Andrzej Folwarczny thinks he knows, at least a little, how Jewish citizens of Poland feel being a minority in an overwhelmingly Catholic country. He is a Lutheran, which makes him a minority in Poland as well.
That explains in part his desire to change the dynamics between Jews and non-Jews in Poland. Fifteen years ago, the former member of parliament launched the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, a nonprofit dedicated to fostering positive Polish-Jewish relations and eradicating anti-Semitism (www.dialog.org.pl/en). “We’re looking for ways to build bridges,” Folwarczny said.
While much of the credit for reviving Jewish life in Poland goes to Jewish activists and organizations in Poland, nonsectarian groups like the Forum play important roles, especially when it comes to shifting the attitudes of non-Jewish Poles.
“This was a taboo subject,” Folwarczny said of his country’s troubled relations with its Jewish citizens. “What you learned in school was a false version of history, the history of the martyrdom of Poles. After Communism, there was a whole competition of victimhood.”
A recent poll of Warsaw high school students asked who had suffered the most during the war, Poles or Jews. Nearly half, 44 percent, said they suffered equally. Sixty percent of the respondents said they would not like to have a Jewish partner, while 45 percent said they “would not be happy” if they had a Jewish relative.
The signature program of Folwarczny’s organization, the School for Dialogue, aims to crush anti-Semitism before it starts by teaching tolerance to youths. Working with middle-school students, organizers go into towns across Poland and task the teens with researching Jewish life in their city before the Holocaust. Often there are no Jews around to talk to, but old-timers might remember the days when Poland was the center of the Jewish universe and better relations reigned.
The students film their exploits in the towns, interviewing people, collecting oral histories, visiting Jewish cemeteries and uncovering a truth they never knew existed. “Students learn about the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” Folwarczny said, “but they may know nothing about the Jews from their town.”
Forum board member Zuzanna Radzik was raised strictly Catholic, but when she discovered anti-Semitic literature in the basement bookstore of her local church, she complained. Church officials ignored her, until she went to the press. She became known as “the bookstore girl,” with the media glare eventually forcing the church to remove the offensive material.
She went on to earn a religious studies degree from Hebrew University. Philo-Semitic as she is, the Forum is a good fit for her activism.
Working with the kids is a joy for Radzik. She recalled how in the town of Konin, teen researchers discovered that one hometown boy made good: physicist Leopold Infeld, who went on to collaborate with Albert Einstein. The same students left messages written in rocks and placed them on long-neglected Jewish tombstones “to show someone visited the graves” in the town where thousands were deported or murdered during the Holocaust.
The Forum has drawn wide international support, including from the U.S. State Department, Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture.
Folwarczny says his program’s goal “is not to teach history as much as it is to change attitudes.” It must be working. When one teenage girl in the town of Koprzywnica finally mentioned to her classmates that her grandmother was Jewish, the other kids cried out, “Oh, that’s so cool!”