Poles don't want to live with the Jews

Received by email. The link to the article is in Polish, but here it is, translated into English:

Warsaw commemorates the events of March 1968.

[In March 1968, the Polish authorities provoked student demonstrations, which were utilized to escalate the government-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign started by the communist party leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in the Middle East in June 1967--VR].

However, the prejudice toward the Jews isstill alive. TNS OBOP [the oldest research and marketing information company in Poland and Central Europe -- <http://www.tns-global.pl/about>] conducted a poll at the request of the Inter-Cultural Center for Professional Adaptation [MCAZ]. The poll probed our attitudes toward immigrants.

An excerpt from this study was included in the invitation to a press conference that we received in the newspaper from the MCAZ.

It shows that only 27% of Poles would want a Jew as a neighbor.

More people would like to have immigrants from Africa as neighbors (31%).

We asked Warsaw residents if they would like Israelis as neighbors. The most frequent answer was: "I do not harbor any prejudices, but I would not like to live next to a Jew."

Why? Explanations varied. "It's a tradition" - explained Barbara Mazur from the Wola district. "Because you never know what to expect from them" - said Jan Kasprzak, an economist from Wilanow.

Tolerance from a Distance.

The results of the TNS OBOP poll do not agree with a study just published by the daily Polska. It concluded that Poles do not consider themselves anti-Semites. Fifty seven percent believe that we are free of prejudice.

Why such discrepancy between studies? Prof. Janusz Czapinski, Warsaw University Institute of Psychology, explains that this is a typical [Polish] reaction. "A question about anti-Semitism involves a big distance from the topic. The respondents do not require any contact with the Jews to respond to the question. In the case of neighborhood the distance significantly shortens. At this level antipathy and reservations may surface. I suspect that if a question was asked whether the respondent would have accepted a Jewish son or daughter in-law, even fewer people would give a positive answer" - says the professor. "The truth is that Poles are tolerant, but only from a distance."

Shallow, but Wide Piotr Kadlcik, chairman, Warsaw Jewish Congregation, has no illusions. In his opinion, anti-Semitism in Poland even 40 years after the March events is a big problem. "It is widely spread, but fortunately shallow" - he diagnoses. "It means that we know that we would not want a Jew for a neighbor or a boss, but when asked for a reason, we have usually a problem with an explanation. Why? Because the majority of people saying that has never had any contact with a Jew" - adds Kadlcik.

How to change this situation? Kadlcik has a simple recipe: "Educate, educate, and more educate" - he says.

This year education means.... official ceremonies. Their organizers rely on two events: the staging of the play "Forefathers" [This classic 19th century Polish play, which was stopped in January 1968 for supposedly exaggerated anti-Russian accents in the staging of the drama, caused protests from students and writers.] and the placing of a commemorative plaque at the Gdanski railroad station in Warsaw [Many thousands of Jews - including my family and close relatives - left Poland in 1967-1971 from this station; there is already a commemorative plaque there placed by the "Shalom"Foundation 10 years ago. I don't understand why a new one is needed. See http://www.izrael.badacz.org/zydzi_w_polsce/katalog_mazowsze_warsaw_inne.html
Scroll all the way down to the last picture].

More cemetery vandalism in Polish area

From JTA:

A swastika defacing a Jewish grave in northeastern Poland is the third such desecration in the area this year.

The swastika in Suwalki was discovered last week in the town's Jewish cemetery.

“We notified the prosecutor’s office, and the local authorities are not dealing with it since the cemetery just last month came under the ownership of the Jewish community in Poland," Monika Krawczyk of the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland told JTA. "We are not going to clean it up since it testifies to attitudes of some local residents today.”

Earlier this year in Augustow and Bialystok, swastikas and the expression “Jude Raus,” meaning "Jews Out" in German, were found on gravestones in Jewish cemeteries.

Krawczyk added, however, that she was hopeful as thousands of non-Jewish Polish students had recently participated in cleaning up cemeteries across Poland.

Today in Jewish History - Elul 22

Sponsored by Aish.com:

In 1939, during the Polish September Campaign, the Nazis occupied Krakow, Poland, a thriving Jewish community of 70,000 Jews. Jews were consigned to forced labor, and all Jews were required to wear identifying armbands. Synagogues were ordered closed and all their valuables turned over to Nazi authorities. In May 1940, the Nazis ordered a massive deportation of Jews from the city, leaving only 15,000 behind in Krakow's Jewish ghetto, crammed into 3,000 rooms. German businessman Oskar Schindler came to Krakow to take advantage of the ghetto labor, and subsequently worked furiously to save Jews, as portrayed in the film, Schindler's List. In March 1943, the Nazis carried out the final 'liquidation' of the ghetto.

