WARSAW (JTA) – The last surviving daughter of Poland’s iconic interwar leader Marshal Jozef Pilsudski has died.
Jadwiga Pilsudska Jaraczewska, who met several months ago with Poland’s chief rabbi, died Sunday in Warsaw. She was 94.
Pilsudski was widely supported by Polish Jews as an opponent of extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. He died in 1935. Jaraczewska was one of Pilsudski’s two daughters.
In June, at her and her family’s invitation, Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, met with Jaraczewska along with her children and grandchildren. Jaraczewska showed Schudrich a famous photograph of Jewish leaders in the town of Deblin greeting her father with bread and salt after the Polish army under his leadership captured the town from the Bolsheviks in August 1920.
Jaraczewska was a pilot in Britain’s Royal Air Force during World War II. With the collapse of communism in Poland in 1990 she returned to Warsaw.
