Poland’s missing Jew

The annual Krakow Jewish Culture Festival draws thousands. Why do these people – many of them non-Jews – care about current Jewish life and culture in Israel and around the world?

By JUDY BATALION
Krakow Jewish Culture Festival (photo credit: Pawel Mazur)
Krakow Jewish Culture Festival
(photo credit: Pawel Mazur)
“I’m not a Polish Jew, but a Jewish Pole,” is the answer Janusz Makuch tells me he gives when people ask him the question, “How do you identify?” The Catholic-raised Makuch is founder and director of the annual Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, which earlier this month celebrated its 21st iteration with Klezmer music, Jewish hip hop, flamenco, a Yiddish Romeo and Juliet, and Israeli cooking workshops.
Started in 1988, when he felt deeply compelled to present Jewish culture in Poland, the festival has always taken place in Krakow’s old Jewish area, Kazimierz (which survived the Nazis). It has seen communism fall, and incredible growth, with audiences this year estimated at 20,000 – a striking figure when one considers that the city’s Jewish population is thought to be 100.
“This year we had Sway Machinery perform nigunim [tunes] with Queen of the Desert, an unbelievably exciting collaboration between a rock band and an African singer,” he says, humming the music and brimming with excitement.
“We aim to celebrate outstanding highlevel Jewish art that is Sephardic and Ashkenazic, religious and secular, heretical and avant garde, but always by real Jews,” he adds. “We must break stereotypes, show tolerance, and definitely have authenticity.”
The festival, he stresses, is about Jewish life. It’s a “kaddish,” he says in a Polish accent: “The festival should pay homage to the pre-war Jewish culture, but the kaddish does not have the word death in it. The festival is not about death – it’s about current Jewish life and culture in Israel, New York and around the world. The Germans may have left a legacy of death, but the Jews left one that is alive.”
This Jew-celebration attitude in a country notorious for being the place where the greatest number of Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and for being anti-Semitic before, during and after the war, is surprising to me. I am a third-generation Canadian Holocaust-survivor, all four of my grandparents having fled Poland because of anti- Semitism. When I went in 2008, searching for my missing roots, what I found was a Poland that was seeking its missing Jew.
The senior adviser to the mayor of Lodz texted me late at night to ensure that we would meet; I came across Jewish studies departments, museums and festivals run by non-Jews; I ate at a Jewish-themed restaurant that had a hamentash course and live renditions of Fiddler on the Roof, sending the predominantly German tour groups into giddy clapping. I met Poles converting to Judaism, those who dedicated their lives to Jewish culture, and twentysomethings “coming out” as having Jewish roots.
SINCE THEN, a number of Polish youth organizations have been established, as have performance art pieces, cultural groups, a Jewish kindergarten, restaurants in Krakow and Lublin, and how-to-be-Jewish classes. A Krakow Jewish Community Center, which has to limit its heaving Friday night attendance to people with Jewish ancestry for fear of being overrun, and which hosts numerous events for adults who’ve only recently found out they were Jews, has been founded.
The Museum of the History of Polish Jews will open in Warsaw in 2012. And Makuch’s festival has grown.
Alongside this “new” Jewish community, however, exists one that has been in western Poland (where Jews were resettled) since after the war.
From the moment I meet them, I am told to “tell American Jews to stop sending money here. Tell them to send it to an Israeli orphanage instead.” According to them, the “new Jew” movement exists to exploit foreign funds sent for Jewish-related events, for the literal free lunches that are offered at Jewish community centers. “How can they call themselves Jews when they still go to church? When they don’t stand for the kaddish at Holocaust memorial services?” This small contingent, seeing themselves as survivors of the Holocaust and of postwar institutional anti-Semitism, feel that the American rabbis who are now running Poland’s community do not understand them, and that the community is exploitative and neglectful.
“The money does not actually go to Jews.
It certainly doesn’t go to the Jews living in Poland who need it,” they say.
Could Poland’s Yid-zeal be financial? Is it objectification? An absolution from responsibility for the past? I began a documentary film project to understand the “philo-Semitism” and why it is occurring.
