independence"

The stereotype goes that many Jews were not only supporters and propagators of bolshevik ideas but also members of such organisations. That was a major accusation during Polish Bolshevik War of 1920.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism

Jewish Bolshevism, also Judeo–Bolshevism, is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, which alleges that the Jews were the originators of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and that they held the primary power among the Bolsheviks. Similarly, the conspiracy theory of Jewish Communism implies that Jews have dominated the Communist movements in the world, and is related to The Zionist Occupation Government conspiracy theory (ZOG), which asserts that Jews control world politics.[1]

In 1917, after the October revolution, the catchword was the title of the pamphlet, The Jewish Bolshevism, which featured in the racist propaganda of the anti-communist White movement forces during the Russian Civil War (1918–22). The Nazi Party in Germany and the German-American Bund in the United States propagated the anti-Semitic theory to their followers, sympathisers, and fellow travellers during the 1930s.[2][3][4][5]

The expressions Jewish Bolshevism, Jewish Communism, and the ZOG conspiracy are used as far-right catchwords for the false assertions that Communism is a Jewish conspiracy. In Poland, "Judeo-Bolshevism", known as "Żydokomuna", was an antisemitic stereotype.[6]



By order of the Soviet Communist Party, a Polish puppet government,[78] the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee (Polish: Tymczasowy Komitet Rewolucyjny Polski, TKRP), had been formed on 28 July in Białystok to organize administration of the Polish territories captured by the Red Army.[20] The TKRP had very little support from the ethnic Polish population and recruited its supporters mostly from the ranks of minorities, primarily Jews.[29] At the height of the Polish–Soviet conflict, Jews had been subject to anti-semitic violence by Polish forces, who considered Jews a potential threat, and who often accused Jews as being the masterminds of Russian Bolshevism;[79][80] during the Battle of Warsaw, the Polish government interned all Jewish volunteers and sent Jewish volunteer officers to an internment camp.[81][82]


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Polish_Revolutionary_Committee


www.orthodoxchristianbooks.com/articles/371/bolshevism-jews/

Indeed, the Russian revolution may be regarded as one branch of that general triumph of Jewish power which we observe in the twentieth century in both East and West, in both Russia and America and Israel. The mainly Jewish nature of the Bolshevik leadership – and of the world revolution in general – cannot be doubted. Such a view was not confined to “anti-Semites”.

Thus Winston Churchill wrote: “It would almost seem as if the Gospel of Christ and the gospel of anti-Christ were designed to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the Divine and the diabolical… From the days of ‘Spartacus’ Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others.”

Douglas Reed writes: “The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprised 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People’s Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly ‘Socialist’ or other non-Communist parties… were 55 Jews and 6 others.”

Richard Pipes admits: “Jews undeniably played in the Bolshevik Party and the early Soviet apparatus a role disproportionate to their share of the population. The number of Jews active in Communism in Russia and abroad was striking: in Hungary, for example, they furnished 95 percent of the leading figures in Bela Kun’s dictatorship. They also were disproportionately represented among Communists in Germany and Austria during the revolutionary upheavals there in 1918-23, and in the apparatus of the Communist International.”

The Jews were especially dominant in the most feared and blood-thirsty part of the Bolshevik State apparatus, the Cheka, which, writes Brendon, “consisted of 250,000 officers (including 100,000 border guards), a remarkable adjunct to a State which was supposed to be withering away. In the first 6 years of Bolshevik rule it had executed at least 200,000. Moreover, the Cheka was empowered to act as ‘policeman, gaoler, investigator, prosecutor, judge and executioner’. It also employed barbaric forms of torture.”


Polish war propaganda posters with Jewish motiffs during the Polish Bolshevik war





dorzeczy.pl/historia/75081/Zdrajcy-1920-Namiestnicy-czerwonej-Moskwy.html

bazhum.muzhp.pl/media//files/Niepodleglosc_i_Pamiec/Niepodleglosc_i_Pamiec-r2012-t19-n1_4_(37_40)/Niepodleglosc_i_Pamiec-r2012-t19-n1_4_(37_40)-s205-213/Niepodleglosc_i_Pamiec-r2012-t19-n1_4_(37_40)-s205-213.pdf

rcin.org.pl/Content/44115/WA303_58726_A453-SzDR-R-28_Leinwand.pdf

[Bonobo]

Reason 4
Political Part 2

"Jews collaborated with the Soviet regime and oppressed Poles in occupied eastern territory at the beginning of WW2."

