A Day to Bare Our Souls - and Find Ourselves

Half a century on, Polish Jews rediscover religious heritage

Great-grandfather Josef, (wielki dziadek) and Nana Magda -- wherever you are now - I hope you are reading this one!

Ludmila Krzewska has decided it is finally safe to be Jewish (ŻYDOWSKI) in Poland again.

She endured anti-Semitic taunts as a child. Her grandmother would have been killed by the Nazis had a Catholic family not taken her in. And her mother was too traumatized to practice Judaism after the war.

That all caused her to bury her background as she grew to adulthood in Warsaw. But when the 25-year-old biology student ventured to recover her heritage five years ago, she met a different kind of rejection. She sought out Warsaw's Orthodox Jewish community, but was discouraged by one member because "I have a 'goyish' husband," she recalls.

The message did not come from the rabbi - but it was enough.

So she turned to Warsaw's fledgling Progressive Jewish community, her husband eventually converted, and the pair have become two in a growing number of eastern European Jews to embrace a modern, liberal stream of Judaism amid a larger rebirth of the Jewish life devastated by the Holocaust.

In Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, and many communities in Germany, there's been a tremendous resurgence of (Progressive) Jewish life, said Rabbi Joel Oseran, vice president of international development with the World Union for Progressive Judaism in Jerusalem. We see young people searching for Jewish meaning, people who have come anew to their own Jewish identities. And Poland is the best example of that.

Amid this Jewish renewal, many turn to Orthodox Judaism, in part because for decades that has been the only choice - even though many do not adhere to all of its rigorous rules. Some are also drawn to the religion, the mystique of its traditions or by the charisma of Poland's popular chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.

Others, however, are drawn to Progressive Judaism - known in the U.S. as Reform Judaism - because they consider it more in tune with modern life and say it allows them to remain more a part of the larger Polish world, their home.

It gives you more independence and a spectrum of choice, Krzewska said. And it makes it easier to have non-Jewish friends, homosexual friends, people who are different.

Before World War II, Poland was home to a vibrant Yiddish-speaking Jewish community of nearly 3.5 million, Europe's largest. Following Nazi Germany's invasion in 1939, most were murdered in Nazi-run death camps like Auschwitz that dotted the land that had been their home for a thousand years.

Of those who survived, many fled, sometimes in reaction to anti-Semitic violence, or the repression that took hold under communism. Those who remained often turned their backs on the faith - though their last names sometimes prevented them from hiding their heritage - and many intermarried with the Roman Catholic majority.

But now, with the democracy that came in 1989 nurturing a new tolerance and security, many Jews are increasingly returning to those roots, in many cases discovering only in past months or years that they have Jewish ancestry at all.

"It represents a very dramatic chapter in Jewish history," Oseran said.

But it is tricky to live an Orthodox life in a staunchly Roman Catholic country of 38 million whose Jews number in the low tens of thousands - perhaps 30,000 according to imperfect estimates.

Pork sausages and other non-kosher foods crown most menus. There's only one kosher butcher in the entire country, in Bialystok, 180 kilometers (110 miles) northeast of Warsaw. And sundown in the deep of winter comes at 3 p.m., meaning observant Jews should cease work in the middle of the work day on Fridays - not an option in most jobs.

Unlike the Orthodox, Reform Jews travel on the Sabbath, men and women sit together during services, and they don't necessarily adhere to all the dietary laws.

"If I followed all the Orthodox rules, I wouldn't be able to eat at my own parents' house any more," said Ania Mazgal, the vice president of Beit Warszawa, Poland's only progressive community. Mazgal, 28, was baptized Catholic, has no Jewish roots, and converted last year because she was drawn by Progressive Judaism's focus on social justice.

Reform Judaism was founded in 19th century Germany, but came to maturity in North America, where it has flourished and grown into the world's largest Jewish denomination. Nonetheless, it faces many challenges in most countries, most strikingly Israel, whose religious life is dominated by the Orthodox to the point that Reform marriages are not legally recognized.

Liberal Jews in central Europe face a similar struggle for acceptance from the Orthodox, some of whom hold that they aren't real Jews because they reject some of the 613 Jewish mitzvot, or commandments.

That offends people like Emil Jezowski, a 17-year-old who was circumcised last year in a Warsaw hospital with a group of adult males from Beit Warszawa, converted and celebrated his bar mitzvah this past Saturday.

"I am who I think I am, I am Jewish," said Jezowski, whose father was born
Jewish but whose mother was raised Protestant. He converted along with his mother and three of his five siblings last summer. "No one can tell me I'm not after all these things," he says.

A further problem for the group is that only the Orthodox community is officially recognized by the state, meaning it inherits the synagogues and other communal Jewish property seized by the Nazis, taken over by the communists, and only now being slowly returned.

While the Orthodox community worships in the Nozyk synagogue, the only one to survive the war in the capital, Beit Warszawa's members meet in a modern house in the city outskirts filled with abstract art and Ikea furniture - an attractive space but one lacking the same feeling of tradition.

The group's rabbi, Burt Schuman, an American who began serving last summer as
Poland's first permanent Progressive rabbi since the Holocaust, also struggles with a sense among many Jews in the U.S. and Western Europe that Poland is anti-Semitic and that Jews should leave it for Israel or America.

Polish Jews committed to rebuilding their lives in the land of ancestors, family and friends feel that outlook deprives them of financial and moral support they need to thrive.

Indeed, Beit Warszawa is funded almost entirely by a single donor, Severyn Ashkenazy, 71, a Polish-American real estate developer who survived the Holocaust and has worked in recent years to nurture liberal Jewish life here. There's a kind of allergy to Poland, Schuman said. The notion that Poland is a Jewish graveyard continues to have a great deal of sway and power.


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