Poland and the Jews: A New Era

The Jerusalem Post carries an interesting article on how the relationship between Poland, particularly the Catholic Church, and the Jews has changed.

Kaddish by the Polish Chief Rabbi at a Catholic burial ceremony: An Appropriate Statement

Irena Sendler, who was involved in the rescue of 2500 Jewish children, was buried in Warsaw last week. At the Catholic ceremony Rabbi Michael Schudrich, Chief Rabbi of Poland, recited Kaddish in front of her grave. I find this to be quite something. A well deserved tribute to a hero.

http://www.forum-znak.org.pl/ind
ex-en.php?t=wydarzenia&id=7318

[photo: VIN News]

Irena Sendler, Oskar Schindler of Warsaw Ghetto, Dies

[edited 10:15 a.m. EDT]

Irena Sendler who saved approximately 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto died at age 98. [According to Deborah Dwork she was personally responsible for saving about 400 children herself and being the "prime mover" for the saving of the rest.]

It has been said of her that, had Poland had better public relations, Oskar Schindler would have been known as the "Irena Sendler of Germany."

There is a nice obit for her in the New York Times. In it she praises the bravery of Jewish mothers in the ghetto:

"Here I am, a stranger, asking them to place their child in my care. They ask if I can guarantee their safety. I have to answer no. Somethimes they wold give me their child. Other times they would say come back. I would come back a few days later and the family had already been deported."

May her memory and their bravery be for a blessing.

Stormfront White Nationalist Website Covers My Visit to Auschwitz

Seems that the Stormfront White Nationalist Community website has posted something about my recent trip to Auschwitz. Since you have to register to access it and I have no intention of doing so , I have no idea what it says. However one can imagine the gist because this is the tag line they give it:

Just goes to show you that the really bad ones got away! The Nazi's intended to chase them out of Europe and thereby made the rest of the world miserable!

Nice, no?

Budapest [1]: A Final Leg

We arrived in Budapest midday on Friday and spent the afternoon seeing the city and hearing from Professor Michael Miller, an alum of the Wexner Foundation, who is teaching here. He provides an incisive analysis of the situation in Hungary, especially for Jews.

The Hungarian Jewish community is "vibrant" compared to what is the case in Poland. There are about 200,000 Jews here and all the synagogues, schools, summer camps, and internecine warfare point to a normal Jewish community.

Normal, that is, if you include children being subjected on occasion to overt antisemitic comments, such as: You should go to Auschwitz.

On the day we arrived there was a big counter demonstration against the antisemitism. Some of our group went. I was simply too exhausted and, along with the other not so stalwarts in our group, went to Cafe Gerbeaud

Shabbat dinner was low keyed. Saturday a.m. we spent walking around Budapest and then for lunch we were joined by about 7 members of the Budapest Jewish community. Professor Michael Miller, who is a boon of unbelievable proportions to this community, had invited them to join us.

Miller teaches at Central European University which has an emerging and impressive Jewish Studies Program. One of the people Miller brought to lunch was Andras Kovacs.

Kovacs is head of the program and deserves great credit for what he is building. The program seems to have the potential to really help resurrect [is that the right word??] Jewish Studies in Eastern Europe. Of course, there are already pockets of Jewish Studies programs in different places, but this one seems particularly impressive.

I spent the lunch chatting with a young woman who had just finished her Ph.D. at the university. She had written on Ba'alei Teshuvah, Jews who "rediscover" or "return" to Jewish practice [though the term implies a "return" it generally signifies someone who was not at all observant of religious practices and who becomes so]. As she observed, every Jew in Hungary is a Ba'al Teshuva of one degree or another.

When this trip was in the planning and I heard that we were going to fly from Krakow to Budapest for Shabbat [it entailed two flights], I thought it was not a good plan [actually I think the term I used was "nuts"]. It did not seem to make sense, on such a short trip, to devote a half day and two flights to getting someplace for a total of 36 hours.

So I was wrong. Really wrong.

First of all, Budapest is a lovely city [so, of course, is Krakow]. It is, however, much bigger than Krakow and somewhat more cosmopolitan. More importantly, from the perspective of its Jewish community, Poland's was decimated while a major portion of Hungary's survived.