On 17 September 1939 Poland, already fighting against Germans in the west, was attacked by the Soviet Union from the east. The Red Army quickly stiffled the resistance of few Polish units quarding the border and conquered large areas of Eastern Poland. The popular belief at the time suggested that Jews gladly welcomed the invading Soviet forces and took part in the persecution of Polish patriots. Yes, such events did take place, indeed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

The Soviet invasion of Poland was a military operation by the Soviet Union without a formal declaration of war. On 17 September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Germany invaded Poland from the west. Subsequent military operations lasted for the following 20 days and ended on 6 October 1939 with the two-way division and annexation of the entire territory of the Second Polish Republic by Germany and the Soviet Union.[7] The joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland was secretly agreed to following the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939.[8] The Red Army, which vastly outnumbered the Polish defenders, achieved its targets by using strategic and tactical deception. Some 230,000 Polish prisoners of war had been captured.[4][9] The campaign of mass persecution in the newly acquired areas began immediately. In November 1939 the Soviet government ostensibly annexed the entire Polish territory under its control. Some 13.5 million Polish citizens who fell under the military occupation were made into new Soviet subjects following mock elections conducted by the NKVD secret police in the atmosphere of terror,[10][11] the results of which were used to legitimize the use of force. A Soviet campaign of political murders and other forms of repression, targeting Polish figures of authority such as military officers, police and priests, began with a wave of arrests and summary executions.[Note 5][12][13] The Soviet NKVD sent hundreds of thousands of people from eastern Poland to Siberia and other remote parts of the Soviet Union in four major waves of deportation between 1939 and 1941.





I think two informative sources are enough


www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206217.pdf

Another complaint was incessantly voiced by the Poles in the matter of the
"national reckoning" which they had with the Jews. Anders himself would
begin every meeting with Jewish representatives and delegations, and the
orders he issued relating to Jews, with the "reminder" that the Poles bore the
Jews a severe grievance for their disloyal behavior during the occupation and
internment in the prisons and camps.13 In his book, An Army in Exile,
describing the Polish Armed Forces organized in the Soviet Union, Anders
begins the chapter on "The Jews in the Armed Forces" with these words: "I
was greatly disturbed when, in the beginning, large numbers from among the
national minorities, and first and foremost Jews, began streaming to enlist. As
I have already mentioned, some of the Jews had warmly welcomed the Soviet
armies that invaded Poland in 1939..." In documents that were not intended
for publication or for public consumption, General Anders' style is much
harsher. Kot, too, writes in his report to the Foreign Minister in London, that
"the Poles feel very bitter towards the Jews for their behavior during the
Soviet occupation — their enthusiastic welcome of the Red Army, the insults
which they directed towards the Polish officers and men who were under
Soviet arrest, offering their services to the Soviets, informing on Poles, and
other acts of the sort." This one-sided accounting, listing only injuries to Poles
and reminding Jews of them — injuries for which the Jews were collectively
blamed — and the total disregard for Poland's anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish
policy between the wars, in particular the violence and organized persecution
of the late thirties was but the first in a whole series of claims invoked to
"justify" discrimination against Jews serving in the Polish Armed Forces in the
Soviet Union.


www.nybooks.com/articles/1987/04/09/poles-and-jews-an-exchange/

Mr. Brumberg’s reaction to a couple of sentences about Jewish collaboration with the Soviet invaders of eastern Poland in 1939–1941 is puzzling. If I had actually written even half of the things which he so eagerly demolishes, he might have had a point. But I didn’t, and he hasn’t. Only a fertile imagination would quote me as saying that prior to 1939 the Poles were “untouched by anti-Semitism.” Only a contortionist could bend my words to mean that the sole reason for Polish hostility to the Jews lay with the Soviet deportations. Only Mr. Brumberg could read into my remarks such farfetched suggestions as that “only Jews” collaborated, or that the deportees to the gulag did not include Jews. What I wrote, and can now confirm, amounts to this: firstly, that among the collaborators who came forward to assist the Soviet security forces in dispatching huge numbers of innocent men, women, and children to distant exile and probable death, there was a disproportionate number of Jews; and secondly, that news of the circumstances surrounding the deportations helped to sour Polish–Jewish relations in other parts of occupied Poland.

I might have added, for Mr. Brumberg’s comfort, that the majority of Polish Jews (like the great majority of Poles, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians) did not sympathize with Russian communism, did not welcome the Soviet invasion, and did not collaborate with the deportations. As reported in God’s Playground, there were an estimated 100,000 Jewish victims among the estimated 1.5 million Polish citizens deported to the depths of Russia and Central Asia in 1939–1941.3 None of which alters the original contention. Among those persons, who to their discredit did collaborate, there were “many Jews.”


and thirdly, that pro-Jewish sympathies were inhibited by knowledge of Jewish activities in the Soviet zone. And that is exactly what I was trying to convey.7

One might equally recall the report written in February 1940 by Jan Karski—one of those fearless Polish couriers who kept London in touch with occupied Poland, and who was subsequently decorated in Israel for his attempts to warn the West about the realities of the Holocaust:

“The Situation of the Jews on Territories Occupied by the USSR”

The Jews here feel at home, not just because they are not humiliated or persecuted, but because their smartness and adaptability has won them a certain measure of political and economic advantage.

The Jews are entering the political cells. They have taken over the majority of political and administrative positions, and are playing an important role in the labor unions, in the schools, and above all in commerce, both legal and illegal….

Polish opinion considers that Jewish attitudes to the Bolsheviks are favourable. It is universally believed that the Jews betrayed Poland and the Poles, that they are all communists at heart, and that they went over to the Bolsheviks with flags waving. Indeed, in most towns, the Jews did welcome the Bolsheviks with bouquets, with speeches and with declarations of allegiance and so on.

One should make certain distinctions, however. Obviously the Jewish communists have reacted enthusiastically to the Bolsheviks…. The Jewish proletariat, petty traders and artisans, whose position has seen a structural improvement, and who formerly had to bear the indifference or the excesses of the Polish element, have reacted positively, too. That is hardly surprising.

