Poles tend to hold more negative attitudes toward Jews than do residents of Hungary or Czechoslovakia, according to the first wide-ranging survey of attitudes conducted in those three countries since the collapse of communism.
Hungarians hold the most positive views, while in Czechoslovakia, Jews are viewed more positively by Czechs than Slovaks.
Forty percent of Poles surveyed said they did not want Jews living in their neighborhood, compared with 23 percent of Czechoslovaks and 17 percent of Hungarians.
Despite the negligible number of Jews living in Poland — fewer than 10,000 out of a total population of 38 million — 26 percent of Poles surveyed said Jews have too much influence over society in Poland, and 42 percent said they did not know.
Nineteen percent of Poles said they think Jews “behave in a manner which provokes hostility in our country,” and 27 percent agreed with the idea that Jews have too much influence over Poland’s economic life.
Although the survey found that Hungarians generally hold the most positive attitudes toward Jews, 28 percent agreed strongly or somewhat that Jews have too much influence over the country’s political life.
On the issue of religious freedom, 89 percent of Hungarians strongly agreed that Jews should be allowed to practice their religion freely, compared with 52 percent of Poles and 55 percent of Czechoslovaks.
The survey, co-sponsored by the American Jewish Committee and Freedom House, a conservative think-tank, polled about 1,200 people in each country during January and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percent.
Penn + Schoen Associates, a U.S. public opinion research firm, worked with local polling companies in each country on the comprehensive survey, which questioned people on a variety of issues, including democratic and economic reforms and views toward Jews and other minorities.
MISTRUST OF OTHER MINORITIES
The mixing of questions about democratization with questions about minority groups was “an ideal way to get a fix on attitudes toward Jews,” said David Singer, AJCommittee research director.
“Certainly, our perspective is that the fate of Jews in any given society is directly related to the fate of democracy — so goes democracy, so go the Jews,” he said.
Mark Penn, president of Penn + Schoen Associates, said people surveyed expressed no clear sense of what they wanted from economic or political reforms. He said there was a correlation between this uncertainty and the apparent inability of these countries to move toward a policy of eradicating anti-Semitism.
People in all three countries expressed fairly high degrees of hatred and mistrust of minority groups besides Jews — such as Gypsies, blacks and Arabs. Officials involved in the survey said such xenophobia is clearly something the three countries still have to address.
“If you think it’s hard to be a Jew — my God, it’s really hard to be a Gypsy,” Singer said of the attitudes in Eastern Europe. “But the findings toward Jews are absolutely terrifying,” he added.
Despite their strongly negative attitude toward Jews, 81 percent of Poles surveyed said they believe that remembrance of the Holocaust should continue, compared with 61 percent of Hungarians and 71 percent of Czechoslovaks.
Close to 90 percent or above of people in each country agreed that the State of Israel has the right to exist, and they generally expressed greater sympathy with Israelis than Palestinians.
But as was the case in a similar survey recently conducted by AJCommittee in the Soviet Union, positive attitudes toward Israel do not easily translate into support for Zionism: 25 percent of Hungarians, 39 percent of Poles and 50 percent of Czechoslovaks said they agreed with the 1975 U.N. General Assembly resolution denigrating Zionism as a form of racism.
The survey, like the previous ones undertaken by AJCommittee in the Soviet Union and unified Germany, are useful in aiding work with local and overseas government officials on issues of mutual concern, said David Harris, executive vice president of AJCommittee.
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