Restitution Helps Fuel Jewish Revival, but Fans Fear of Prejudice

With the fond eye of memory, Rafael Scharf traces the landscape of his youth in the Krakow neighborhood of Kazimierz: prayer house here, Torah study hall there, streets echoing with the voices of 60,000 Jews.

The vibrant community of shopkeepers and scholars, children and parents, was silenced by Nazi deportations, murder and postwar flight to Israel, the United States and elsewhere. Today, only about 200 people in Krakow call themselves Jews.

Most of the hundreds of synagogues, prayer houses, schools and social service centers of Scharf’s childhood still stand, but long ago they were confiscated by the Nazis and then by Communists.

Little by little, though, new life is returning to the old country. Across Eastern Europe, Jews--some backed by new legislation--are reclaiming lost property.

The Jewish quarter of Kazimierz has been revived, but less for the benefit of local Jews than for tourists and entrepreneurs banking on the neighborhood’s erstwhile fame as a Jewish center.

Travelers can imagine life as Scharf knew it by visiting the renovated synagogues and kosher-style restaurants. They enjoy folk bands playing klezmer--even though the musicians are non-Jews.

Half a century after the Holocaust and several years after the fall of communism, the region from Poland to Bulgaria has no more than 175,000 Jews. Poland alone once had 3.5 million. Scharf himself left Krakow in 1938.

Considering the sparse Jewish population, the opportunity for Jews to recover hundreds of properties raises troubling questions.

“To whom should the property be given?” asked Scharf, an 82-year-old writer now living in London. “And for what purpose?”

How much is reasonable for small Jewish communities to ask for? Anti-Jewish sentiments are largely in check in the region, but never far below the surface. How far can restitution go before it spurs new anti-Semitism?

Jews aren’t the only ones seeking lost property. Across Eastern Europe, governments, religious and social organizations, and individuals are grappling with the issue of restitution for property confiscated by Communists.

Restitution of the about 17,000 formerly Jewish properties across the region is more complicated. Such real estate changed owners not once but twice. And diminished Jewish congregations can’t come close to filling the institutions they stand to recover.

Regained communal property could be used to house revitalized Jewish institutions or rented for income to help pay teachers in Jewish schools, purchase books for libraries, or buy paints and clay for art workshops in Jewish community centers.

Peter Feldmajer, head of Hungary’s Federation of Jewish Communities, said the answer on how to use such benefits depends on where Jews envision themselves in the future.

“If we see Jews as having a future only in Israel, then certain things follow--for instance, where the restitution proceeds should be used,” Feldmajer said. “If we see the Jews as being in Hungary for a good long time, then the restitution for Jewish community property should be here in Hungary.”

Until recently, Jewish communities focused on supporting impoverished elderly and providing kosher products to Orthodox Jews. Before that, the priority was emigration.

“We’ll never see the kind of community that existed here between the two world wars,” Feldmajer said. “But we think that the Hungarian Jewish community could flourish . . . so that our main problem isn’t keeping people on the edge of existence, but rather developing a self-sustaining and proud Jewish community.”

New schools have opened, funded by former U.S. Ambassador Ronald Lauder’s foundation for supporting Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Cultural festivals have blossomed, and some who denied their Jewish heritage, or discovered it only recently, have begun to return to the Jewish fold.

Budapest is home to a gleaming new Jewish community center, Balint House. Krakow’s Center for Jewish Culture, in a light-filled, renovated prayer house, sponsors lectures, exhibits and an annual summer academy run jointly with U.S. universities. The spectrum of Jewish life has opened wide.

“Here in Poland, it wasn’t important whether you kept up Jewish tradition. It was enough not to go in a Christian direction,” said Jakub Rympel, a 28-year-old physiotherapist who eschewed religious services where most of the congregation was elderly.

Now he can drop into the Krakow cultural center for lectures and exhibits. Or he can study Hebrew and the liturgy with a young rabbi. Taking part in Jewish life is “becoming normal,” Rympel said.

Much of the tentative rebirth that has occurred so far has been funded with foreign money. But that too has its price. Some of the region’s Jewish leaders think outside organizations, led by the Jerusalem-based World Jewish Restitution Organization, or WJRO, are pushing too hard on restitution and other issues and risking a backlash.

Regional leaders want to build their own communities in their own ways, using their own money--making the issue of property very important.

“The WJRO says everything that was Jewish has to be Jewish, but there’s 50 years in between. You have to proceed moderately,” said Tomas Kraus, the head of the Czech Federation of Jewish Communities. “Our strategy was to ask what’s possible to get.”

The Czech Jewish community has recovered half of the 202 properties it requested. The rest were put beyond reach by privatization, but Kraus said negotiations with the government would begin soon on compensation.

The dilemma is most acute in Poland, where the number of properties is high, but so is the demand for income. Upkeep on at least 1,200 Jewish cemeteries probably will far outweigh rental income.

A Polish law severely limits the property Jews can seek to recover. It allows local Jewish communities to apply for the return of government property that belonged to religious congregations on Sept. 1, 1939--the date the Nazis invaded. It does not cover the much larger network of Jewish social organizations, nor property now in private hands.

Konstanty Gebert, editor of the Warsaw-based Jewish monthly Midrasz, said there was a “rash of sellouts” before the law took effect. As in the Czech Republic, local governments sold formerly Jewish property to private owners, who are not responsible for making restitution.

Polish government officials and Jewish representatives will resolve property disputes over the next five years. Their rulings, made by consensus, will not be open to appeal.

An important test case will be Krakow’s Talmud Torah, a former religious school among the 48 properties the community there has requested, said Tadeusz Jakubowicz, the community leader. Krakow’s Jews already have lost one court battle over the three-story building, which the city now uses as a medical center.

Jews also worry about the repercussions of any struggle over property. Scharf witnessed an explosion of anti-Semitism in the 1930s and said the issue of restitution made him “apprehensive about the side effects.”

In February, a firebomb damaged the two doors of Warsaw’s only synagogue. Rabbi Michael Schudrich, director of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in Warsaw, said the bombing was probably a response to the restitution debate--and the news of Jews from abroad reclaiming property, including apartment buildings.

“I’ve never heard as many anti-Semitic statements as in the last six months,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s a response to the restitution question. There’s more tension in the air. People are afraid of losing their houses.”

Stanislaw Krajewski, a philosophy professor and president of a Warsaw-based professionals’ group, the Jewish Forum, said that property is the one issue that makes an otherwise esoteric debate over the return of Jews very concrete.

“The feeling is that, yes, it’s a tragedy that the Jews disappeared, but there shouldn’t be Jewish interference in our towns,” he said.

While extremist groups openly express anti-Semitism, Krajewski said he sees a parallel, growing respect for Judaism, especially in the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

“Jews who participate in Jewish activities are seen as a normal, accepted part of the Polish scene,” Krajewski said. “The attacks are aimed mainly against those who are of Jewish origin and don’t take part in Jewish life. . . . It’s the idea of ‘aliens posing among our own’--mythological Jews.”