History of Polish Jews

In parts of Poland where Jews no longer live, it has become trendy to invoke  fond memories of Jewish culture and tradition.  By establishing in areas formerly known for their large Jewish presence, restaurants and similar places of commerce with a Jewish twist, serving cuisine known as 'Jewish food', that kind of thing.  Poles who find themselves uncomfortable at the thought of sharing living space in their neighbourhoods with Jews find it entertaining to visit the past in this way.

It makes about as much sense for Austro-Canadian multi-millionaire Frank Stronach, in his dotage, to return to Austria, the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, where the Nazi Party (national socialism in its more innocuous presentation) had its birth to re-assert himself as an Austrian citizen, albeit an elderly Jewish one, for the purpose of funding and founding a new political party.  One might think that someone with the heritage he had would seek to shun the country, but not he.

And there are others who are now doing their own re-writing of history and heritage.  Well-heeled people of Jewish ancestry who think back, in their elderly years, of how fond they were living in Poland as children, for example.  Ascribing to that country an honourable historical role in the manner in which it hosted a millennium of Jewish life.  Where as long back as history goes, pogroms distinguished life for Polish Jews.

Yet they have proceeded, said a Polish-born Holocaust survivor named Sigmund Rolat, to fund a museum in Warsaw.  Where else but upon the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto, in a sense memorializing the infamous Ghetto and the unsuccessful uprising that failed to stop the Holocaust, but brought a sense of honourable resistance on the part of young Jews to their inexorably vulnerable plight that led to their extinction.

The Museum of the History of Polish Jews has been erected by Jews prideful of their place in history. They were committed to raising the huge sums required for the building; over $100-million.  To memorialize a thousand-year history as Poles, albeit Jewish ones.  Where entire villages in a 'shtetle' countryside, along with more cosmopolitan-urban presence of Jews were comprised of Jewish peasants.

Sometimes living alongside their non-Jewish counterparts in quasi-harmony, more often not quite.

Jews, dispersed around the world, when they were hounded out of Israel by Roman conquest following on earlier conquests, wandered and settled where they could.  And wherever they migrated to and settled they did so under duress from the existing populations and their rulers.  That they managed, despite all adversities, to prosper, in village and farming communities (although land ownership and farming was denied them), is a tribute to their determination.

From the 19th Century on, the more casual bigotry against Jews became somewhat more formalized and organized and what we know of as Anti-Semitism rose to the occasion, culminating in the Germans understanding they would see no opposition in the European communities they overran, to the presence of death camps whose ultimate purpose was to destroy those whom they labelled vermin.

Famously, Jews who survived the Holocaust, returning to their villages in Poland were surprised to see their neighbours in possession of their homes and their goods.  Little wonder the Poles snarled and turned upon their returning neighbours.  The purpose of the museum is to present the history of the Jewish presence in Poland over the last one thousand years, not to explore the tragedy that led to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and the Warsaw Ghetto.

Nor to linger on the uncomfortable fact of Polish anti-Semitism, the boycotts, economic strictures, persecution, slander, and massacres of the 19th and 20th Centuries.  Pre-Second World War Poland hosted Europe's largest Jewish community, of 3.3-million people.  They comprised ten percent of the Polish population.  And most of those 3.3-million Jews perished during the Holocaust.

Perhaps it is worth valuing the very fact that despite constant harassment, discrimination, violence and displacement, Jews in Poland managed to thrive.  That many among them achieved their life-purpose.  And many achieved outstanding representation of what it means to aspire and to reach the heights of human endeavour.  Jewish culture and learning had its place in Poland.

The names of Polish-born Jews like David Ben-Gurion, Menachim Begin, Albert Sabin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Harry Warner and Samuel Goldwyn, Max Factor and Helene Rubenstein made their exceptional way in the world as entrepreneurs, scientists, political world leaders.  Not because they were Poles, but because they were Jewish.

It is a conceit to bypass the struggle to survive in an hostile environment, celebrating it as a place where Jews flourished, when they did so in that environment only because of an inherent and inherited passion for life and determination to endure.

Jews owe nothing to Poland.

A woman enters the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland - a new museum dedicated to the 1,000 years of Jewish existence in the country. The glass building rises from soil marked by tragedy in Warsaw's former Jewish district.

Photograph by: Czarek Sokolowski, The Associated Press