“Why are you so interested in Judaism?” I ask Makuch on the heels of his successful 21st festival, knowing that though all four of my grandparents were Polish and my mother spent her formative years there, I’d never say I was Polish.
He explains his passion: “When I inherited Polish culture, I also inherited Jewish culture. Our histories are totally intertwined.... There was such a long history of Jewish life here – before the war, 10 percent of our country was Jewish. Afterward, for years, there were attacks on Jews, and people were terrified of admitting any Jewish link. They lived without Jewishness, in total abstinence.
Now, with the fall of communism, people can explore, associate. They discover they are Jewish – it’s like discovering Atlantis, their own authentic lost world! People want to understand this Jewish connection.”
This explanation – a lifting of repression and the formation of a new, post-Soviet Polish identity and memory – has been expressed by others.
Lukasz Myszala, a thirtysomething education specialist at Majdanek, explains that he grew up overlooking the camp and became fascinated by this taboo site, which then became his life’s work. He stresses that Jews have been in Poland since the Crusades, and though they often lived in ghettos (as the kings’ financiers), they were always deeply linked with Polish culture. Jews and Poles thrived together for centuries. Pointing out Majdanek museum panels, still in Cyrillic, he notes that the history of the Holocaust has been a Soviet narrative, which Poles are now studying and reclaiming, along with their national story.
Piotr Goldstein, 31, from Lodz, found out he was Jewish as an adolescent, later became the head of the country’s Jewish Students Union and is now a PhD student and tour guide. He is proud of Lodz’s Jewish past; before the war, he says, the city was 40% Jewish (by comparison, New York today is 12%). His tour stresses the ways in which faiths and cultures supported each other, including how, in the early 1900s, wealthy Jewish and German industrialists banded together to make an Orthodox church for Russian workers – which still stands.
Showing a newly renovated Jewish industrialists’ estate, he boasts that “my city hosts festivals of the four cultures: Poles, Germans, Russians and Jews.”
“How could it be that 60 years [since the Holocaust] could delete 1,000 years of living Jewish culture?” asks Makuch. “This is the only country in Europe which every day faces its own history.... Every day, I am aware that I live in the shadow of Auschwitz.... Every day, books are being published about Jewish-Polish relations.
Only Israel is as crazy as this country.”
It appears that after years of Soviet-constructed narratives about Poland’s past, a new, EU-member Poland is rewriting its own history, negotiating a new identity, looking to its future while re-exploring its past. Since joining the EU, the county has found itself on par with Western European development. It has remodeled, rebuilt itself (downtown Warsaw boasts trendy minimalist restaurants and high-rise hotels), and begun a process of aesthetic and cultural gentrification. Young people are looking for meaning, culture, and “coolness” in their national past, and find some in the country’s rich, near-1,000-year-old Jewish history.
SIXTY PERCENT of Ashkenazi Jews in the world today are of Polish descent. The cultural connection between Poles and Jews, evidenced in comparable cultural jokes and baked goods (the similarity of cheese danish at bakeries in Wroclaw and my Canadian Jewish suburb is striking), is compelling, and can be uncomfortable.
My Warsaw tour guide insists that Hitler had the same plans for Jews and Poles, which is why there is no Jewish section at the Warsaw Rising Museum.
Poland and Germany relate to the war differently.
While the latter has been seen as the clear-cut aggressor, the former has a more complex standing. Most of the death camps were located in Poland; however, it was an occupied country, fought over by Russians and Germans, and Poles themselves were victims (Slavs were beneath Aryans on Hitler’s hierarchy, due to be a slave race but not marked for extermination).
According to Jaroslaw Nowak, the former senior adviser to the mayor of Lodz, his own family was interned at Auschwitz. He has strong sympathy for the Jewish plight, and is highly active in the country’s Jewish commemoration.