But what is worse, Jews are denouncing Poles (to the secret police), are directing the work of the (communist) militia from behind the scenes, and are unjustly denigrating conditions in Poland before the war. Unfortunately, one must say that these incidents are very frequent.8

The Yad Vashem archive in Israel, too, provides detailed substantiation of the same picture. “The Jews welcomed the Red Army with joy. The young people spent all their days and evenings with the soldiers.” In Grodno, “all sorts of appointments were filled predominantly with Jews, and the Soviet authorities entrusted them, too, with the top positions.” In Lwów, “I must admit that the majority of positions in the Soviet agencies have been taken by Jews.” A Jewish observer to the pro-Soviet demonstrations in Lwów related, “Whenever a political march, or protest meeting, or some other sort of joyful event took place, the visual effect was unambiguous—Jews.” In Wielkie Oczy, the Jewish doctor recalled how local Jewish youths, having formed themselves into a “Komsomol” toured the countryside smashing Catholic shrines. The references can be found in a recent study of the Soviet deportations from eastern Poland by J.T. and I. Gross, W Czterdziestym nas Matko na Sybir zeslali: Polska, a Rosja, 1939–1942.9

In Pinsk, where the population was over 90 percent Jewish, young Jews built an “Arc de Triomphe.”

The purpose here, of course, is not to demonstrate what one hopes would be taken for granted, namely, that Jews given the chance will behave as well or as badly as anyone else. The purpose is simply to show that the marked increase in anti-Semitism in occupied Poland in 1939–1941 was linked to Jewish conduct. To put the perspective of many Poles emotively, Jews were seen to be dancing on Poland’s grave.

[Bonobo]

Reason 5
Political part 3, connected with part 1 and 2

"Jews were numerous and active members of communist secret police and judiciary who oppressed Polish patriots after WW2"

In 1945, when the WW2 ended, Poland was liberated from Germans by the Red Army which resulted in another occupation - Soviet. Stalin intended to create a block of Soviet-controlled communist states in Eastern Europe and Poland was an important element. To achieve his goal, any organisations and individuals who tried to maintain/protect Polish independence had to be liquidated. The era of the so called stalinist terror began. The popular belief is that the Jewish willing participation in the oppressive system was substantial.


eurojewcong.org/news/communities-news/poland/top-polish-educator-blames-jews-communist-atrocities/

Top Polish educator blames Jews for Communist atrocities
March 6, 2018

A leading Polish educator engaged in an angry Facebook rant about alleged Jewish responsibility for Soviet atrocities against Polish citizens, amid deepening anger in Poland over international objections to new legislation that criminalises public discussion of collusion between Poles and the Nazi occupation forces during World War II.

“Young Jews should finally understand where the unhealed wounds of the Poles are!” wrote Ryszard Nowak – the director of the highly-regarded Lyceum XII public high school in the city of Krakow – in a Facebook post uncovered by the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

Claiming that Jews dominated the court system in communist Poland after “your Holocaust,” Nowak named several communist officials as responsible for the 1953 execution of Polish General Emil August Fieldorf by the Soviet NKVD secret police, highlighting their Jewish origins. Those listed by Nowak as culpable for the murder of Fieldorf – a former commander of the Polish Home Army that fought on the Allied side during the war – included “military prosecutor Helena Wolińska-Brus, a Polish communist Jewish activist, Beniamin Wajsblech, a Jewish prosecutor, Paulina Kern, a judge of Jewish origin, Maria Gurowska, a judge of Jewish origin, Advocate Emil Merz of Jewish origin, Gustaw Auscaler, a Polish advocate of Jewish descent.”


www.independent.co.uk/news/poland-blames-jews-for-the-crimes-of-communism-1046216.html

Poland blames Jews for the crimes of Communism

FROM ADAM LEBOR in Warsaw
Sunday 10 January 1999 01:02

THE FRONTLINES are being drawn in eastern Europe's latest conflict. This is a battle not over territory or borders, but for control of something more intangible and, for the continent's political health, more important: memory and historical justice.

This year marks 10 years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which triggered the end of the Soviet bloc and, ultimately, the Soviet Union itself. A decade after those first slabs of masonry came crashing down, the noise reverberates still across the lands where the Red Star of Russia once ruled unchallenged.

For nations, like people, suffer from the traumas that twist and shape their psyche: traumas of war and occupation, resistance and collaboration with dictatorships, Nazi or Soviet.

It is perhaps difficult for citizens of Britain, a country that has not been occupied for centuries, to imagine the mental scars left by Nazi and Soviet occupation and the choices of collaboration and compromise demanded by a reign of terror.

Now officials are grappling with the question of how to bring to account those Communist officials who organised systematic human rights abuses including judicially-sanctioned torture and murder.

Polish officials are now seeking the extradition of two alleged Communist- era criminals: Helena Brus, a former military prosecutor, now living in Oxford, and Salomon Morel, one-time commander of a Soviet detention camp, now living in Tel Aviv. "This is payback time for the Stalinist period. The same excuses were given by Nazi war criminals. They said they were innocent because they were just following orders," said Zbigniew Wolak, veteran in the Polish Home Army, many of whose comrades were killed or imprisoned on their return to post-war Communist Poland by the Soviets and their local supporters.

