Jewish life over death in Poland

Poland. The nation is the ancestral home of two-thirds of American Jews, and millions of other Americans as well. Yet the mere mention of Poland can provoke negative reactions ranging from cold indifference to outright hostility. For many the Holocaust — 3,000,000 Polish Jews were murdered there — is the central fact that bars even the prospect of redemption. Thousands of visitors from the West fly into Krakow solely to experience the death camps and witness the horrors, leaving the country without any exposure to the great culture that existed there for 1,000 years.

Yet Poland today, 60 years after the end of World War II and the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, is a new nation, populated by millions of people who were born since 1945. Should Poles carry the guilt of the horrors perpetrated by others a long time ago? More to the point, how should we relate to that nascent Jewish community that is sprouting new life every day in Poland's remarkable transition from a communist state to a fledgling democracy?

Here are three vignettes to convey a sense of what is happening in the new Poland, where anti-Semitism is reportedly less than it is in France or Belgium.

Scene One. Our group from the Taube Foundation in San Francisco is in the Lauder Morasha School in Warsaw, watching a group of kindergarten children who are as adorable as can be. They remind us of kids in San Francisco, New York or anywhere. They draw pictures and sing for their visitors. But there is something very distinctive about these young students: They are all grandchildren of survivors, and their grandparents have only late in life shared the secret with their own children (the parents of the kindergarteners) that their family is of Jewish origin. The children of the survivors, in turn, are sending their kids to Jewish day schools to recover their cultural traditions. This is happening throughout the Central and East European nations, which suffered first under the Nazis and then the Soviets.

Scene Two. The Jewish Culture Festival makes its annual summer appearance in Krakow, Poland's second city and a major center of Jewish culture until World War II. A concert in Kazimierz, the Jewish Quarter (which, unlike Warsaw, escaped physical devastation in the war), brings 12,000 people into the market square, which rocks with klezmer jazz for hours on end. Singer and actor Theodore Bikel, he of Tevye fame, stands before the huge crowd capturing their respect and admiration. Bikel is 45 years older than the average member of the audience, which consists primarily of young non-Jews.

Scene Three. In the Galicia Jewish Museum, a panel of students from Czulent, a Krakow-based student group, discusses Jewish identity and continuity. These are young people who are finding their way to a Jewish identity, a process denied their parents until 15 years ago when the state began emerging from communist rule. Now Poles are free to ask whatever questions they want, to assemble and act politically, to write and publish as they wish. This has all happened within the students' brief lifetimes. For comparison, in America we have had an unadulterated and continuous 350 years to explore the same issues. It has never been illegal in the United States — not for a day, not for an hour — to openly practice one's Jewish faith.

What is the meaning of these stories? They point to life, not death, as a preeminent theme for the future of Poland. Where the unspeakable once took place, a new generation of Poles — many of them rediscovering their Jewish roots — is exploring what the Holocaust did to Poland and what was lost of the great culture that once flourished there.

It is not a huge community but it is alive and vibrant, humming with possibilities. The Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture, which sponsored the journey to Poland this summer for a dozen Bay Area community leaders, is working with other philanthropies through its Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland (JHIP) to bolster and support the institutions of Jewish life.

Jewish life in Poland outlasted the Third Reich, and the synagogues and cemeteries trashed by the Nazis are being restored. But not only Jews have a large stake in this Polish renaissance. So do other Poles, for while Poland's pre-war Jewish population was about 10 percent of the nation, the Nazis through their destruction of Polish Jewry killed 40 percent of Poland's journalists, 50 percent of its physicians, 60 percent of its violinists, etc. American Jews also have a stake in seeing a strong, democratic and pluralistic community emerge in triumph over one of the darkest chapters in the history of humanity.




Stephen Mark Dobbs is the executive director of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture.




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