Update: Museum of the History of Polish Jews

Activities in support of the Museum continue here in North America this summer. Last Wednesday evening, 60 young professionals attended a fundraising cocktail reception at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History, here in New York City. The event was hosted by the North American Council in partnership with Chris Walenczak who, along with several of his friends, brought the crowd together to learn about the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, to view the photographic exhibit “And I Still See Their Faces”, and to enjoy a glass of Polish vodka. Special thanks to Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk for his inspiring opening remarks.

Another event is planned for Tuesday, August 28, also at the Center for Jewish History. The evening will celebrate the Museum Groundbreaking and will offer a final opportunity to view the photographic exhibit "And I Still See Their Faces: The Vanished World of Polish Jews" before it closes at the end of the month. Tickets for the event are still available and details can be found on our web site here.

Photos and highlights of the speeches from June's Groundbreaking Ceremony are now available here.

The Museum will also be taking part in the 92nd St. Y's street fair on September 16th. Please stop by and say hello!

In more somber news, a true friend of both Polish Jewry and the Museum recently passed away. Chris Schwarz, the founder of Krakow's Galicia Museum and host to MHPJ events during Krakow's annual Jewish Culture Festival, will be missed by us all. His obituary from the New York Times can be found here.

For more information about the Museum of the History of Polish Jews or NAC events, please respond to this email, check http://www.mhpjnac.org or call us at 212-584-3300.

Thank you for your continued support.

Museum of the History of Polish Jews
North American Council

Jewish cemetery desecrated in Poland

A Jewish cemetery in southern Poland has been desecrated with around 100 tombstones daubed with anti-Semitic slogans and Nazi symbols, police said Monday.

Police spokesman Adam Gaska said that the perpetrators were believed to be local youths, and that a criminal investigation had been opened in Czestochowa in the country’s south.

“Numerous tombstones have been covered with insulting wording or SS symbols, in black paint," Gaska told Poland’s PAP news agency.

The Czestochowa Jewish cemetery was founded in the late 19th century and houses 4,500 graves, including that of the Hasidic spiritual master Izaak Mayer Justman.

Few Jewish cemeteries in Poland are currently used for burials, and many were left abandoned for decades before restoration efforts began in recent years.

Most of the country’s pre-World War II population of 3.5 million Jews -- then the largest Jewish community in Europe -- were exterminated by the occupying Nazis.

After the Holocaust, Poland’s Jewish population numbered just 280,000.

Many Jews emigrated to the United States or Israel, either immediately following the war or during a wave of anti-Semitism under communist rule in 1968.

Poland now counts between 3,500 and 15,000 Jews -- out of a total population of 38.2 million -- according to estimates by different sources.

Jewish woman takes up residence in Auschwitz

This post was moved to SmoothStoneBlog

Who is Irena Sendler?

Via "The Woman Who Loved Children," Ladies' Home Journal Print Edition, December 2006.

Irena Sendler rescued 2,500 children from the Nazi death camps. Her story, writes Marti Attoun in Ladies' Home Journal, was rescued by three Kansas teens.

And her story is astounding, as awe-inspiring as that of Oskar Schindler, whose courageous acts of Nazi resistance became a book and an Academy Award-winning film. But unlike Schindler, who received international acclaim, Sendler had been a footnote in history for nearly 60 years.‚ That all changed in September 1999, when three teenagers in a small town in Kansas were looking for a topic for a history project and stumbled upon a short mention of Sendler in an article in a 5-year-old newsmagazine. As a Catholic social worker, the article said, Sendler had organized the rescue of 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Nazi-controlled Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and 1943.

"We thought it was a typo," recalls Elizabeth Cambers, now 18 and a college freshman. "We thought it was supposed to say she rescued 250 children, not 2,500."

In September 1939, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker employed by Warsaw's social-welfare department. An only child, she had been just 7 when her father, a Catholic doctor, contracted typhus and died after treating Jews during a 1917 typhus outbreak . But she never forgot his sacrifice. "I was taught that if a man is drowning, it is irrelevant what is his religion or nationality, " Sendler has said. "One must help him. It is a need of the heart."

In the fall of 1940, Sendler watched as the Nazis forced 350,000 Jews inside the Warsaw ghetto, a 16-square-block area that was walled off and guarded. With each passing month of the war, the torment of the people locked inside intensified. They were dying of starvation and disease while unknowingly waiting for the Nazis to herd them into freight cars that would ultimately take them to their deaths in the gas chambers.

Sendler joined Zegota, the code name for the Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, an underground network founded in December 1942 by psychologist Adolf Berman and six other prominent scholars, religious leaders, and social activists. The secret organization, which forged thousands of birth certificates and other documents to give Jews safe Aryan identities, asked Sendler to head up their operation to smuggle Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto.