The contrast was striking and not having seen this city, I am sure many of the participants would have walked away from the visit convinced that Eastern Europe was a Jewish wasteland. It certainly is not what it once was [through no fault of the Jews] but Budapest reminds us that there are communities fighting to not just survive, but thrive.

The reaction of some of the Israeli participants was notable. They commented with great sensitivity and concern, why would someone remain in Budapest, even with all its schools, shuls, and Jewish communal life, especially if your child is subjected to these kinds of attacks. They just did not get it.....

On one hand I fully understand their response and on the other... well these are HUNGARIAN Jew and they don't want to leave Hungary judenrein. It is the same feeling expressed by people such as Stashek Krijewsky and other Polish Jews we met. This is where they are and this is where they feel they belong.

My computer battery is about to die and I have got to catch my plane to Amsterdam and home.
All in all quite a trip.

Rwanda: Bomb at Rwanda Genocide Museum Mars Week of Mourning

Budapest, Hungary

Reuters reports that a bomb thrown at Rwanda's genocide museum killed a policeman. This came during the week of mourning marking the 14th anniversary of the genocide. The Hutus apparently resent the week because it focus attention on their misdeeds.

As William Faulkner said: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even passed." That has been a leitmotif of this past week here in Poland and Hungary with the Wexner Foundation alumni group and it is the essence of this terrible event.

Krakow [3]: Auschwitz-Birkenau Postscript

We had a long day in Auschwitz Birkenau. We began the visit at the Alte Judenrampe, the place where until about May 1944, most of the Jews who were brought to Auschwitz came off their trains and were walked into the camp. The Auschwitz Museum has wisely decided not to create a memorial there but just to have some signs explaining the place, a couple of copies of drawings made by people who arrived there, and a box care. We then walked the approximately 1/4 of a mile to the camp entrance in silence. No one had to ask for it. It just seemed the appropriate thing to do.

Spent most of the day in Birkenau and, at that, most of the time in the back at Crema 5,4,3,2 [in that order], the Sauna, Canada, and a few other places. For me the most powerful part of that visit is to the exhibit of pictures in the Sauna. They are family pictures brought to Auschwitz/Bikenau by people who, under the impression that they were being resettled, brought their most precious memories with them in the form of family pictures. They are so precious because they show the victims in all their life and not in their camp status.

The group held a most moving service right next to Crema 2 [between the remains of the ovens and the pit/pool into which the ashes were dumped]. The most powerful part was when people began to call out the names of those for whom they were mourning.

After a relatively short visit to Auschwitz 1, we returned to Krakow. At dinner we were joined by 3 members of the Tzulent [pronounced Chulent] society, the Jewish "young peoples" society of Krakow. They were wonderful. These are young people who are finding their way to their Jewish identity. None of them knew they were Jews or practiced Judaism growing up.

One of them talked about the vibrant 300 member Krakow Jewish community. On the way back to the hotel Brigitte Dayan, who lives on the Upper West Side, observed that there are more Jews in her building than are members of the Krakow Jewish community.

Yet rather than being depressed everyone -- Israelis and North Americans -- walked out on a high. Here were young people who celebrated their Jewish lives in a place that has been so marked by Jewish deaths. They are making a difference. All of us in the group have a choice in how we want to live our Jewish lives... in fact we have lots and lots of choices.

They don't have those choices and yet they so value what they do have. They were the perfect antidote to what we had seen during the day.

The members of the group then did something really amazing. On the spot they collected $1000 and gave it to the Tzulent society to support the Seder they are making. And they did so to honor the three scholars and leaders who have accompanied them on this trip: Larry Moses, Ezra Korman and myself. They could have given us nothing more precious than this.

It is a gift I shall truly treasure.

Now some folks have gone off to the Jewish quarter. I am off to bed since our wake up call comes at 3:15 a.m. tomorrow.

Next stop: Budapest.

Krakow [2]

Another fascinating evening. Joined by four Polish students who are studying about the Holocaust here in Krakow. They were brought here by their professor, Annamaria Orla-Bukovska and by Dr. Jolanta Ambrosewicz-Jacobs, who directs the Holocaust Studies Program at the Jagellonian University.