"You cannot punish the hundreds of thousands of people who were involved, but you can bring to justice those who were prominent. This is a battle for the memory of future generations. Either they will know the truth or it will be hidden."

But who to bring to justice, when the very nature of a totalitarian regime means that almost every citizen was, by their complicity in its demands, implicated to a greater or lesser degree, in its continuance? Perfectly preserved for decades in the vaults of national memory, these events are now rising to the surface of the consciousness of nations such as Poland, triggering a spate of attempts by legal officials to win what they believe is belated justice, but what others call veng-eance - a vengeance forged on the anvil of ancient prejudices.

The attempt by Polish authorities to force the extradition of Helena Brus, a former Stalinist-era military prosecutor in 1950s Warsaw, from Britain, has highlighted an issue that is set to haunt the new democracies of post-Communist eastern Europe for years to come. Last week, Poland's Supreme Court quashed an arrest warrant for Mrs Brus, formerly Wolinska.

Now married to an Oxford don, Wlodzimierz Brus, fellow of Wolfson College, Mrs Brus was accused of issuing an illegal arrest warrant for General August Emil Fieldorf, a leader of the Polish Home Army, who was hanged in 1953. Her case is likely to go to appeal.

Salomon Morel is wanted by the prosecutor in the southern Polish city of Katowice, charged with crimes against humanity while he was commander of Swietochlowice camp. More than 3,000 prisoners, mainly Germans, were held at the camp during 1945; more than half died or were murdered, according to the Polish news agency. Israel has refused his extradition, saying that the crimes with which he is charged are not seen there as genocide, and so are subject to statutes of limitations.

Dorota Boriczek, now 68 and living in Ludwigsberg, Germany, was taken to Swietochlowice when she was 14, with her mother. Morel was a cruel and barbaric man, she said. "He was young and very brutal. He came in at night, we could hear the cries of the men as they were beaten, then they threw the bodies out." Two straightforward cases, then, of two aged, alleged criminals, with blood on their hands, either directly or indirectly, finally being called to account.

Except that these cases are anything but straightforward. Both Mr Brus and Mr Morel are Jewish, Holocaust survivors who lost many in their families to the Nazis. However bloody their hands seem, they were two small cogs in a machine, run by hundreds of thousands of Stalin's willing functionaries. Many of those officials now live peacefully in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

During 1997 and 1998, Poland did not make a single extradition request from these countries for former Communist officials, according to the Polish Ministry of Justice. "The evidence against Salomon Morel is very damaging, but why, of all the commanders of the dozens of camps run by the Soviets, pick on him?" asked Konstanty Gebert, editor of the Warsaw- based Jewish magazine Midrasz. "There are no extradition requests to other countries where former NKVD officers must be living.

"The Morel case is very worrying, because when the Poles made the extradition request they must have known that Israel had no legal basis on which to accept it. So either the experts at the Ministry of Justice are incompetent, or this was done to make Israel look bad."

For Maria Fieldorf-Czarska, who is daughter of the hanged General Fieldorf and is pressing for Mrs Brus's extradition, Poland has said sorry to Jews too many times. Now it is their turn to apologise to Poland, she claims. Mrs Fieldorf-Czarska, now 73 and living in Gdansk is blunt with her opinions. "The sad truth is that our secret services in the 1950s were dominated by Jews. They were disposed to Communism, perhaps it is genetic. All the people connected with the arrest and prosecution of my father were Jewish, and most of them went to Israel.

"Nobody says sorry to us, but nowadays we have to say sorry to Jews all the time. Our government apologised for the Jews killed by the Germans: now Israel should apologise to us."








polish-jewish-heritage.org/Eng/prl.htm

Why did so many Jews belong to the communist party, the Security Service (secret police) and participate in other centrally controlled public institutions in the Polish People's Republic?


Wladyslaw Bartoszewski replies: Yes, statements of this nature are often heard. If you have a minority, not only religious but also political and, which moreover serves the communist party of the Soviet Union, a perceived enemy of Poland, that minority can expect a negative attitude from the majority.

However, the very formulation of this question is already an accusation and is biased. First we are assigning a special role to Jews in those public institutions. Are we talking about Jews as a nation or as a religious group? If we?re talking about Jews as a religious group, this is pure nonsense. For a religious Jew it was impossible to take guidance from marxist dialectical materialism. If we single out Jews as a nation, then we exhibit a racist way of thinking. The assimilated Jews considered themselves citizens of Poland. They thought and acted within the political context of Poland. There had also been purely Polish communists in pre-war Poland, such members of intelligentsia as Wanda Wasilewska, Stefan Jędrychowski and his wife, Jerzy Sztachelski and his wife, and other leading non-Jewish communists; ?Aryans? in Nazi vocabulary - fortunately such distinctions had not been in mainstream use in pre-war Poland. Generally, non-religious Jews were culturally and politically assimilated. They identified themselves as Poles. So which Jews are we talking about here?

