Israeli ambassador to Poland is ‘smothered in love’

Friday, September 6, 2002 | by

RUTH E. GRUBER

KRAKOW—The scene shown live on Polish television was extraordinary.

The camera panned across the 10,000 frenzied fans who crammed into the main square of Krakow's old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, for the final concert of the annual weeklong Festival of Jewish Culture.

Suddenly, the camera zoomed in closer.

There in the middle of the cheering, dancing throng was a familiar bearded face: Israeli Ambassador Shevach Weiss, almost lost in the crush, dancing hand in hand with the other revelers.

"Shevach Weiss," says Konstanty Gebert, publisher of the Polish Jewish monthly Midrasz, "is probably the only Israeli ambassador in the world whose main threat comes from being smothered in love."

Weiss, 66, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland and the former speaker of the Knesset, has become a popular and even beloved figure in Poland since taking up the post of Israeli ambassador in 2001.

He travels widely around the country and appears frequently on television and at public events, disarming and charming the Polish public with his blunt yet informal style.

"Even when he says something that Poles disagree with, they still like him," said Andrzej Folwarczny, a former member of the Polish Parliament who now heads a center for cross-cultural dialogue in the southern town of Gliwice.

At the Jewish Culture Festival, for example, the launch of a book based on intensely personal interviews with him drew a standing-room-only crowd, as did a public meeting and question and answer session with Weiss and Poland's ambassador to Israel.

But festival-goers—90 percent of whom were non-Jewish—could also find Weiss almost every afternoon sitting with friends at an outdoor Kazimierz cafe, dressed in a T-shirt and puffing on his pipe.

"Shevach Weiss is just great," says an accordion player from a village near Krakow who, dressed in traditional costume, plays Polish folk music for tourists in Krakow's main square. "I love him. He really has a way of reaching out to people."

Folwarczny agrees.

"He has something called charisma," he says. "It is very easy for him to make direct contact with his audience, and he is very honest when speaking, without prejudices or hang-ups. It's very important that he speaks Polish, and of course his personal history, too, makes him special."

Weiss' personal history is dramatic and gives him a deep understanding both of Polish sentiments and of the painful complexity of Polish-Jewish concerns.

He was born in Boryslaw, a small town in eastern Poland that was 30 percent Jewish. As a child, he survived the Holocaust, hidden by local Gentiles.

"Boryslaw was typical for the region, multiethnic and multilingual," said Weiss. "At home, we spoke Yiddish, Polish and Ukrainian.

After the war, Weiss and his family settled in Israel. He entered the Knesset as a Labor Party member in 1981 and was speaker of the Knesset from 1992 to 1996.

After retiring from political life in 1999, he became chairman of the international board of the Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.

Because of his experiences, and because of the often tense nature of Polish-Jewish relations, Weiss regards his job as something more than just representing the Jewish state.

"It's a mission to be Jewish and an Israeli ambassador in Poland," he says.

"I am a delegate of Israeli diplomacy, but also the representative of all those who died," he said.

Because of the Holocaust, "We have lost two generations of dialogue, but in the last 10 to 12 years, there has been a process of renewing. Part of my role is day to day, more and more, to serve as a bridge between nations."

Weiss is obviously comfortable in Poland and among Poles, and his style and message appear to have struck a chord.

Poles are flattered, too, that Israel chose such a key political figure to be its ambassador. Weiss, indeed, likes to recount that he turned down ambassadorships in Berlin and Moscow to come to Warsaw.

"I think the shtetl is still inside him," said Janusz Makuch, the director of the Jewish Culture Festival.

"He loves Ashkenazic culture," says Makuch, who is not Jewish. "He is a witness. He says nothing against the Polish people per se, and he tries to understand the Polish mentality. People feel that he is one of them.

"Sometimes I think he is actually the ambassador of Poland to Israel. I love this man, and I trust him very much."