A visit to Poland last month by the leaders of the Joint Distribution Committee brought yet another Eastern European country to the list of those in which the JDC has been invited to reestablish direct contact with the Jewish community in recent years.
Participating in the visit to Poland, which included stops in Warsaw, Auschwitz and Lodz were JDC president Henry Taub and his wife Marilyn, Ralph Goldman, executive vice president of the JDC, and Akiva Kohane, JDC representative for Eastern Europe. The JDC visit was made in response to an invitation from the Union of Religious Jews of Poland. It is estimated that only 6,000 Jews remain in Poland out of a pre-Holocaust population that exceeded three million.
In January 1980, direct contact between Hungarian Jewry and JDC was established. Contact with the Jewish community of Czechoslovakia followed in February 1981. The JDC has had relations with the Jewish communities of Rumania and Yugoslavia for a number of years.
JDC’s association with Poland extends back to World War I, when it brought aid to the Jews trapped between the warring forces. It was forced to cease operations in 1941 but returned after the surrender of Germany. Contact was broken again in 1949 and reestablished in 1956. It was broken again from 1967 to 1981.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
