Jews Without Papers
Descendents of Polish Jews are returning and adopting their faith. The Jewish spark returns and rekindles itself precisely in the land that is often considered to be the most cursed of all.
The Jewish community in Wroclaw is one of the oldest Jewish communities in Poland and Germany. Its history begins in the 13th century. Indeed, a tombstone from 1205 was found in the Jewish cemetery.
Wroclaw is located in southwestern Poland on the banks of the Oder River. The city constitutes a central crossroad between the Baltic and Adriatic Seas, Central Europe and eastwards.
Until the Second World War, the city was in German territory and was called Breslau. Until the war, the city had the second or third largest Jewish community in Germany (after Berlin and Frankfort). Some 20 thousand Jews lived there. The city had many synagogues. The most renowned was the “Neue Synagogue” which had a seating capacity for thousands of congregants.
Breslau was home to many learned rabbis and intellectuals. Amongst them were Isaiah Berlin and Abraham Geiger as well as the renowned historian Heinrich Gratz who lived and wrote in this city. In 1854, Zachariah Frankel established there the famous Rabbinical Seminary, which served as an important center for progressive/modern Judaism until 1939.
An interesting chapter in Jewish history began in Wroclaw after the Second World War. The city was annexed to Poland and its name changed from Breslau to Wroclaw. A result of the war was the disappearance of the German-Jewish community from the city. Taking its place were new Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia. Wroclaw became a dwelling place as well as a transit point for Jews from the former Soviet Union and the remnants of Polish Jewry.
According to calculations, some 70 thousand Jewish immigrants in all settled in the city. Immediately after the Second World War, there four synagogues, a kosher restaurant, Mikveh, Talmud Torah, print shop and two cemeteries.
In 1968, the city’s Jewish community reached its end. Gomulka, the leader of the Communist Party at that time, expelled tens of thousands of Jews from Poland. Most of them were sent to Sweden, Denmark, the United States and Israel.
More than 90 percent of Poland’s Jews disappeared from the Polish scene. Orderly Jewish communal life ceased to exist. However, in the past few years, it seems that Jewish life and Jews, along with their descendants are awakening in Poland in general and in Wroclaw in particular.
Today, the Jewish community of Wroclaw numbers 320 members besides many other Jews and their descendents living there. Nevertheless, some of them are still careful about revealing their identity. This community is the second largest in Poland, after Warsaw.
The last rabbi of Wroclaw left the city in 1967. From then until 2006, Wroclaw did not have a full-time rabbi. About a year ago, Shavei Israel’s emissary, Rabbi Yitzhak Rapoport (a graduate of Strauss-Amiel), began to officiate as the community’s rabbi.
Nowadays, in Wroclaw, an active Jewish community is becoming active on Polish soil. Shabbat prayers with Torah readings are held (something that has not taken place for a long time because nobody knew how to read) with 20 to 30 members arriving every Shabbat. For the High Holidays, over 100 congregants come. Some 70 people came for the Hanukkah and Purim festivals.
Lessons in Judaism alongside Hebrew, Jewish tradition and philosophy courses are given here. Recently, the community kitchen became kosher due to the rabbi’s activity and the community’s support. Every day, a hot kosher lunch is served to 20-30 community members. Also, there are activities held for the youth movement two or three times a week.
“The aim for all our activities is to enable anybody with Jewish roots to be reconnected again with his forefathers’ tradition,” explains the community’s rabbi, Rabbi Rapoport.
The problem today is how do we re-invigorate the Jewish community? How do we awaken the Jews? How do we discover and bring closer the Jews and their descendant whom Polish history has striven to wipe off the pages of Jewish history?
Recently, the authorities have returned the Great Synagogue to the community as part of restoring Jewish property. In 1945, all properties in the former German area of Wroclaw were seized by the Polish communist government. This property included the famous Zum Weissem Storch (The White Stork) Synagogue, built in 1827-1829 in line with the designs of Karl Ferdinand Langhans.
The synagogue served as a house of prayer until 1968. The Jewish community in Wroclaw submitted an official request to transfer all rights to the building to it. The request was denied and the synagogue was granted to the University of Wroclaw in 1974. In 1989, it was given to the Academy of Music, which sold it to a private enterprise in 1992.
In 1992, the Jewish community officially requested the government to return the synagogue to its control, as is stated by the general laws for restoring properties in Poland, relating to Jewish properties seized by the communist government. Only in April 1995, after a long judicial procedure and drawn out negotiations, and after support by international bodies, the Ministerial Council in Warsaw, came to the decision to return the synagogue to the Jewish community in Wroclaw.
Today, the community is restoring the synagogue. Prayers are held there on the High Holidays. On Shabbat, they pray in the Bet Midrash, which is located in the community building. During my visit to Wroclaw, I met with a phenomenon that is constantly developing in the Jewish world in general and in Poland and Eastern Europe in particular: A change in lifestyle after discovering the family’s Jewish roots. Long buried Jewish roots in Poland’s expanses are beginning to sprout their shoots above the ground.
Rabbis and Jewish communities are attempting to rekindle the Jewish spark in a land that many of the world’s Jews consider to be a cursed one. It is well known, that after the Holocaust, many Jews left Poland or Judaism, or hid their Judaism and identity from their family and their surroundings.