I have already talked about Zionists and Bundists in our second interview. Zionists were treated with hostility by the communist party. They left Poland right after the war or around 1948-49. When the state of Israel was created in 1948, Jews left Poland in big numbers despite obstacles. Others, against their tradition, became supporters of the new regime. This was also the case of many Poles..

Members of the Bund were social democrats and enemies of communism. However, they were ordered to join the Polish United Workers? Party. As a result the Bund was disbanded in 1948. The Polish Socialist Party experienced a similar fate. For the members of the Bund there was no politically comfortable place in Poland. So, we have crossed out the Zionists and the Bundists. Again which Jews are we talking about? We are left only with non-political Jews, opportunists such as existed also among the Polish population and with declared communists, statistically a small group of people.

Now, we can ask the question : why did so many Jews join the communist milieu? The answer is rooted in the interwar years in Poland. The Jewish minorities in Poland, as well as in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states, did not see any future for themselves. Because of their numbers and a relatively high rate of assimilation, the local population was unfriendly. Also the orthodox Jews did not tolerate a different way of thinking among the younger generation.

What roads were open to them ? Either Zionism which offered them a chance to build a utopian life (it ceased to be a utopia after the state of Israel came into being) or communism which trumpeted equality of all people, and the elimination of racial, religious, and national prejudices. It was a big lie but young Jews, like many young Poles, did not realize this. Władysław Gomułka, for example, did not have a trace of Jewish roots, his background was Polish and peasant, and he believed in communism. It was obvious for him that his marriage to a Jewish communist activist came as a natural part of solidarity among the proletarians. Such were his convictions.

Numerous Jews, survivors of the war, who lived through the camps and mass deportations, arrived in Poland from the Soviet Union (over 200 000). Most of them knew how to read and write. Illiteracy, so common among Polish and Belorussian peasants, did not exist among the Jews. Relatively many Jews met the minimum requirement for office work. The Soviet regime very skillfully manipulated the Jews. The Soviets played on Jewish pre-war problems, resentments and fears to bind them to the Soviet power as the only guarantor of a better present and future for their families. The Jews received officer ranks in the army and in the security service which were previously unavailable to the majority of them except for the physicians or the older generation of Piłsudskis legionnaires of Jewish background. Those people received such privileges because the Soviets were certain they were not Polish nationalists. And this guaranteed a minimum of loyalty.

There are no statistical data presenting a precise percentage of Jews in the Polish United Workers? Party, in the Central Committee of the Party or the security apparatus. There is no doubt, however, that the proportions were above 10% in the Party and the security apparatus, even greater at the level of some of the important, higher-ranking positions. At a first glance, there appears to be a lack of balance.

Yes, Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc were in the Politburo - I?m talking here about the initial post-war years in Stalinist Poland - but neither Bolesław Bierut, nor Józef Cyrankiewicz, Marian Spychalski, Władysław Gomułka, Zenon Nowak, Stanisław Radkiewicz (a longtime minister of security) were Jewish. They were perhaps political renegades who ignored or had a different understanding of the Polish raison d?etat, but they were not Jewish.

Why is it that when one talks about negative examples of Jewish behavior in Poland, the same names of interrogation officers with Jewish last names always pop up? Today, among the most infamous are Humer and Serkowski. Humer was of German background, not Jewish. He came from a family of German settlers in Tomaszów Lubelski, where he went to school before the war. There were many other notorious interrogation officers in Mokotów prison like Dusza and Chimczak. They were second league tormentors such as are present in every totalitarian system but by no means Jewish.

Why do we hear constantly that the Jews were in charge of Security in Poland and we don?t hear that it was run by the Politburo? Today, after documents have been opened, we know that Bierut personally endorsed all death sentences. Among the executed were members of the Polish intelligentsia, officers, cadets, students, political activists fighting for independence from different political movements from nationalists to socialists; in other words very different people. Did the Jews really decide about these sentences? I would be very cautious answering this question. The chief executioner, the chief prosecutor of the Polish People?s Army, General Zarako-Zarakowski was not Jewish. He came from a Polish Belorussian family, was born in Polesie, and graduated from the Stefan Batory University in Vilna. Numerous other prominent persons in the military prosecutor?s office were not Jewish. On the other hand, however, there were many Jews among the military defense attorneys.

There were very few Jews in the government of communist Poland. Józef Cyrankiewicz, the longest serving Prime Minister in Europe, was not Jewish. The government consisted of Polish professionals with either socialist or liberal political backgrounds. We need to remember that the communists infiltrated and destroyed the major political parties and re-established them under the names of the United Peasant Party (Zjednoczone Stronnictwo Ludowe) and the Democratic Party (Stronnictwo Demokratyczne). They also established and supported groups of young Catholic activists gathered in the Pax movement with the goal of splitting the Catholic Church in Poland. There were many people who, in my opinion, did a dirty job. But there were very few Jews among them. Accusing Jews of a disproportional role in the communization of Poland offers an easy explanation of difficult subjects.

So, why did some Jews join the Party? Because they saw in it the only guarantee of free life and equality. After Stalinism, many of them started leaving Poland in the years 1956 and 1957. Only several tens of thousands stayed in Poland. Mostly, these were Jews with a Polish cultural consciousness, members of mixed marriages, who being married to Poles decided to stay in Poland. Were all of these people privileged? In 1967-68, the Communist Party - in a struggle inside the party - used them as scapegoats in a disgraceful way from the point of view of its own doctrine. Intellectuals in general became scapegoats, including many non-Jews, liberal and independent-minded people who did not want to accept the fascist course of the red party. The fascist faction was unacceptable to them.

