An evolving view of Poland
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August 29, 2012
I love to read the web comments on articles we’ve posted, but am often surprised at the turns the conversations take.
There is, for example, a very strange and interesting discussion going on over an article that appeared in NJJN several weeks ago, about a Christian bus driver who was fired by New Jersey Transit because he wouldn’t work on his Sabbath. The article was apparently linked to a fairly conservative Catholic site, which drove a lot of the commenters our way. The readers seem most exercised over our characterization of Sunday as the “Christian Sabbath” and whether Scripture supports the idea that Christians must observe Sunday as the Sabbath.
Who knew that this is still a debate?
There is a similarly unexpected row over an article we posted about a New Brunswick synagogue’s recent mission to Poland. Congregants visited synagogues, Jewish museums, and communities in Warsaw and Cracow, and toured concentration camps at Treblinka, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Maidanek, and Plaszow.
Not surprisingly the trip aroused mixed and intense emotions, summed up in the words of trip organizer Sheryl Olitzky: “I absolutely believe there is anti-Semitism there, but there is a lot being done to increase Jewish awareness and Jewish life.”
Many of the comments that follow seem to have arrived via a Polish-American website, where the article was cross-posted and where Poland’s reputation remains a hot and painful topic.
“I find it odd that in the entire article there was no mention of the perpetrators of the holocaust….Nazi Germany,” writes “Marc.”
“These camps were German Concentration Camps,” adds “Brian.” “Go read some (actual) history books and lay off your Polonophobic bias.”
This kind of passion erupted a few months back, when President Obama referred in a speech to a “Polish death camp.” Poland’s prime minister hit the roof, and Obama’s critics suggested his failure to identify them as “Nazi death camps” demonstrated a lack of historical awareness or diplomatic seichel.
Most Jews, I daresay, reacted with a shrug, or at least a sympathetic nod at what the president and the Poles were getting at. In a subsequent op-ed, Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman acknowledged the “sloppiness” of the president’s language and wrote that “Poland was a victim of the Nazi terror machinery.” Yet he also writes that anti-Semitism was “an integral part” of Poland in the 20th century. He writes of the rise of fascist parties there in the 1920s and ’30s, the “combination of Polish complicity and indifference” to the Nazis’ persecution of Jews, and the massacre of Jews in Jedwabne during and Kielce after the war.
Thus history and personal experience have shaped Jewish attitudes toward Poland in the many decades since the Shoa. Despite the “righteous gentiles” who saved Jews, most of us remain ambivalent at best and antagonistic at worst toward the Poles and their descendants.
But that appears to be changing — an aspect of the article that its critics overlooked. “Poland wants to take ownership of its Jewish past,” Rabbi Eliot Malomet tells our reporter. “There has been an awakening over the last few years that this Jewish heritage is really part of Polish heritage, and on every occasion where we experienced Poles, there was a lot of graciousness.” The participants took note of Poland’s 20,000-strong Jewish community and the Poles who are rediscovering their Jewish roots.
Visits like these are transforming Jewish attitudes toward Poland. In an article posted this month at eJewish Philanthropy, David Jacobson, a Jewish leader from South Africa, reports on his recent visit to Poland and asks, “Are We Guilty of Gross Prejudice Towards Poland?” He too notes persistent anti-Semitism as well as the “remarkable attraction and affinity to Jewish culture” among Poles. “Everything I saw and heard convinced me that Poland has been unfairly portrayed by the global Jewish establishment,” he writes. “During my two weeks in Poland, I learned about and witnessed another side to this much maligned country.”
The balancing act, then, is to acknowledge the dark legacy of anti-Semitism and indifference as well as the glimmer of reconciliation and renaissance. Insisting on one to the exclusion of the other is a distortion of history.
* * *
When the writer David Rakoff died this month at age 47, I was struck by the fact that I never met him. Having heard his gentle, precise, somewhat mournful voice on This American Life all these years, I had a false memory of great intimacy. He also wrote regularly and intimately about the cancer that would eventually kill him.
I also “bonded” with Rakoff over a shared experience — at different times, we both found ourselves volunteering in a kibbutz chicken coop, or lool. He writes about the experience in his collection Fraud, recalling the “snarling, saw-toothed, ammoniac, cheesy smell” of the immense corrugated coop, and the unthinkable task of rounding up chickens by “grabbing hold of the birds by one leg.”
I envied him his ability and opportunity to spin that night in the coop into an essay heard on TAL. His humor, heartache, and somehow life-affirming cynicism made me one of his regular readers and listeners. Moreover, we were both members of an exclusive fraternity: the Society of the Lool.
