Friday night services at Warsaw’s only functioning synagogue provide a revealing glimpse into the Polish capital’s Jewish community.
One elderly Jew, dressed in black hat and long black coat, sways back and forth in prayer from his position toward the front of the renovated and freshly painted room.
Near him are several other older Jewish men, and a scattering of foreign visitors in Warsaw on business or as tourists.
Toward the back, a gathering of young men, clad in jeans and sweaters, sits together, absorbed in prayer. As the service ends, they leave together to celebrate kiddush in an adjoining building.
The groups of worshipers, reflective of the community here as a whole, are divided by a generation and by their own experience of Poland. The older group survived the horrors of the Holocaust that virtually wiped out the thriving prewar Warsaw Jewish community.
The younger worshipers, who grew up largely detached from or even unaware of their Judaism, are now at the forefront of a rebirth of Jewish life in this newly bustling city.
The number of worshipers on this particular recent Friday night is only several dozen, in a city that before World War II was home to 390,000 Jews and a centuries-old Jewish culture.
During the German occupation, the Nazis used this particular Warsaw synagogue as a stable.
Until recently, there was a sense that Polish Jewry was dying. The community’s average age was about 70, and few saw any hope of a renewal of Jewish life in a country ravaged by war and communism.
EXOTIC TO BE JEWISH
“People of my generation are called young in Poland,” said Daniel Grinberg, a 43-year-old Jewish historian in Warsaw.
But, especially in the few years since the fall of communism in Poland, some observers of the situation see hope in the new generation of Poles who are discovering their Jewish roots. These observers are assuming that strong leadership for a future Polish Jewish community will come from those now in their teens and 20s.
That generation “is the first real Jewish generation in Poland since the war with a chance to grow up with a normal Jewish identity,” said Michael Schudrich, an American rabbi who lives in Warsaw.
Of course, anti-Semitism remains a persistent problem, even in the new post-communist Poland. But observers are becoming increasingly optimistic that some Jewish community will survive here.
Konstanty Gebert, 41, a Jewish journalist in Warsaw who was one of the first younger Jews to become involved in practicing Judaism, said that his own generation had no interest in Judaism at a crucial younger time in their lives.
But for the teen-agers and twenty something Polish Jews, he said, “it’s exciting, original, exotic to be Jewish.”
Of a prewar population of about 3.5 million Polish Jews, an estimated 7,000 to 30,000 now live here. After the war, some Jews returned to Popland, but many intermarried and many left during the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign supported by the Communist government then in power.
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has provided a constant source of support for Poland’s dwindling community of elderly Jews. Among other things, the JDC supports the distribution of tens of thousands of kosher meals and Jewish education programs.
And a relative newcomer to Poland, the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, has become an active player in the efforts to revive Poland’s Jewish community, especially among the youth.
“The Lauder Foundation is the only (organization) putting its money with the living, not the dead,” said Gebert.
The foundation’s Warsaw office, located in a building next to the synagogue, has been headed for the past year and a half by the energetic Schudrich, 38, who first visited Poland in 1973.
“We were aware such (younger Jewish) people existed for many years,” but there was no way to approach them, Schudrich said. “With the fall of communism, there has been an upheaval, both political and social.”
‘FATAL COMBINATION’ DISCOURAGED JEWISH LIFE
Many in the older generation have decided to tell their children of their Jewish roots. “Thousands of people have discovered their ethnic roots within the last 10 years, many in the last five years,” Schudrich said.
He told a story of one young man who brought a small group of other high school students — none Jewish — to a Jewish event, where one in the group saw his uncle, praying.
The horrors people suffered during the war, compounded by communist repression, was a “fatal combination” for the Jewish community, he said. Schudrich said he feels that until the past year or two, there was no real Jewish community here, just the “official Jews” and the young “Jews of Polish ancestry” struggling to define themselves.
Now, however, he thinks the community has established its own identity.
The foundation has sponsored the first Jewish kindergarten in Poland in decades. Next fall, a Jewish elementary school is to open.
Two restaurants with Jewish themes have opened in Warsaw. One, the Menorah, open since 1991, serves kosher food. The second, the Eilat, is not kosher but is connected to the Polish-Israeli Friendship Society, which promotes good relations between the countries through cultural activities.
But there is still active debate in Warsaw about the future of Polish Jewry. “It’s still an open question,” said Gebert, the journalist.
“If we manage to produce something” stimulating, the community would become self-sufficient, Gebert said.
He added that five years ago, he would have said there was “no future” for Poland’s Jewish community. “Today, there is a fighting chance.”
Unlike its communist predecessor, this Polish government is actively seeking Jewish tourists, from the United States and from Israel. “Jewish Americans are an extremely important group for our aims in promoting tourism,” a government official said. Last year, 140,000-150,000 Americans — including Jews and Polish-Americans — and 10,000-20,000 Israelis visited the country.
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.