The experiences and choices of the Jews in Poland were not homogenous. To conclude: if out of 300 000 Polish Jews - I?m talking here about the citizens of post-war Poland who survived (four fifths of them in the Soviet Union, one fifth in hiding, in guerilla units or in the German camps) - if out of these people over 200 000 left Poland during the first three years after the war, it means that, from the very beginning, the majority of Polish Jews did not want to build communism in Poland
























Julia Brystiger


Julia Brystiger (née Prajs, born November 25, 1902, in Stryj – died November 9, 1975, in Warsaw) was a Polish Communist activist and member of the security apparatus in Stalinist Poland.[1] She was also known as Julia Brystygier, Bristiger, Brustiger, Briestiger, Brystygierowa, Bristigierowa, and by her nicknames – given by the victims of torture: Luna, Bloody Luna, Daria, Ksenia, and Maria. The nickname Bloody Luna was a direct reference of her Gestapo-like methods during interrogations. Her pen name was Julia Preiss.[2] Author of several books.

Life

Brystiger was the daughter of a Jewish pharmacist from Stryj (now Ukraine). In 1920 she graduated from high school in Lwów (new Second Polish Republic) and married a Zionist activist Natan (Nathan) Brystiger. She studied history at the Lwów University while pregnant and a year later gave birth to a son, Michał Bristiger.[3]

After graduating from University, Brystiger went to Paris where she continued her education, receiving a PhD in philosophy. Upon their return, in 1928–1929, she got a job at a high school in Vilnius and in a Jewish Teacher's College Tarbuch. Since 1927, she was an active participant in the communist movement, and in 1929 was fired because of her communist agitation. Working for the Communist Party of Poland, she was arrested several times, and in 1937 was sentenced to 2 years in prison.[2]
Stalinist agent

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After the German and Soviet attack on Poland, Brystiger escaped to Samarkand, accepted Soviet citizenship and became an active member of the Soviet political administration. She created the so-called Committee of Political Prisoners, which helped the NKVD to imprison several members of the prewar Polish opposition movements.[4] She was "denouncing people on such scale, that she antagonized even Communist party members".[3] Ironically, at one point Brystiger oversaw the interrogation and persecution of Bela and Józef Goldberg – her future colleague, the UB interrogator known as Józef Różański. Różańskis had committed "a crime" of accepting Western food-aid in the form of two kilograms of rice and a bag of flour from the Polish Government in Exile's embassy, in order to save their daughter from starvation. A few years later, Józef Różański joined the NKVD and eventually, became a high ranking functionary in the Polish secret police. He ended up working alongside Brystiger – his former interrogator – in the Ministry of Public Security of Poland under Stalinism.[5]

Following German Operation Barbarossa Brystiger fled to Kharkov, then to Samarkand deep in the USSR. In 1943-44, she worked for the Union of Polish Patriots, and in October 1944, joined the new Polish Workers' Party.

In December 1944, after returning behind the Soviet front, Brystygier began working for the infamous Ministry of Public Security of Poland, where she soon got promoted to the rank of Director of the Fifth Department created in July 1946 specifically for the purpose of persecution and torture of Polish religious personalities.[6] Her career is believed to have been so rapid also because she was intimate with such high functionaries as Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc.[4] In the Polish official archives, there is an instruction written by Brystygier to her subordinates, about the purpose of torture:

In fact, the Polish intelligentsia as such is against the Communist system and basically, it is impossible to re-educate it. All that remains is to liquidate it. However, since we must not repeat the mistake of the Russians after the 1917 revolution, when all intelligentsia members were exterminated, and the country did not develop correctly afterwards, we have to create such a system of terror and pressure that the members of the intelligentsia would not dare to be politically active.[7]

Brystiger personally oversaw the first stages of each UB investigation at her place of employment. She would torture the captured persons using her own methods such as whipping male victims' genitals. One of her victims was a man named Szafarzynski – from the Olsztyn office of the Polish People's Party – who died as a result of interrogation carried out by Brystygier. One of the victims of her interrogation methods testified later: "She is a murderous monster, worse than German female guards of the concentration camps". Anna Roszkiewicz–Litwiniwiczowa, a former soldier of the Home Army, said about Brystygier: "She was famous for her sadistic tortures; she seemed to have been obsessed with sadistic treatment of genitalia and was fulfilling her libido in that way.".[8]

Brystiger became the head of the 5th Department of MBP sometime in the late 1940s. It specialized in the persecution of Polish religious leaders. Brystygier – a dogmatic Marxist – yearned to destroy all religion as an "opiate of the masses".[2] She directed the operation to arrest and detain the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski. The decision to arrest him had been made earlier in Moscow. Brystygier took an active part in the "war against religion" in the 1950s, in which only in 1950 (in one year), 123 Roman Catholic priests were imprisoned.
She also persecuted other congregations, such as the 2,000 jailed Jehovah's Witnesses.[1] Julia Brystygier left the Ministry of Public Security in 1956 and tried to become a writer, authoring a novel "Crooked Letters". She worked in a publishing house under Jewish communist Jerzy Borejsza (Różański's brother), and was a frequent visitor to a boarding school for the vision impaired, in a village near Warsaw