The conversation was too long and complex to easily summarize especially as we are leaving for our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau shortly. We are getting an early start in order to avoid some of the "crowds" that get there later in the day. I always find it somewhat surrealistic that we rush to get there early in order to avoid the crowds....

More later.

Krakow [1]

Arrived here safely after a pleasant train ride down. Before boarding the train we heard from Jerzy Halberstadt, the director of the to be built Museum of Polish Jewish History. He spoke very powerfully about how the museum might serve the purpose of recording history and the challenges it faces in speaking to the Polish Catholic, Israeli teenager, American Jews, Japanese tourist, and everyone else.

The design is powerful and the way in which they recognize that their job is not to tell the story of the Holocaust but to send the visitor out -- prepared with the right context -- to Auschwitz, Majdanek, and all the other terrible places associated with this history.

Off to meet with Professors Annamaria Orla-Bukovska and Jolanta Aambrosewicz-jacobs who teach at the Jagellonian University. Jolanta is also a consultant to the Auschwitz museum. They are bringing 4 Polish students from the Jagellonian who study the Holocaust.

Should be a good evening on which to build after our conversations of the previous few days.

Warsaw [5]: Leaving for Krakow

We are leaving shortly for Krakow. Will take the train there. I have been here for 5 days, the group a bit less than that. The changes in this city -- and this country -- have been amazing. My first trip was well over 20 years ago.

I feel, more strongly than ever, that it is imperative that, in visiting a place such as this which was the site of some unspeakable horrors [though we do speak about them quite a lot], we keep our historical facts.

The "Poles were worse than the Germans" notion has come up again and my attempt to demonstrate [I do not say argue because this is not opinion, this is fact] that the Poles, many of whom were genuinely antisemitic, were NOT the ones responsible for what happened here. That was the Germans.

Yesterday someone described that as "apologia" for the Poles. I recognize that this tendency to want to blame the Poles is a deeply emotional argument that is rooted in parents' and grandparents' encounter with Polish antisemitism. That was real and in many cases made life terribly difficult. There were Poles who were pleased the Germans "gave it" to the Jews.

But the Holocaust itself... that was the Germans.

One of the other reasons I feel so strongly about this is that it negates hundreds of years of Jewish life in Poland. Someone reminded the group yesterday when we were at the Yeshiva that the rabbi who founded it was a member of the Polish Parliament in the interwar period. He was not the only rabbi who was in the parliament. And certainly not the only Jew.

Life is always more complicated if we don't let facts get in the way....

But, as I argued to the group yesterday, it is critically important that when dealing with this topic which is so filled with emotion, pain, and horror that we get the history right.

It's not just because of the deniers [they are not that important... potentially dangerous yes... important? no]. It's for other reasons:
1. If you are going to draw contemporary lessons from this horror then you cannot draw them based on untruths.
2. The victims wanted you to get the facts right. Witness Samuel Kassow's magnificent new book Who Will Write Our History? It is the story of the Oyneg Shabbes group [Emanuel Ringelblum]. They wanted facts not myth. They wanted a careful recounting of what happened to them. As one of them noted, what happened to them was bad enough. It's not necessary to aggrandize it in any way.

More on that later.

Lively trip. Off to finish packing [why do we always bring too much???] and then, after a meeting with the Director of the to be built Museum of Polish Jewish History, the train to Krakow and another encounter with history and with the present.

Warsaw [3]

Last night at the opening session Larry Moses, President of the Foundation, gave a powerful presentation on the personal, emotional, and more existential aspects of being a child of survivors. It is difficult to summarize such a talk and I can only hope that he will post it or publish it in some form.

This trip is designed NOT to be just a let's tour the terrible Holocaust sites in Poland but it is designed to facilitate a conversation among Israelis and North Americans about aspects of their Jewish identities.

Consequently the participants have been broken up into small groups -- equal numbers of Americans and Israelis -- to tackle aspects of that conversation. They began that conversation last night. It continued more informally today on the multi-hour bus trip to Lublin.

