Young Poles are Rediscovering their Jewishness
Ha’aretz, February 24, 2008
Before learning about his Jewish roots, Pinchas Zlotosvsky from Poland was a skinhead with uncompromising contempt for Jews, the 32-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew told Haaretz last weekend during Shavei Israel’s annual conference for hidden Jews in Lodz.
The transition in Zlotosvsky’s life occurred after his mother told him she comes from a Jewish family. Her parents, she said, sent her to a monastery when she was a small child so that she would survive the Holocaust.
All her relatives were murdered, as far as Pinchas Zlotosvsky knows.
“I realized I was Jewish according to Judaism. I couldn’t look myself in the mirror for a whole week after I found out,” he recalls. After he recovered from the shock, he spent the past few years rediscovering his Jewish roots. He has also become very active with the Jewish community.
Zlotosvsky’s return to Judaism is something he has in common with many of the participants in the conference, which saw the restoration of the Rabbinic Association of Poland for the first time since the 1930s. Attending the ceremony was Israel’s chief rabbi, Yona Metzger, and, of course, Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.
Official data mentions some 3 million Jews living in Poland prior to World War II. Today, official figures list only 4,000 Jews as residing in Poland, but the actual figures at least in terms of Halakha, or Jewish law are probably higher. The discrepancy stems from the fact that thousands of Jews who survived the war preferred not to reveal their Jewish identity for fear of anti-Semitic persecution by the local population.
Indeed, there were pogroms against Jews after the war, with the authorities turning a blind eye to lynching and murders, and even, at times, taking part in the killing of people who had managed to survive the Nazi purge.
Another significant portion of the hidden Jewish population consists of people like Pinchas Zlotosvsky’s mother, whose parents sent them to monasteries to be raised as Christians. Despite efforts by international Jewish organizations to locate these people, not all have been found, and many are assumed to have remained Christian.
One reason for this is that many adoptive families were believed to have been reluctant to tell the children the truth about their origins.
Anti-Semitism is still prevalent in Poland, according to the rabbis who came to the conference from Lodz, Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw and other parts of the country. But in parallel, they spoke of a newfound acceptance of Jews ¬especially in major cities. This atmosphere of openness, the rabbis said, encourages some hidden Jews to retrace their roots.
Freund’s organization is better known for its efforts to locate the people who might have come from the 10 tribes of Israel in remote corners of the world. The conference, which was also attended by 150 Polish men and women aged 18-40, is part of the organization’s efforts to locate hidden Jews in Poland.
Michael Freund, Chairman of Shavei Israel, said, “Jewish life in Poland has been growing stronger in recent years, as many young Poles have begun to discover their family’s Jewish ancestry, which was often hidden out of fear of persecution by the Nazis and the Communists.”