Poles see themselves as victims of World War II and its aftermath, and at times express this victimhood through Jewish association. Perhaps the clear-cut Jewish story helps Poles deal with their more ambiguous family suffering. Or, as it has been explained to me, they love the underdog. Yet there seems to be a tension between collapsing differences for shared empathy, and rewriting history to mask difficult truths.
Additional elements of Polish culture might still be uncomfortable for Jews. Some Poles own a hassid figure, which they rub on the stomach for financial luck. (This association of Jews and money might relate to Poles trying to revive their sophisticated and worldly past.) Poland never paid reparations, and there is still casual anti-Semitism in the country. But, Makuch stresses, he requires almost no security for a Jewish festival.
“It’s ironic that it takes being next to Auschwitz to feel so safe,” he remarks.
So who, I ask, are the 20,000 attending the festival? The answer: tourists from the US, Israel, Brazil, Japan. But mainly Poles. “The festival was always meant to be for Poles,” he says. “Understanding Jewish music helps us understand Polish life. And some Polish Jews come, too.”
This brings up the question of how many Jews are in Poland today. As soon as I ask, we both chuckle knowingly: This number is up for grabs, strange for a Jewish culture obsessed with numbers. The answers I have received range from 40 to 40,000. With people emigrating, converting and “coming out,” it’s a difficult figure to track. Further, organizational biases might cloud the statistics (it is possible that some organizations want to show larger numbers for funding purposes).
Overall, ascertaining the number of Jews calls into question how Jewish identity is determined in the first place. What makes someone a Jew? Maternal ancestry? Persecution? Poland is a country where the very issue of who is a Jew is at stake. According to Nowak, it would be offensive in Poland today to say you are not a Jew, as so many Poles have Jewish roots, some without knowing it.
Ultimately, to Makuch, “the number doesn’t matter.”
He stresses that it’s not a matter of mathematics, but of ethics. The experience of Judaism must be authentic.
Is it? The Fiddler on the Roof renditions did not seem genuine to me (though I cannot say if the musicians were Jewish – perhaps they were). But the energetic director of the Krakow JCC, American Jonathan Ornstein, certainly thinks that overall this movement is genuine.
“The first wave involved Christian Poles accepting Judaism, as seen through the festival. Now Jews with hidden pasts are starting to feel safe about coming out.
There are tens of thousands of people here with Jewish roots – let’s get them involved. While the rest of Europe is becoming more anti-Semitic, Poland is becoming more philo-Semitic. The Jewish community next to Auschwitz is the hippest and least self-conscious in the world. There is growing tolerance.”
To Ornstein, at least, the Jewish future is in Krakow.
AMERICAN JOURNALIST Ruth Andrew Ellenson, working on a book about Jewish peoplehood, visited the Krakow festival for the first time this year. She agrees that Poland offers a refreshing and important take on Jewish identity.
“I was genuinely surprised that my Jewishness was revitalized and given deeper meaning in a place where I expected to feel marginalized. The expectation before you go is that being Jewish in Poland is dangerous, but being around people who are fighting simply to be Jewish, rather than fighting over what it means, as is often the case in America and Israel, made me keenly aware of how important is it to engage in Jewish life,” she reflects.
“In Poland, Jewishness is not a theoretical issue, but a practical one,” she adds. “It would be easy to despair there, but I found people who are deeply committed to building a Jewish future."
What about next year? I ask Makuch. More of the same? He is currently brainstorming and planning trips to scout top Jewish talent around the world (“I must wander to find the wandering Jews”), but he imagines that he will actually host fewer events – “270 events in 10 days is too much!” Makuch is undoubtedly passionate about his project.
It remains to be seen how this country with new Jews, old Jews, non-Jews, semi-Jews and cool Jews will develop its narrative and cultural memory. How widespread will this embracing of Judaism become, and how does it help negotiate complicated feelings of guilt, victimhood and Polish identity? Is it better to live with cultural harmony at the cost of historical accuracy? Is philo-Semitism the flip side of anti-Semitism, and should it be treated with skepticism, or should it be celebrated for its potential? As Ornstein insists, “I’d rather live somewhere where people are chasing me and trying to kiss me rather than kill me.”