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Friday January 5, 2007

Polish priest shuts down anti-Semitic bookstore

by dinah a. spritzer
jta

prague | In the end it wasn’t the years of lawsuits and pressure from Catholic and Jewish groups that caused the demise of Poland’s best-known haven of anti-Semitic literature, but a newly appointed parish priest who decided enough was enough.

The Antyk bookstore, which quietly closed last October, had become a symbol of some of the last remaining vestiges of Jewish-Catholic tension. It had been opened by extreme right politician Marcin Dybowski in the basement of All Saints Church, directly across from Warsaw’s Nozyk synagogue in 1997.

“The bookstore should have been closed a long time ago because it did not represent contemporary Catholicism,” said the Rev. Henry Malecki, 55. “The church does not function according to prejudices and hatred.”

Malecki rejoined the parish last June, having served there as vicar 20 years ago, and told the bookstore that he would not renew its lease.

“He has shown how the moral stance of a single person can make a difference to many,” said Piotr Kadlcik, chairman of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland.

Many had long wondered how a bookstore in a church basement could be allowed to sell literature claiming that Jews controlled the world, collaborated with the Nazis and are the enemies of Polish national interests.

Stanislaw Krajewski, co-chairman of Poland’s Council of Christians and Jews, said the closing of the bookstore was important because “for years and years we were all told nothing could be done about it. So it has special meaning when a single person changes that.”

After several protests, the store claimed it had toned down its offerings, but a year ago JTA found 15 books in stock that criticized Jews or reinforced negative stereotypes. The so-called patriotic bookstore, frequented by fringe Catholic nationalists, made an odd partner to the statue of Pope John Paul II in front of the church.

Zuzanna Radzik was 19 years old when she brought the bookstore into the limelight.

“When I first visited the store in 2001 with a Jewish friend, I found that it was not only awfully anti-Semitic but also anti-church, criticizing certain reforms that have been made,” said Radzik, now studying at a Catholic university in Warsaw. “The messages from its literature, posters and discussions was decidedly anti-Christian.”

Radzik sought out the intervention of the priest at All Saints, but says she was rebuffed. He said he would not play the censor, according to Radzik, and was grateful to have the rent money from the store.

So Radzik circulated a letter against the bookstore with 200 signatures of prominent Catholics and sent it to the archbishop’s office in Warsaw.

“When I asked for a meeting with the bishop after handing in the letter, I was told by his secretary that they didn’t care about my project and had more important things to do,” she recalled.

The soft-spoken Radzik continued to hound various bishops and even the primate’s office, which refused to respond even after the story was reported in a mass circulation daily newspaper, Rzeczpospolita.

Antyk held a press conference condemning Radzik, and church officials continued to ignore her, but she raised public awareness of the issue.

“It was a painful, but at the same time life-changing experience,” she said.

Radzik, who recently returned from a fellowship studying Christian-Jewish relations at the University of Notre Dame, said she feels no sense of victory now that Antyk is closed.

“The truth is that we didn’t succeed,” she said. “It was not lay people protesting or the media, but one good parish priest who changed everything.”

As the vicar at All Saints in the 1980s, Malecki had been a maverick, taking young people to visit the Jewish community’s headquarters.

He did not want to discuss his predecessor, but indicated that the church needed funding for renovation and Antyk had paid a relatively high rent.

Malecki hopes to renew contacts with the Jewish community, something Kadlcik wants as well.

“We definitely want to meet him and encourage him,” Kadlcik said.

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