It "exploded" tonight at the conversation about the commemorative trips to Poland [see previous post].

One of the reasons tonight’s conversation became so raw was that something happened today at Majdanek which brought some of the subliminal issues into sharper focus.

We met a group of Israeli army officers who were visiting the camps together with both a Holocaust survivor and some parents who had lost children in Israel battles. The high ranking officer who was in charge of the group invited us to attend the ceremony they would be holding in Majdanek.

Because of scheduling matters if we had stayed to join them we would have had to drop the stop at Yeshiva Churchmen Lublin, the yeshiva which created the study program Daf Yomi [daily Talmud study].

Two of the members of the group – a Reform and Orthodox rabbi -- had carefully prepared a study session which was a composite of traditional Talmudic sources and contemporary theology/philosophy about the Holocaust [Fackenheim].

The Israelis were VERY upset that we were leaving Majdanek without participating in the ceremony [it began as we started to depart]. Some of the Americans felt they were overreaction, especially since this was not something that had been planned in advance and it's hard to simply shift things around.

The organizers felt that we could not summarily drop another element of the program, especially since two of the group had worked so hard to prepare the study session.

For some people this seemed to juxtapose the idea of a modern state of Israel as opposed to all that is represented by the Yeshiva [which was an anti-Zionist place].

Then there was tonight’s session and all those raw emotions.

When I left the bar a few minutes ago Israelis and Americans were deep into discussion [and some drink] discussing, debating, reflecting and just talking.

I guess that means that things are working as they should be.

Gotta pack. After a morning meeting with the Director of the new Museum of Polish Jewish History, we take a train to Krakow.

Laila tov.

Warsaw: [2]

Tuesday night
Warsaw

We spent the day in Majdanek and Lublin, met up with a group of Israeli soldiers at Majdanek, and are right now in the midst of heated discussion on the role of the kind of trip we are on and the kind of trips many Israeli and American youth take to Poland.

Does it create a bunker mentality?

Does it make them feel that they are victims? That the diaspora is a place of death?

A lot of vibrant and rather raw feelings are being expressed.

More later.

Warsaw: Reflections [1]

I am in Warsaw where, until yesterday, I was on my own and had time to explore some aspects of the contemporary Jewish community. I blogged about that in a previous post. On Sunday a.m. I went out to a facility of the Jewish community a sort of retreat center/hotel [not 4 star... not any star] to meet with a group of young people who will be serving as counselors in the Jewish community's summer camp. The program, run by the JDC, gives them two weeks of summer fun combined with Jewish education. A group of them also go to a JDC camp in Hungary.

What was striking about the teenagers was how normal it all was. One can easily forget where one is and the fact that, until 15 years ago, these kinds of activities would have been, if not risky, certainly frowned upon by the government.

Late on Sunday the real "work" began. The purpose of my trip is to accompany a group of alumni if the Wexner Foundation's programs. They include alumni of their Israel/Harvard Kennedy School program, Graduate Fellows program, and their Heritage program. Each program has a different target audience. One is for mid-career Israeli government and NGO officials, those who are clearly on a fast track. The Graduate program targets students entering rabbinical, cantorial, communal service, education, and PhD programs. It helps fund their graduate work and provides them with outstanding programs over the course of the 4 years of their fellowship. The Heritage program targets emerging [and some rather emerged] North American Jewish lay leaders.

The programs are all highly selective and are run at the highest level. This trip was open to alumni of each of the programs [there was only space for 40 people so not everyone who wanted to go was able to do so]. The trip itself is designed to be far more than an exploration of the history of Poland and Hungary. Its goal is to create and foster a conversation between Israelis and Americans and among all the participants about their Jewish identity. The history of this place provides a very pregnant backdrop for that conversation.

We spent yesterday visiting the main Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, walking what remains [virtually nothing] of the streets of the ghetto, meeting with Rabbi Michael Schudrich [the Chief Rabbi of Poland], and engaging in conversation amongst ourselves.

We had a provocative [in the best sense of the word] discussion at the Rappoport memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto about the nature of Yom HaShoah and its linkage in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s to the Ghetto uprising. In fact, in Israeli society in those decades the two were linked, as if to suggest that the majority of victims went like "sheep to the slaughter" while the ghetto fighters were the heroes. [This is a very complicated conversation but it was really stimulating to have it with a group of Israelis and Americans.]