But first she had to get inside. Because the Nazis were on guard against the spread of infections, they allowed the delivery of medicine inside the Ghetto. A Zegota member working inside the Polish disease department forged a permit that allowed Sendler to work undercover as a nurse inside the ghetto. Her code name was Jolanta.With the help of 10 "messenger friends," as Sendler called her colleagues, and dozens of volunteers, she organized the effort to sneak the Children to orphanages, convents, and private homes in the Warsaw region.

Children who were old enough to talk were taught to rattle off Christian prayers and mimic other religious behavior (such as how to make the sign of the cross) so they could live safely without arousing suspicion of their Jewish heritage.

Sendler and Zegota devised several routes for smuggling children out of the ghetto. Kids escaped on foot or in the arms of volunteers through sewer pipes or basements with underground passageways. Many also escaped through the courthouse, which had entrances on both the ghetto side and Aryan side. Other methods were more inventive. For instance, a trolley driver and Zegota member, when crossing from the ghetto to the Aryan side, hid little ones in trunks, suitcases, or sacks under his back-seat, where the Nazi guards could not see. Another supporter, an ambulance driver, kept his dog beside him in the front seat and trained him to bark to camouflage any cries or noises from the babies hidden under stretchers in back. Sendler also arranged for babies and children to be sedated and smuggled out with merchants in potato sacks, under their loads of goods. Sometimes, she even sneaked sedated children out in body bags, telling the guards that they were dead.

Day after day, for about 16 months, Sendler persuaded parents and grandparents to hand over their babies and children, to give them a chance to live. "There were terrible scenes," Sendler says. "One mother & I wanted a child to leave the ghetto while the father did not. The grandma wanted, the husband did not. They asked what was the guarantee? What kind of guarantee could I give them?" She couldn't even guarantee that she could get past the guards. On slips of tissue paper, Sendler recorded the identity of every child she rescued. Whenever possible, she wrote down the child's Jewish name as well as the child's new Christian name and new address. Sendler buried these names in jars under an apple tree in a friend's garden. After the war, Sendler hoped, the children would be located and their Jewish identities revealed to them.

On Oct. 20, 1943, the Gestapo arrested Sendler. They had long suspected she was running a smuggling operation, and one of her messengers had been caught and tortured until she gave up Sendler's name and home address. The Gestapo interrogated Sendler, demanding information about the identities of the other rescuers and the children in hiding. But she refused to talk, even when she was beaten until her legs and feet were broken. "I was quiet as a mouse," Sendler has said. "I would have rather died than disclose anything about our operations." She was then taken to Pawiak prison, where she was sentenced to be executed.

At the last minute, however, the woman who had rescued so many others was herself rescued. On the day she was to be executed, Zegota paid ahefty bribe to a guard, who allowed Sendler to escape. The guard subsequently posted Sendler's name on public bulletin boards as one of the executed, essentially rendering her invisible to the Nazis. She then went into hiding in Poland, just like the children she'd saved.

When Poland was liberated a year and three months later, in January 1945, Sendler returned to the friend's garden and dug up the jars. She turned over the rescued children's names to Zegota's Berman, and he and other members of the group tried to locate the children's foster families.‚ Sadly, most of the children had no parents or grandparents to be found. Less than 1 percent of the Jews inside the ghetto survived the war, most having perished at the Treblinka death camp in northeast Poland. After the war, Sendler married, raised two children of her own, and continued her career as a social worker in Warsaw. The beatings she had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo left her permanently disabled and she has had trouble walking ever since. But she never talked openly about her rescue work. Poland was under a communist regime, and the postwar climate wasn't safe. For almost 60 years, her story was essentially lost to history.

Then, in March 2000, she received a letter from Elizabeth Cambers and two of her classmates at Uniontown High School in Uniontown, Kan. Encouraged by their social studies teacher, the girls had selected Sendler as the subject of their National History Day project, and though information about her was scarce, they had been able to write a 10-minute play, titled "Life in a Jar", that had already won first place at the state level of the national contest. "We explained who we were and what we were doing," says Sabrina Coons, now 20 and a student at Kansas State University. "We told her that we found her story amazing."

Sendler's response, handwritten in Polish, arrived in Kansas three weeks later. "I am very eager to receive and read your play,"Sendler wrote. In a series of letters, Sendler answered the students'questions, and slowly the details of her remarkable story unfolded; an international friendship was forged.