May his memory be for a blessing.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is Editor-in-Chief of the New Jersey Jewish News. Between columns you can read his writing at the JustASC blog.
Comments
joe
August 29, 2012
When you speak of the “dark legacy of anti-Semitism and indifference” in Poland, you conveniently forget the nearly ONE THOUSAND YEARS of Jewish culture in Poland. You forget that Poland accepted Jews while other countries were turning them away. The reason there were more Jews in Poland than any other country in Europe before WW2, was that the country was a safe place for Jews. GERMANY changed that, not Poland. You also forget that from 1939 - 1989, the years of “indifference” that you speak of, Poland was under the rule of a foreign power. The Poland of today is NOT the Poland of those 60 years. To even compare is unfair. The “dark legacy of anti-Semitism” you refer to mostly resides in Germany and Russia. To forget this is an even more blatant distortion of history.
Brian
August 29, 2012
The writer of this article is a blatant, ignorant idiot, and an obvious Polonophobe.
Well said Joe.
Paul Sawicki
August 30, 2012
I have to agree with Joe on this 1000 years of jews in Poland and you call us antisemetic
and indifferent. Poland was occupied by murdering nazis and then communists not a lot normal civilians could do, it was hard enough to survive yourself
Qsy
August 30, 2012
In Poland there was no fascist party in 1918-1939 period! There were fascist parties in all Europe nearly but not in Poland we had only a strong autoritharian power which is normal for that time. Of course there was antisemitism and it’s sad but I think it would never evoluate to the acts like pogroms in Jedwabne if there wasn’t Nazis. It was like that:
Many regular Poles, lots of them just peasants, didn’t like Jews. When Nazis arrived, Germans begun to burn villages where there were some Jews, accusing all the groups of people nevermind the Jews or the Poles and killing them and it’s why some of this people started to be against Jews. I don’t say it’s good but there’s a big difference between a peasant who is stupid and just doesn’t want to have problems and all the state making factories of massive killing of people. But still you have to remember Poles were helping many Jews. There was a help for Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many people fought both in Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and Warsaw Uprising like Marek Edelman. There were people like Irena Sendler who took a few thousand Jewish children out of ghetto. There were people like Jan Nosal and Maria Bobrzecka from Auschwitz nearby towns who were helping prisoners. First was because of that killed by Nazis, Maria Bobrzecka died in April 1945 because she got ill when entered KL Auschwitz after liberation. There were many Polish Jewish people considering themselves as Poles and Jews. And in communism times there were a lot of Jews who were opressive as communist leaders : Hilary Minc and Jakub Berman were the most important, and 1968 was provoked by political reasons and there was no antisemitism but the inside communist party fights.
Dear author of this article, if you speak about Poland, read some history, not only look at the world in one way.
Tadeusz Tuszynski
August 31, 2012
I was raised in a Catholic family. As I began to investigate the 30 year old family connections and origin of the name. My interest deepened when I came to the cinema theater in Amsterdam. Then I understood why my father’s father worked during the war in the composition of coal as a midfielder. then under a different name in the Tatra highlander was. Do not reach me any information about ancestors. Father to survive this terrible period was sent to the seminary and his brother by the Tatras went to England. where was the bomb squadron, after the war, got to the U.S., where he was a professor of electronics at stranford first University. His son is now a well-known neurosurgeon. I am convinced that my ancestors were Jews. And the fate of my family are deeply rooted in Polish history and its destiny. Almost a thousand years the Jews lived in Poland, and not always assimilated. I’m not surprised the behavior of my grandfather and father, who wanted to survive. Similar was the fate of my late father in law. he lived 85 years. just because his father paid the mother to give him her maiden name. son registered as a Catholic. If adopted the name of the Father, his days would be numbered .......
Ann Saltzman
September 07, 2012
This discussion is most relevant to the upcoming conference of the Drew University Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study on Thursday, Nov. 15. Entitled, “The Holocaust in Poland: A Terrible yet Extraordinary History,” our keynote speaker will be Professor Natalia Aleksiun speaking on “The Holocaust in Poland: A Complicated History.” Dr. Aleksiun is both Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Graduate School of Jewish Studies at Touro College in NY and Assistant Professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Institute of History in Warsaw, Poland. She received her first Ph.D. in history from Warsaw University and her second Ph.D. in Jewish Studies from NYU.
Other conference sessions will focus on the Righteous of Poland. Those of you who are interested in learning more should contact the Center at 973-408-3600 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).