— A lecturer at Warsaw University stated here that the anti-Zionist campaign being conducted in Poland is an attempt “to legitimize Soviet intervention” in that troubled nation.
Pawel Spiewak, who is also a member of the editorial staff of Wiez, a prominent Catholic publication in Poland, reminded a B’nai B’rith audience yesterday at the International Conference Center that the Soviets conducted a similar campaign before invading Czechoslovakia in the 1960s.
Spiewak, here on a six-week visit under the sponsorship of the Internation Communications Agency, said that the anti-Semitic posters placed around Warsaw recently was the work of the secret police. He explained that although there are only about 7000 Jews remaining in Poland, some are members of an influential labor group, Solidarity, which the government seeks to discredit.
“Many people in Poland think that Jews are responsible for the establishment of Communist rule in Poland, “” Spiewak said. “Many Communists were Jews and many Jews were in the secret police in the Stalinist era. So now (some Polish people) want to say the responsibility for all the crimes of the Stalinist period is with the Jews. They want to say that the Communist Party is not responsible, mainly Jews, by some Jewish plot”
Spiewak, who spoke under the aegis of the International Council of B’nai B’rith, said that until recently there were no recorded accounts of anti-Semitism in Poland and that most Poles did not know that it existed. The Holocoust was written in terms of Poles being killed, he explained. The new wave of anti-Semitism is “especially troublesome because the Jewish community doesn’t exist in Poland,” he declared.
Spiewak added that the Poles can speak freely today and that “it is very important to discuss” anti-Semitism in terms of understanding and coming to grips with their past and to avoid making Jews the scapegoat again. He said that an effort to thwart that likelihood involves a number of Catholic intellectuals who are writing books and other publications about anti-Semitism in their country, In addition, he said, they are publicizing cultural activities of Polish Jews prior to World War II.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
