Jewish Communities in Poland Come to Life Again

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, the former Atlanta rabbi and educator, visited Poland during the High Holidays to conduct services at the Beit Warszawa synagogue, the Reform synagogue in Warsaw. The synagogue, which was established about 25 years ago, has approximately 100 members and is affiliated with the World Union of Progressive Judaism. Many of them are converts to Judaism or have an interest in Jewish life, which Salkin says is flourishing in present-day Poland.

“Everything we dreamed to have been true about outreach has come true in Poland in spades, by which I mean, the overwhelming majority of people with whom I dealt and with whom I prayed and whom I taught over my two weeks were not born Jewish. They are either converts to Judaism or are on their way to converting to Judaism.”

Before World War II, Poland was the home to a Jewish population of 3.5 million Jews. It was among the most important centers of Jewish religious and cultural life, with a history that stretched back a thousand years.

It was estimated that at one time during the 17th century, three-quarters of all the Jews in the world lived within its borders. Salkin describes it as the one-time capital of Ashkenazi Judaism with a history that became so intertwined with Polish life that you cannot tell the country’s history with telling the history of its Jews there.

But during the modern era, Poland has grappled with antisemitism, and during the Holocaust attitudes toward Jews varied widely, from the relatively small number of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews to those Nazi collaborators who hunted them down. Ninety percent of Poland’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis.

The 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising was the highpoint of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust and the ghetto’s destruction, and according to Salkin has left an indelible imprint of the city.

“The ghetto is ubiquitous, and Warsaw was mostly destroyed.” Salkin said. “As I walked around someone points out to me the mounds upon which apartment buildings are built and said, ‘those building are not built on hills, that’s rubble.’ The rumor is that if you kick the ground hard enough, you’ll find bone fragments. People there live with history, but they also live with ghosts.”

But Salkin describes his encounter with present-day Jewish life as anything but morose. He describes the intellectual and spiritual interest in Judaism and Jewish life as “uncanny and “borders on the fetishistic.”

In six cities in Poland, there are plans to extend what are called step-by-step classes, which are introductory courses in Jewish learning that are often a prelude to conversion. In Warsaw, graduates of the program make up the Beit Warsawa congregation and participate in community religious activities. In Gdansk, Lodz, Lublin, Wroclaw, Katowice, and Częstochowa, Jewish communities have become members of a national umbrella organization known as Beit Polska. This summer, for the first time in nearly 100 years, young Jews from progressive communities in Poland and Germany spent two weeks camping together.

Warsaw has a Jewish history museum, which is one of the most extensive in the world. Salkin said it took him four hours to pass through its many exhibit rooms, most of which are devoted to the glories of the Jewish past.

One of the world’s largest Jewish cultural and music festivals is in Krakow, and it attracts tens of thousands each summer, many of them not Jewish.

The interest in all things Jewish was what Salkin described as the biggest surprise of his High Holidays trip. In a recent posting to his Martini Judaism blog for the Religious News Service, the impression that Poland left with him was not death, but life.

“Poland is not a Jewish cemetery. It is a Jewish maternity hospital. There, they give birth to Jews. That has been the greatest take-away from my experience in Poland over the Days of Awe. In the synagogue in Warsaw, I constantly encountered young Poles who thirst for Jewish wisdom, for Jewish texts, for Jewish ideas, for Jewish spirituality.”

As part of his visit, he lectured at a university just outside Gdansk, the city which once was home to a prosperous and educated community. He spoke to a group of post-graduate students, almost none of whom were Jewish but had a burning interest in learning about Judaism, its ideas and its hope.

It was an idea which echoed Rabbi Salkin’s Rosh Hashanah message to his Polish congregants.

“On Rosh Hashanah,” Salkin said, “I talked about the necessity of hope and that Poland teaches the idea, in so many ways, of the resurrection of what was once considered dead.”