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Friday March 23, 2007

Pole position: Scholarly book tackles Polish-Jewish relations

by dinah a. spritzer
jta

warsaw | Back in 1995, two young adults on an official mission of multicultural tolerance got off a plane in Tel Aviv. One was German, one was Polish.

The Israeli host embraced the German with kisses and hugs.

But he stared coldly and suspiciously at the Pole, barely willing to shake his hand, as if the elderly Israeli had come face to face with an unrepentant pogromnik.

To the Pole, Andrzej Folwarczny, the gesture spoke volumes about the success of German-Jewish reconciliation and the challenges that lay ahead for Polish-Jewish relations.

“I couldn’t understand why suddenly I was the enemy,” he recalls.

During the same visit, Folwarczny overhears a German-speaking tour guide at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial tell German visitors, “Auschwitz was in Poland because the Germans knew that Poland was an anti-Semitic country.”

Historians say the death camps were built in Poland because of the country’s large Jewish population and because it was an occupied country. The Nazis wanted to commit mass murder outside of its own territory, where it sought popular support.

Regarding Auschwitz, where most of the Jews killed were not from Poland, the location was convenient for railroad connections, historians say.

Such disconnects encouraged Folwarczny, now 37, to dedicate his life to Polish-Jewish relations.

Three years after the Israel experience he founded the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, a nonprofit that runs tolerance workshops in schools and universities, meetings between diaspora Jewish students and Polish students, and an intensive education program on Jewish-Polish relations that brings together young Poles and Americans. The American Jewish Committee is a partner.

“In my personal opinion, people’s attitudes have not changed enough” since the end of communism, Folwarczny said. “There is still Polish anti-Semitism, but also there are also still problems with the diaspora attitude toward Poles. The only way to change this is education and interaction.”

The culmination of the forum’s efforts is the recent release of “Difficult Questions in Polish-Jewish Dialogue.”

“This book addresses a lot of the questions Israeli and American Jews ask about Poland. [Many in the Jewish community] felt it would be important to answer all of these questions in one place,” said Shana Penn, deputy director of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture in Belmont, which helped fund the book’s publication.

“This book is an FAQ to help people making trips to Poland think in a different way about the current reality and how things have changed.”

In the book, religious scholars, politicians, diplomats, historians and journalists from around the world address questions about the Polish pogroms during and after World War II, anti-Semitism in Poland today, why Jews don’t accept Jesus as the messiah and the reasons Jews flocked to Poland 800 years ago.

A major contributor to the book is Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, twice appointed Polish foreign minister in the post-communist era and a leading figure of Zegota, the underground army’s movement to save Jews during World War II.

In the chapter “How did Poles behave during the Holocaust,” Bartoszewski wrote, “all the political and social powers in occupied Poland similarly assessed German crimes against the Jews to be a willful and planned genocide.”

But in a chapter titled “Why did Poles collaborate with Germans in persecuting Jews?” Warsaw-born Israel Gutman, who survived the Majdanek concentration camp to become chairman of Yad Vashem’s scientific council, sounded a different note.

“During the occupation there were no Jewish citizens of Poland in the government-in-exile,” Gutman wrote. “In the course of two years, when Jews were dying en masse from hunger and illness in the cramped confines of the ghettos, no material aid, not even a voice of solidarity, reached them from the ‘underground state.’”

Released in Polish at the end of 2006, the book is now available in English. It can be ordered through American Jewish Committee. Folwarczny is working on a Hebrew version as well.

Along with the AJCommittee and Taube Foundation, sponsors of the book include the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research and American philanthropist Sigmund Rolat, a native of Poland.

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