A Culture Back From the Brink

Leslaw Piszewski was 16 when he started “suspecting something” about his family, but for years he couldn’t figure out what it was. “There were too many secrets,” he recalled. “I started asking questions and did not get answers.”

The urge to know the truth grew when he was 23 and his daughter was born. “I thought, I must tell my child who I am, who my parents are, who my grandparents are and where we come from,” he explained.

Pressed again for answers, Piszewski’s father finally revealed a fact he had been hiding since World War II: He is Jewish.

Today the younger Piszewski is a leader of Poland’s small but increasingly vibrant Jewish community, which is largely composed of people like himself who had lost or nearly lost all sense of Jewish identity. In the decade since communism fell, they have embraced their roots.

Still hanging in the balance, though, is whether this growing community will be able to sustain itself as younger members make decisions about marriage, emigration and the education of their children.

“I had the choice to go to Israel,” said Piszewski, 41, deputy director of Warsaw’s Jewish community organization. “But I want to stay in Poland, to show that Hitler did not achieve what he wanted. We are still here.”

About 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland before World War II--10% of the population--and Warsaw was the world’s second-largest center of Jewish life after New York City. Then an estimated 3 million Polish Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

But the Nazis were not the only culprits in the near-demise of the Jewish community in Poland, which, like many other European countries, has a long history of intermittent anti-Semitic violence. Scattered pogroms in 1946 prompted many Holocaust survivors to flee, while Communist-directed purges in the late 1950s and late 1960s led to further emigration.

By 1970, Poland’s Jewish population was estimated at 6,000. During the next two decades, it appeared that Jewish institutions might not survive the passing of the prewar generation.

But today the number of Polish Jews, including people who are rediscovering their roots, is estimated at about 30,000. Warsaw’s Jewish community has a kindergarten, along with a combined elementary and middle school that will grow to include a high school as its students get older. There is resurgent attendance at Sabbath and holiday services at the city’s only surviving synagogue.

A major project is underway to renovate historic buildings on the only street in Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto that escaped Nazi destruction; a kosher restaurant is in one of the structures. There are also plans for a $50-million museum of Polish Jewish history.

‘My Dad Made a Strange Face’

The future of Jewish life in Poland will be built by people like Joanna Goldstein. The 16-year-old sported a punk-style hairdo--part black, part blond--when she attended a recent holiday camp organized by the Warsaw branch of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, an international organization that finances activities aimed at strengthening Jewish life in former Soviet bloc countries.

Discovering her Jewish roots initially gave her a “schizophrenic” feeling, Goldstein said. “When I was 8, I told my dad an anti-Semitic joke,” she explained. “My dad made a strange face, and I asked him whether Jews were bad. Then my dad told me that I am Jewish.”

Goldstein comes from the once heavily Jewish city of Lodz in central Poland, where today fans of one soccer team routinely disparage players for a cross-town rival as “Jews,” using the word as a general term of insult. “I think that if I didn’t learn I was Jewish, I could have become an anti-Semite, a soccer fan,” Goldstein said. “I could have been a real racist.”

The Lauder-sponsored holiday camp is held outside Warsaw in a wooded town that was a favored Jewish vacation spot before World War II. It welcomes families during school breaks for a mixture of fun, religious services and Torah study, as well as workshops on music, dance, drama, arts and crafts.

Because the Jewish community in Poland is small and focused largely on survival, Orthodox, liberal and secular Jews--as well as people simply exploring their roots--are thrown together at the camp in a way seldom seen elsewhere. A room still decorated with Communist-inspired wall paintings serves as a makeshift Orthodox synagogue, complete with a white curtain dividing the men’s and women’s sides.

Efforts to rediscover roots and ensure the survival of Jewish traditions and institutions are taking place in many former Soviet bloc states, often with help from the Lauder Foundation. But Poland remains a special case because its prewar Jewish population was so huge and the destruction of Jewish life here so nearly complete.

Stanislaw Krajewski, 50, a philosophy professor at Warsaw University and a board member of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland, said his parents survived World War II in the Soviet Union. Krajewski grew up in Poland knowing he was Jewish but not particularly caring about it. With the anti-Semitic purges of the late 1960s, he realized that--one way or another--being Jewish was going to make a difference in his life. But for years he remained inactive.

“In the 1980s, Jewish institutional life was very weak, and it seemed like it would be dying in the future,” Krajewski said. “After 1989, freedom came, and I and my friends understood this was the time to be involved and the responsibility was on us too.”

Nothing Like It in Country’s History

Krajewski described his own experience, and that of many others of the postwar generation, as a process of “de-assimilation.”

“It is only with my generation, in the ‘80s and ‘90s in Poland, that some of us coming from completely assimilated families became more Jewish than our parents were,” he said. “There has never been anything like that in Polish history or Jewish history.”

This process may for the first time make being Jewish in Poland closer to the experience of being Jewish in the United States or Western Europe, Krajewski said, because this “de-assimilation” does not mean the younger Polish Jews lose any of their language, culture or sense of belonging to Poland.

