Despite Continued Anti-Semitism, Polish Jews Are Coming Home page 2
He insists that anti-Semitism is on the decline, especially among the younger generations. Still, Rabbi Schudrich notes that the older generation is still very much afraid.
“Poland is a free democratic country now. Finally the fear that they’ve had had has dissipated,” Rabbi Schudrich explained. “But people have lived in fear for 50 years. That fear doesn’t go away in a day and doesn’t even go away in a decade. Having nothing to be afraid of today doesn’t mean that they don’t fear.”
That fear was a center point of Rabbi Symcha Keller’s childhood. He was born Krzysztof Skowronski. During his childhood there were two rabbis in Lodz who had survived the war and tried to rebuild the Jewish community in the city. However they were constantly hounded by the Polish Communist Police. Keller studied with them in secret, and became a leader of the Jewish anti-Communist underground movement in the city. The last rabbi of Lodz, Rabbi Zev Morana, was expelled from the city and country in 1972. Keller eventually left for Israel and the United States where he learned in yeshiva.
He returned to Lodz in 1993 and was elected to lead the community. In the past seventeen years, the community has grown from 60 Jews to 350. When he arrived, most involved Jews were elderly. Today, most are in their thirties and forties. A local practicing Catholic priest found out recently that he is Jewish. He now attends synagogue while continuing to perform his Catholic duties, and is torn about which religion to follow.
Rabbi Keller says the Jews of Lodz are victim to occasional anti-Semitic incidents by local drunk hoodlums, but he says the local government and the Catholic Bishop work to contain the problems. The other major challenge that the Jewish community faces is that years of ignorance has made local Jews disinterested in their religion.
“Like Moshe in Egypt, taking Israel from Egypt wasn’t so hard,” Rabbi Keller explained. “But to change the mentality of the Jewish nation was quite hard. It’s the same story here. Despite being three or four generations after the war, many families still have little connection to Judaism.”
Sparks in the Darkness
The city of Krakow is also witnessing a rebirth of Jewish life, albeit challenging. For the past three years, Rabbi Boaz Pash has been the rabbi of the Rema Synagogue, which is named after Krakow’s most famous Jewish resident, Rabbi Moshe Isserles, zy”a. Rabbi Pash hosts Shabbat meals and teaches classes throughout the city.
The fear of elderly Jews is so strong that even the chazzan of the shul, Yudel Shtein, is extremely discreet about his activities lest his neighbors discover that he is Jewish! When Rabbi Pash first arrived in Krakow and visited the chazzan in his apartment, Shtein pleaded with him to put a hat on his head and hide his peyos.
In Krakow, Rabbi Pash works with a group of elderly Jews who survived the Holocaust because they were adopted by Christian families or were hidden in monasteries. They were raised as Catholics, and though they know they’re biologically Jewish, they continue to live openly as Catholics. Rabbi Pash speaks to the group throughout the year, teaching them about Shabbat and upcoming Yomim Tovim. He says the members all listen respectively, but are not interested in changing their ways.
“They understand the problem, but don’t want to do anything about it. You can’t change people in that stage of life,” Rabbi Pash said.
Three and half years ago Rabbi Eliezer and Esther Gurary also moved to Krakow and opened a Chabad-Lubavitch center. They are based in the Izaak Synagogue, which is just a short walk from the Rema Shul.
Once, while walking down one of Cracow’s streets, Rabbi Gurary met an elderly man whom he knew to be Jewish. The rabbi asked him for his Hebrew name, and the man put his mouth to the rabbi’s ear and whispered it, fearing that it might be heard by a passerby, thereby alerting the locals that he was a Jews.
Rabbi Gurary has had some success reaching out to Jews in their twenties and thirties who are not burdened by the fright of their grandparents. A handful of Jews now come to the Chabad House each Shabbos, as well as to other events and classes.
“We are working very hard to reach out to the young people here, to bring them to shul and provide them with activities and a connection to Yiddishkeit. Baruch Hashem we have had a bit of hatzlachah.”
However even the young Jews who attend the Chabad House services have a difficult time understanding the importance of mitzvos and religious observance. The years of an utter absence of Jewish life in Poland, and the lack of role models has made it difficult to inspire them to want to take on Jewish observances.
“Right now, they want to have a connection with the Jewish community and they want to know more about it. But they’re not looking to be practicing Jews. Religion is too much for them, too foreign,” Rabbi Gurary said. “They don’t understand that there is a connection. They say, ‘I can be a Jew because my grandfather is a Jew, which makes me one too. But this doesn’t mean I need to go to shul, keep kosher, or observe the laws of Shabbos.’”
Rabbi Gurary has attempted to help the elderly Jews reclaim some of the Jewish rituals they remember from their youth, but he has met with limited success. The only thing that really interests them at this point is to have a Jewish burial. Unfortunately, they did such a good job raising their children without Judaism that none of the children today have anything to do with the Jewish community. When one visits the Izaak Shul, one finds only Jews in their 20s and 30s, or those in their 70s and 80s, and absolutely no one in between. Those “middle generation Jews” are often married to gentiles, and after so many years of hiding their identities—or not even being aware they were Jewish—they encounter great difficulty in relating to their religion.
But amidst the many challenges, Rabbi Gurary has seen some incredible rays of sunshine. He knows of a man from Warsaw who now goes by the name Binyamin. The man grew up with no knowledge of his family’s roots, since his mother was orphaned during the war and none of her extended family survived. As he grew up he repeatedly asked her about her family, but she refused to tell him anything.
Binyamin thought that the reason his mother was hiding her family identity was because they had been Nazis. This led him to begin researching his roots, and one day he found himself in the archives of Warsaw’s Jewish community. When he described his quest, he was told that his family’s name indicated either Jewish or non-Jewish Polish origins. While Binyamin waited, the archivist, Yechiel Rosner, went downstairs to search the building’s many files to see if he could give this young man further data that might be helpful.
Two hours later, Mr. Rosner returned with startling news – the archive had in its possession Binyamin’s mother’s birth certificate! Binyamin was astounded discover that his mother had been born during the war to Jewish parents living in a ghetto, so not only was his mother’s family not Nazis, but they were Jews!
Binyamin returned home and once more questioned his mother about her origins. Again, she refused to answer. Only when Binyamin showed her the copy he had made of her birth certificate did she finally break down and admit that she was Jewish.
“This is the secret of my life,” she said. “Even your father doesn’t know I am a Jew,” Binyamin’s mother told him. She begged Binyamin not to divulge the news to his father.
So for the next two years Binyamin and his mother shared the secret and struggled with how to live secretly as Jews. And then suddenly one day, Binyamin’s father revealed that he was Jewish as well. Binyamin eventually found his way to Torah observance, and he is now living as an Orthodox Jew in London.
During the Holocaust, Poland became the country where millions of Jews and thousands of Jewish communities were annihilated. It has been said that the zechusim of those vanished Jews and communities are now helping to bring back the current generation of Poland’s Jews. The current-day struggle of so many of Poland’s Jews to reclaim their birthright, and their success against all odds, is certainly a fitting tribute to the kedoshim.