Many parts of the day were fascinating but, since I am limited by time [we are off to Lublin shortly], I want to just focus on one aspect. Schudrich's talk. He talked about the unknown number of Polish Jews who: don't know they are Jews, know they are Jews but are reluctant to "come out of the closet," discovered they were Jews in adulthood, etc. etc.

For many people in the group it is hard to fathom why anyone would want to stay here after all that happened on this soil [of course it happened at the hands of the Germans who, in certain -- but certainly not all -- cases were "supported" in this by Poles]. Yet it is striking to hear the stories of how people make their way back -- slowly, hesitantly -- to this aspect of their identity.

There is more to tell but I have to go to breakfast, give a talk on the intersection of memory and identity, and then head off to Lublin all before 8:45.

Shabbat in Warsaw: "Mir Zeinen Da" [We are still here]

I spent this past Shabbat in Warsaw. Later today [Sunday] I shall meet up with a group of Americans and Israelis who are arriving in Poland under the auspices of the Wexner Foundation.

Yesterday I attended services on Saturday morning at Beit Warszawa, the Jewish Cultural Association. It was a Reform/non-traditional service. [Though, in fact, the liturgy etc. were pretty traditional.] There were about 20 people in attendance. Afterwards Rabbi Burt Shuman, an American born rabbi who has been here a number of years, asked me to lead the group in a conversation about Holocaust denial. That was followed by lunch and Torah study.

One of the rabbis is an Israeli. She spoke about participating in an Israeli television show done recently in Poland. She lamented the fact that it began with Yiddish songs and was all about the past. There was no sense of a contemporary Jewish life.

The striking thing was the age of those there. I would say that the majority were in their 30s and 40s. There are many other people -- of all ages and stages -- involved in Beit Warshava's many other activities.

Later in the afternoon I spent a couple of hours with Jerzy Halberstat, the Director of the soon to be built Museum of Polish Jewish History. It is an amazing project with a dynamite group of people involved in the planning and conception of it, among them Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, one of the most creative people around.

Tomorrow a.m. I shall go to a retreat center outside of Warsaw to meet with a group of Polish students who will be working this summer as counselors in the JDC [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] sponsored summer camp. They are having an orientation session this weekend and I shall be having a discussion with them this morning.

The reason I write all this is that so many Jews who come to visit Poland think of it as a Jewish cemetery. They treat it as a place where Jews once lived and were destroyed. That's true. However, in the words of the Jewish Partisan anthem from the Holocaust, Zog Nit Keynmol, mir zeinen da, we [they] are still here.

[Many visitors come confused about who did the destroying, i.e. it was the GERMANs not the Poles. They come with the historically daft idea that the Poles were worse than the Germans.... but more on that in another post. For my previous thoughts on that see the my comments here.]

I am also reading Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew by Stanislaw [Stashek] Krajewski who is on the Philosophy faculty at the University of Warsaw and who is helping design the portion of the aforementioned museum dedicated to post-Holocaust Jewish life in Poalnd. In addition, Stashek consults to the American Jewish Committee about Polish Jewish matters.

Stashek has become a traditional Jew. [Had a fantastic Shabbat dinner at his home.] He grew up knowing nothing about tradition or Jewish practices. He is also a Polish Jew. During the very bleak days in the 1980s -- which turned out to be the death throes of communist rule -- Stashek wrote for the underground press. Some of those essays are included in the book.

When I was here in October I met with members of the Czulent [pronounced chulent] society, the Jewish "student" [many in the group are not students] organization in Cracow. I shall do so again later this week.

Visitors -- young and old -- often find it emotionally and intellectually simpler to treat this place as one with a past but with no future. The community may be small. There are many Jews still in the woodwork. There are many who are still hesitant about emerging. It is a complicated situation. But it is not just a place about the past. For visitors to come and see only that is to shortchange both themselves and a small but fascinating Jewish community.

More later. I am off for an early morning walk in the "Old City" of Warsaw.