After an emotional performance of Life in a Jar at Uniontown High, the students were invited to perform the play for church groups, nursing homes, and civic organizations throughout southeast Kansas. Through their correspondence with Sendler, the teens learned that she lived quite meagerly. So at each performance, they set out a donation jar. Their first gift to Sendler was $3, which they told her to use for postage. "We found out later that she gave the $3 away to a children's home," says Coons. "That's just how she is."

Although the girls didn't win any awards when they traveled to Maryland in June 2000 to compete in the national contest, their play gained national and international attention, and the students have since given more than 100 performances of the play in eight different states. As a result, Sendler has received numerous awards for her courageous work. After learning she was to be given a $10,000 humanitarian award from the American Center of Polish Culture in Washington, she wrote to her girls "My emotion is being shadowed by the fact that no one from the circle of my faithful coworkers, who constantly risked their lives, could live long enough to enjoy all the honors that now are falling upon me.... I can't find the words to thank you, my dear girls.... Before the day you have written the play "Life in a Jar" -- nobody in my own country and in the whole world cared about my person and my work during the war ..." One member of a Kansas City audience was so profoundly moved by Sendler's story that he raised money to send the play's three authors to Poland to meet Sendler in May 2001.

"It wasn't real until I actually met Irena," says Megan Stewart. "We all ran up and hugged her. She wanted to just hold our hands and hear about our lives." Cambers told Sendler, "I love you. You are my hero." Sendler, a 4-foot-11-inch woman who now uses a wheelchair, deflected the girls' praise. "A hero is someone doing extraordinary things," she told them.. "What I did was not extraordinary. It was a normal thing to do.

"From "The Woman Who Loved Children," Ladies' Home Journal Print Edition, December 2006.

Online, the shadow of Auschwitz

From Christopher Wolf, chair of the International Network Against Cyber-Hate and of the Internet Task Force of the Anti-Defamation League, is a partner in the Washington office of Proskauer Rose LLP.:

Human rights experts from around the world gathered in Poland recently in a bid to counter
the misuse of the Internet by hate groups. Sitting in a Warsaw conference room, the group viewed the latest online content produced by neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic hate groups, all reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda seen in that city more than 60 years ago.

Gone are the days when hate groups met in dingy rooms. Now, the Internet is the platform of choice for fringe groups that want to look mainstream. And as the promoters of intolerance and hate well know, on the Internet, video is king.

In Poland, the experts on Internet hate speech viewed a kind of "hate film festival" - slickly produced videos promoting white power and demonizing Jews, blacks, gays and other minorities, all available online. The music videos and film were Hollywood quality. A kid looking at what effectively are recruitment ads to join the intolerance movement would be impressed with the production values.

Today, the platform of choice for distribution of online videos is YouTube, which Google recently agreed to purchase for $1.65 billion. YouTube has capitalized on the advent of broadband Internet connections to make it a simple proposition to upload and share videos. Unsurprisingly, there has been a surge in hate videos posted online recently.

One likewise would expect a proliferation of pornographic videos on YouTube. But the YouTube terms of service make it clear that pornographic offerings are not allowed. As a result, and through the obvious attention of the YouTube managers, smutty videos are not to be found on the service.

The YouTube terms of service also prohibit "harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive" content. Citing the prohibitions in the terms of service, human rights monitors have brought hate videos to the attention of YouTube, and some videos have disappeared. But the presence of many others shows that the current management of YouTube makes the elimination of hateful content a low priority.

The folks at Google have been far more sensitive about the presence of hate speech on the Internet. When the Anti-Defamation League pointed out that the search term "Jew" produced a
virulently anti-Semitic site as a highly ranked search listing, Google volunteered to alert users to the fact that the listed site was in fact a hate site. And executives of Google have reached out to groups like the league to explore ways to counter online hate speech, and have even attended conferences on the subject.

While the First Amendment permits a wide range of speech in America, including hate speech, private companies do not have to allow their platforms to be used for distribution of such content. That is why activists fighting online hate take heart from terms of service that set standards. So far, it appears that Google takes such standards seriously. Let's hope that if
the Google/YouTube deal goes through, enforcement of the prohibition against hate speech becomes a real priority on the online video service.

We know too well what happens when citizens - including corporate citizens - fail to act
when hate speech proliferates. A searing reminder was provided to some of the people attending the Warsaw conference on Internet hate speech, who concluded their visit to Poland with a trip to Auschwitz.

Before walking to the crematoria at the concentration camp, visitors were invited to a screening of an orientation film containing footage from the days after the camp was liberated. The images are predictably horrific and the film makes the point that the murder of six million was the culmination of a regime of prejudice and hate.

For the people viewing the film, and the camp, the experience was painful but the lesson was profound: Expressions of hate and intolerance can lead to unimaginable acts of inhumanity.