[Bonobo]

Here are threads which somehow relate to the topic

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/130/polish-jewish-troubled-neighborhood

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/3890/polish-jewish-israeli-relations-today

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/3774/nationalists-soccer-jewish-israeli-symbols

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/2738/jewish-life-modern-day-poland

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/5410/polish-antisemitic-jewish-antipolish

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/1581/communist-murderers-oppressors

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/5381/polish-jewish-relations-second-world

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/5408/march-1968-anti-jewish-campaign

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/2845/poklosie

polandsite.proboards.com/thread/2065/poland-get-truth-jewish-bandits

[Bonobo]

I think I have finished presenting all the main causes of Polish antisemitism.

Reason no 1 - religious differences - is the oldest and most important, all other reasons occured later in time and seem to stem from the first. Without the religious gap between Jews and Christians the cooperation would have been much better, even if there had been some frictions in business or elsewhere. After their arrival, due to a different faith, Jews were instantly treated with suspicion and hostility by local communities and society in general, which resulted in their alienation and intolerance towards them. Such negative attitudes inspired by religious motives lasted for centuries. And even though today religion isn`t so important to people like in the past, old traditional animosities have remained, blocking the way for understanding and tolerance in modern times.

Paradoxically, there is still hope.

antisemitism.org.il/136387


Jews feel safer in Europe’s conservative East than its liberal West
November 27, 2018

Source: commentary magazine

A pervasive false impression.

by Evelyn Gordon

The narrative adopted by many American Jews these days is that rightist governments enable antisemitism, while liberal governments allow Jewish communities to flourish. A corollary of this thesis is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open friendship with rightist governments in Eastern Europe has enabled antisemitism. Thanks to a poll of European Jews published last week, we now have some facts by which to judge this thesis. And the facts appear to belie it.

The Joint Distribution Committee’s International Center for Community Development surveyed 893 Jewish leaders and professionals from throughout Europe and found that in general, Jews felt safe everywhere. Nevertheless, there was a stark difference between Eastern and Western Europe.

In the east, a whopping 96 percent of respondents felt safe, while only four percent felt unsafe. In the West, 76 percent felt safe, and 24 percent felt unsafe. Respondents from places like Poland, Hungary, and Romania—countries routinely accused of having antisemitic, borderline fascist governments—felt safer than Jews in liberal countries like France and Germany by a 20-point margin.

Moreover, “Western European respondents were more likely to consider antisemitism as a threat than were Eastern Europeans, and to report deterioration in the situation from earlier surveys,” the JDC’s report said. Nor is this mere subjective perception: Other studies have found that Jews are much more likely to experience physical violence in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe. In 2017, for instance, Hungary’s 100,000 Jews didn’t report a single physical attack, while Britain’s 250,000 Jews reported 145.

Jews in both regions expected antisemitism to worsen over the next five to 10 years, with the result that combatting antisemitism “ranked among the top three communal priorities” for the first time since the survey began in 2008. Nevertheless, the East fared better than the West on this score, too. “A significant regional difference emerged on expectations of increasing antisemitism with those in Western Europe considerably more pessimistic (75 percent) than those in the East (56 percent),” the report read.

There are two reasons for all these seemingly counterintuitive results, which, as the report noted, are a “reversal of the situation … over the past two centuries.” The first is the politically incorrect fact that violence against Jews in Europe comes mainly from Muslim antisemites rather than either the right-wing or the left-wing variety (see, for instance, the shootings at a Jewish museum in Brussels, a Jewish school in Toulouse, and a kosher supermarket in Paris). And in Western Europe, liberal governments spent decades implementing liberal immigration policies that have produced large Muslim populations. Eastern Europe has very few Muslims, initially because decades of Communist rule made these countries economically uninviting and more recently because rightist governments have imposed restrictive immigration policies.

The second reason is more speculative since correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causality. Nevertheless, as the report noted, the findings are suggestive: “Hostility towards Israel in the general society is perceived to be fiercer in Western Europe; 88 percent of leaders from Western Europe considered that the media in my country regularly portrays Israel in a bad light, as opposed to only 36 percent from Eastern Europe [italics in original].” Here, too, objective data seems to support this hypothesis: Whenever Israel launches a major counterterrorism operation, anti-Israel sentiment spikes along with antisemitic attacks.

Everyone except antisemites understands that Israeli actions don’t justify attacks on Jewish citizens of other countries, but rampant anti-Israel sentiment often makes antisemites believe that society will tolerate such attacks as long as they can be portrayed as “anti-Israel.” And this belief is hardly unfounded. To take just one example, consider the notorious case of a German synagogue firebombed in 2014. Both the trial court and the appeals court ruled that this wasn’t an antisemitic crime, but merely an overly zealous form of political opposition to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Consequently, the perpetrators received mere suspended sentences.