Jewish community leaders and representatives of the Lauder Foundation generally agree that it is too soon to know whether a self-sustaining Jewish community will be rebuilt here.

“You’ve got 60 years of deliberate destruction, to varying degrees, of Jewish life in this country, and roughly 10 years of the beginning of putting it back together again,” said Yale J. Reisner, director of research and archives here for the foundation. “I think there are some very significant signs of hope on the horizon. There’s an opportunity for there to be future generations of Polish Jewry, and that almost didn’t happen.”

At Warsaw’s synagogue, attendance is up dramatically and the average age of those attending has dropped.

“If you could have visited the synagogue 10 years ago, there were only old people there,” said Eleonora Bergman, a researcher at the Jewish Historical Research Institute in Warsaw. “Now there are kids and young people.” The synagogue survived World War II onlybecause it was first used as a warehouse for Nazi loot stolen from Jews and was later converted into a stable for horses.

The steadily growing Lauder Morasha School, launched by the foundation in 1994, has 170 students. It will continue to add one grade each year as its students get older. The school is open to non-Jews as well and uses Polish as the language of instruction, but students also study English and Hebrew. It provides a predominantly Jewish social environment, with emphasis, for example, on celebrating Jewish holidays such as Purim.

During Purim celebrations last month, students dressed in costumes and celebrated the scriptural story of Esther. Because of the Holocaust, the story carries particular resonance here.

“The Book of Esther is about an attempt to completely wipe out the Jews of the Persian Empire of the time--to physically exterminate the entire Jewish people,” explained Reisner. “It didn’t work then and it didn’t work in the 1940s, and it hasn’t worked at any point in history. That’s the tale of Purim: We are still here. Everyone who wanted to destroy us lost.”

The Lauder Foundation supports a genealogy project headed by Reisner that helps Polish Jews and others uncover their ancestry, and a variety of workshops, camps, seminars and social activities to teach about Judaism.

The foundation is also the main force behind a $10-million project to restore buildings that survived the destruction of the Jewish ghetto by the Nazis after they crushed an uprising in 1943, the victims’ last-ditch effort to resist deportation to concentration camps.

Buildings’ Former Beauty Resurfaces

Those buildings, empty of tenants for several years, now have crumbling brick exteriors and inner walls defaced by anti-Semitic graffiti. But restoration workers are patiently removing grime and old stucco to uncover historically valuable 19th century wall and ceiling paintings that hint at the beauty the buildings once displayed.

“This is a part of old Warsaw that simply vanished at a certain moment,” said Magdalena Skulska, one of the preservationists on the project. “Now we can at least bring back a small fragment, bring it back alive.”

The Lauder Foundation is promoting “this dream to create a vibrant life where Jewish life once flourished,” said Jonah Bookstein, the group’s director in Poland. “If we do something through schools and kindergartens, then we are really relighting the flame of Central European Jews.”

That dream is particularly about people like Michal Zybert, 19, who learned of his Jewish heritage just four years ago when his grandmother, without explanation, paid for him to attend a Lauder holiday camp.

As activities got underway, “there was talk of Jewish tradition, of the Jewish religion, so I went up to one of the camp counselors, asked him if this was a Jewish camp and said that I am not Jewish,” Zybert recalled. “He asked what my grandmother’s name was and said he would check it with the Jewish Social and Cultural Assn. Then he came back and said she was Jewish.”

His grandmother later told him that she had not wanted to talk about being Jewish earlier “because of anti-Semitism and things like that,” he said. She was the only person in her family to survive World War II.

Zybert was brought up as a Roman Catholic, the religion of his mother, and her relatives still don’t know that his father is Jewish. His parents want nothing to do with Judaism, but he is an active member of the Polish Union of Jewish Students.

“My great-grandfather was a Hasidic Jew, and he was the last one in the family to be so religious,” Zybert said. “Then there was the war and everyone died, and my grandmother created this illusion that she is Catholic.”

On a trip to Israel, Zybert discovered that even there the question of identity can be difficult for people like himself, partly because many people have the idea that after the Holocaust no Jew would have wanted to live in Poland.

“Someone asked us where we were from, and we said that we are Polish Jews,” he recalled. “And then there was this surprised look: ‘Oh, I thought there were no Jews in Poland.’ For those in Israel we are not really Jewish, because if we were we would live there. I don’t think that’s right. I am a Polish Jew.”

Differences in Perception Common

Such differences in perception between foreign Jews, especially Israelis, and Polish Jews are quite common, said Krajewski, the philosophy professor.

“They think that Poland was very important in prewar Jewish life, then it became a place of massacre, and this is a graveyard and that is it,” he said. “I feel I am a part of a new chapter of Jewish life in Poland, although I understand that, to many Jews outside Poland, we are just a footnote to the last chapter.”

Ela Kasprzycka of The Times’ Warsaw Bureau contributed to this report.