Jews emerge from the shadows in a land that is haunted by history
He discovered that he was Jewish when he was 13 years old.
When Jan Krazniewski was told at school that Polish names ending in “ski” sometimes denoted an aristocratic background, he came home buzzing with excitement. Could it be, he asked his father, that the family had noble estates tucked away in some corner of Poland?
His father sighed.
“It’s time for you to know something,” he said. “Our name is really Kirszenbaum.”
Jan is now a Jew learning to be a Jew.
Across Poland, long-buried Jewish roots are poking above the surface. And in the shadow of Auschwitz concentration camp a remarkable social experiment is under way: a small, dedicated group of rabbis is trying to rekindle Judaism in a country that many Jews worldwide see as cursed terrain.
“After the Holocaust, many Poles had either left Poland or left Judaism,” Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, says. Nervous of anti-Semitism, most of the remaining Jews went under cover.
Today, in families such as that of Jan Krasniewski, the secret is out. More than a hundred Polish Jews have been gathering in a summer camp in Wisla, a mountain resort close to the Czech border, to compare notes about their hidden lives.
The instruction is both practical and learned. “The bucket is for clean water,” a cheerful organiser says, “the bowl for dirty” - the beginning of a lesson about ritual cleansing.
As the vanguard of the new Polish revival chats in the brief pauses between lectures, it becomes plain that each modern Polish generation has been bound by a code of silence. There is Sara Janecke - real name Szulc - in a long, billowing green dress, who was sheltered as a baby in the Holocaust by a Catholic orphanage. She is still searching for her rescuers, for a missing part of her identity.
There are the 1968ers - Poles who only discovered that they were Jews when their families and schoolfriends were thrown out of the country in a communist anti-Semitic purge.
And then there are the young ones who were told of their Jewishness only after the fall of communism, when parents judged that life was about to be less precarious for members of the faith.
“My mother told me I was Jewish when I was 14,” Maciej Pawlak says. “Until then all I knew was that I shouldn’t attend Christian religion classes at school.”
Mr Pawlak, now 30, has gone on to become the first Polish-born rabbi for 40 years and is one of the leaders of the Jewish revival. He is the very model of a modern rabbi - big on bonding through skating. Before Mr Pawlak arrived on the scene, the rabbis of modern postwar Poland were foreigners, Americans and Israelis parachuted in on what is regarded as one of Judaism’s most complex challenges.
In the 1930s about 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland; for about half a millennium Poland had been Europe’s most important Jewish sanctuary. Naturally, that sparked friction between Jews and Poles, and rural antiSemitism, sometimes fuelled by Catholic priests.
The Holocaust - the Germans set up their death camps throughout Poland, not just in Auschwitz - and successive emigrations, prodded by the communists, left the Jewish community with barely 20,000.
Time is running out, for most of them are in their 70s and 80s. The Rabbi of Wroclaw, Itzak Rappaport, concedes: “The bulk of people attending my synagogue will, sadly, be dead in 15 years’ time.”
One of the first steps taken by the Swedish-Polish rabbi was to throw open his home to visitors every Saturday afternoon: 15 to 20 young Poles turn up and some will fully embrace Judaism. If they stay in the city, they will save the community.
One of them is Jan Krasniewski, now 20, who has found not only a religion but also a whole family history; the dam of secrecy and silence that divided the different generations has been breached.
“I discovered that one of my grandfather’s cousins was killed in the big pogrom in Kielce in 1946,” he said, trying to explain how his family had come to renounce the Kirszenbaum name and identity. “And on my nonJewish side I found that my great-aunt always warned the children to avoid the synagogue lest they be killed and made into matzah bread.”
The fear of Jews is less acute but lingers on. Some Polish Jews keep their faith a secret from children who, unaware of their Jewishness, have become intolerant ultra-nationalists.
None of this is easy for Rabbi Rappaport, whose family were expelled from Poland in 1968 — put on the train to Vienna, passports confiscated - and who swore for many years that he would never tread on Polish soil. “I oscillate between boneh,” he says using the Hebrew word for build, “and soneh”, or hate.
“I have to stay focused on each individual with Jewish roots, or who wants to become Jewish, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to function,” Rabbi Rappaport says. “Wherever there is a Jew, there is an obligation of another Jew to help him.”
So Jewish benefactors - Shavei Israel and the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation - are trying to conjure a new world out of the rubble and ashes of the Holocaust.
Ron Lauder, the heir of the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire, has set up Jewish schools in Poland and across Central Europe. There are summer and winter workshops, camps, youth clubs, scholarships and the well-respected Midrasz magazine.
Slowly the huge investment since the end of communism is beginning to pay off: Jews are returning or coming out, breaking their silence, gaining confidence. Every time the ultra-nationalist and often provocative station Radio Maryja snipes at Jewish “profiteering” or peddles ancient stereotypes, the fledgeling Jewish community retreats an inch or two back under its shell.
But anti-Semitism is not remotely comparable to its prewar or immediate postwar levels. It is a backdrop to extreme rightwing politics. “It makes me queasy sometimes,” a participant in the Jewish summer camp says, “but it doesn’t make me rush to pack my suitcase. That is progress.”
The Mayor of Lodz - site of one of the biggest Nazi-run ghettos - recently invited a group of teenagers from northern Israel to shield them from the bombing of Hezbollah -— unthinkable a decade ago. Local councils, once an engine of vitriolic anti-Semitism as they fought off Jewish restitution claims, are becoming open and engaged.
One of the summer camp members, Agnieszka Cahn, remembers with pride how young Poles and young Jews protested in her southern township of Myslenice two years ago against a march of rightwingers who wanted to celebrate the life of a dubious local hero.
The man had led the ransacking of Jewish shops in 1936 but had fought with the Home Army partisans against the Nazis. A hero to some Poles; an object of deep suspicion on the part of the local youth, who acted after being alerted to the problem through the internet.
Civic courage is on the rise and that, more than anything, makes life safe again for the new generation of Jews.
“And here,” the proud Rabbi Rappaport says, holding up his baby daughter, “is the youngest Jew in Wroclaw!”