In short, hostility toward Israel in the surrounding society encourages antisemitic acts among people who already hold antisemitic beliefs. And since hostility toward Israel emanates primarily from the left these days, it’s no surprise that such hostility is higher in liberal Western Europe than conservative Eastern Europe. Thus, both of the main contributors to antisemitism in Europe today—Islamic antisemitism and left-wing hostility toward Israel, are more prevalent in the liberal West than in the allegedly “fascist, antisemitic” countries of Eastern Europe.

None of the above implies that right-wing antisemitism isn’t a real problem; it obviously is. Nor does it imply that Eastern Europe’s right-wing governments have a clean bill of health on antisemitism; they have been responsible for some undeniably problematic acts and statements. It certainly doesn’t guarantee that nationalist parties won’t turn against the Jews tomorrow, as a prominent European rabbi warned last week. The British Labour Party’s swift transformation into an antisemitic cesspool shows just how quickly Jew-friendly attitudes can disappear. And it doesn’t mean America’s situation is necessarily analogous; the U.S. is too different from Europe for easy parallels to be drawn.

Yet to pretend, as many American Jews do, that right-wing antisemitism is the only kind we need to worry about flies in the face of reality, at least as it has played out in Europe. The European reality similarly belies the claim that rightist governments are, by definition, bad for the Jews. And given that reality, Netanyahu’s close relations with conservative European governments could actually help combat antisemitism in those countries by bolstering their positive attitudes toward Israel.

The world is a great deal more complex than the simple “left-wing good, right-wing bad” equation so prevalent among American Jews today. And recognizing that complexity might help liberal Jews be more understanding of their conservative brethren, both at home and in Israel.

Evelyn Gordon, who writes for Commentary’s blog, is a journalist and commentator living in Israel.

[Bonobo]

Reason 6

Modern Jews` antiPolish attitude

Dec 4, 2018 10:06:45 GMT 1 Bonobo said:

I think I have finished presenting all the main causes of Polish antisemitism.

While presenting old reasons from past centuries, I forgot about a new, modern one, namely the public utterances of renowned Jewish/Israeli politicians visibly troubled by antiPolish agenda.
Especially, about Polish antisemitism which is imbibed by all Poles with mother`s milk. Such statements are unfair, of course, but they are repeated so often that even neutral Poles have enough. Unfortunately, this enough turns into dislike or even hatred of Jews. And so the vicious circle goes one. Jews accuse Poles of antisemitism, and Poles believe it and behave accordingly.


The earliest remark like that comes from 1989.

www.jta.org/1989/11/30/archive/issue-of-polish-anti-semitism-arises-during-israelis-meeting-in-warsaw

Israel’s clear-cut interest in restoring diplomatic relations with Poland has been confronted by that country’s long history of anti-Semitism.

The issue was raised bluntly by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in a recently published interview and by other Likud politicians.

It is dogging Vice Premier Shimon Peres on his current visit to Poland.

Peres, who is Israel’s finance minister and leader of the Labor Party, assured Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki at their meeting in Warsaw on Tuesday that “Israel and the Jewish people oppose ‘anti-Polandism,’ as much as you oppose anti-Semitism.”

The exchange of remarks about anti-Semitism was initiated by Mazowiecki, a leader of the Solidarity trade union movement, regarded as a firm friend in Israeli and Jewish circles.

He apparently was alluding indirectly to Shamir’s published remark that the Poles were deeply imbued with anti-Semitic feelings. “They drink it in with their mother’s milk,” the Israeli prime minister was quoted as saying.

Both Shamir and Peres were born in Poland, though Peres left at an earlier age. According to journalists accompanying him, Peres was at pains to ease the tension raised by Shamir’s remarks, without losing sight of Poland’s dismal record with regard to its once huge Jewish population.

Peres invited Mazowiecki to visit Israel, and the devoutly Catholic Polish prime minister eagerly accepted, saying he looked forward to visiting the holy places.

‘NEW CHAPTER’ IN RELATIONS

The restoration of diplomatic relations with Israel, which the Poles broke in 1967, seems likely in the near future.

After meeting Tuesday with Peres, Poland’s foreign minister, Krzysztof Skubiszewski, said “a new chapter” in relations between the two countries would open in the first four months of 1990.

The foreign minister, also a Solidarity leader, said it had been a mistake to break off with Israel 22 years ago.

The first steps to rectify it were taken in 1988, when Israel and Poland opened interest sections in Warsaw and Tel Aviv respectively.

Skubiszewski made clear that Poland will have to move forward carefully, however, because of its large volume of trade with the Arab world. He and Peres had a detailed discussion of prospective economic cooperation.

Peres learned of Poland’s interest in Israeli agricultural exports and expertise, and of Warsaw’s plans to open a chain of Kosher restaurants, in anticipation of greater Jewish tourism.

But a different note was sounded Tuesday in the Knesset by Gideon Patt, the minister of tourism and a member of the Likud bloc’s Liberal Party wing. He said relations with Warsaw, if restored, should be “correct,” but no more.

In Patt’s view, Israel should not go out of its way to establish closer economic ties with Poland. “We should not support the Polish economy in its attempt to recover,” he said.

He was articulating an undercurrent of discomfort over the Israeli-Polish thaw, discernible in parts of Israeli society, notably among Holocaust survivors and their families.