In Rabbi Yitzhak Rapoport’s house, Wroclaw community’s rabbi and Shavei Israel emissary (graduate of Strauss-Amiel), young men and women gathered for Seudah Shlishit (the Third Meal) on Shabbat afternoon.
Each young person told his personal story, where he came from, where he is going to, but in the main he related how he discovered that he was Jewish and how that discovery affected the rest of his life. It was a special experience listening to their words and especially hearing the emotion in their voices.
Slowly but steadily, Communism’s influence and the fear of Nazism are dissipating. Jews and their descendents are revealing themselves, ending their historic silence in order to return and adopt their Jewish faith.
Sometimes these are children of a Jewish mother or grandmother or sons and grandsons of a Jewish father and grandfather. However, despite the difference in the Halachic difficulties between the two groups, they share the deep feeling that they are part of the Jewish family, their deep Jewish identity and their identification with the suffering and hiding that there parents and grandparents went through during the Holocaust and afterwards.
David Gurfinkiel tells an especially interesting personal story. His family is a mixed one. A Polish mother and a Jewish father. The family decided to show him both ways, the mother’s Catholic faith and the father’s Jewish belief, so that he could choose his religious belief when the time came.
In his home, he celebrated both the Jewish and the Christian holidays and visited both the church and the synagogue. He was not circumcised nor did he have a Bar Mitzvah but neither was he baptized into the Christian church. However, during his visits to the church he felt sadness and a feeling of guilt. During his visits to the synagogue at his father’s side, especially during Simchat Torah, he felt the Jewish joy and song and decided this was the life he would choose for himself…
Today he learns Torah, observes the commandments and desires to convert. It is his contention that he does not want to be a Jew because he is already one. He lives as a Jew and fights to be one. But mainly, he chose to be a Jew out of full awareness. He feels he is part of the Jewish people and despite of everything, he wants to convert in order to be a Jew according to the Halachah, a Jew in the eyes of God and the Jewish people.
Yatzek Koiara only discovered his Jewish roots by accident a year ago. He never asked about his lineage and his mother never spoke to him about it. One evening while they were sitting in front of the television they saw a program about Jews and his mother said to him: “From a where do you think you got a nose just like the Jews? You’re also one of them! You’re a Jew!”
He began to inquire about his family tree and discovered that his maternal great-grandmother was Jewish. The grandmother married a German Christian and educated her daughter as a Christian. That is to say, his grandmother was Jewish from birth but a Christian in her belief. But his mother today is an atheist. His mother feels she is Polish and views Judaism as a religion and therefore does not feel connected to her Jewish roots.
Yatzek claims that he returned to his Judaism because it became clear to him that he had Jewish roots, otherwise he would not have become interested at all in Judaism and Jews. His grandmother and mother accept his return to Judaism in a positive manner, “If he wants to be a Jew that’s good. If he doesn’t want to be a Jew, that’s also good… The main thing is that he should be happy.”
Yatzek feels very happy in his process of returning to Judaism. At this time, he is studying for a month in Israel at a Shavei Israel’s seminar, learning Torah and hiking all over Israel in order to full join with his Judaism.
Triumph over the Nazis
Jan Krasnievski discovered his Jewish roots when he was 13 years old. In school he heard that Polish names with the ski suffix frequently attested to aristocratic roots. He returned home full of excitement.
“Is it possible,” he asked his father, “that the family owned aristocrats’ property awaiting them in some in a God forsaken place somewhere in Poland since they come from a family of aristocrats?” His father sighed. “The time has come that you should know something,” he said. “Our true name is Kirschenboim.” Today, Jen is a Jew studying out to be a Jew.
Marc Winiasch is a musician, a violinist. His father is Polish and his mother is Jewish according to what she related to him. “My mother was afraid of everything,” which is a sure sign of Judaism in Poland. Throughout her life, she never did anything that was unusual for the neighborhood and never told him anything about Judaism.
In my discussion with Winiasch, I feel he is trying to make some kind of “flashback” regarding his childhood… He was educated in a Jewish environment in the “Ksimisch” of Krakow. He did not study Judaism but he absorbed Judaism in the streets, from Jewish music and kleizmers, from his music teachers who were mostly, if not all, graduates from the Cheder and Talmud Torah from before the war… His Polish father did not call him by his Polish name Wlaslav, but rather called him Shimon.
How did he find out about his Jewish roots? When his mother went to the hospital, she called him urgently because she thought that she was going to die and related to him what he had already guessed… That he was Jewish since she was a Jewess…
I heard a story from Janush Novak, from which I think every Jew can learn what Jewish pride is. Janush’s father was a small boy during the Holocaust. His father’s parents, Janush’s grandfather and grandmother, were taken to an extermination camp and killed. Janush’s father remained alone, an orphan without a father and a mother and with a deep trauma about his parent’s death.
After his father grew up, he consciously decided to distance himself from the Jewish people out of fear and anger. He married a Polish woman and hid his being Jewish origin from himself and from his surroundings. After a while, Janush discovered that his father was Jewish.
He began to ask questions, to learn Torah and, bit by bit, to keep the commandments. Now, he wants to convert and become a Jew according to Halachah. When I asked him why he wants to convert, he replied: “When my father left Judaism and married a non-Jewish woman – that was a Nazi triumph over Judaism. That I request to come and convert, to return to the Jewish people – that will be a triumph of the Jewish people over the Nazis.”
One of the figures that caused me to think deeply about the Jewish identity of Holocaust survivors and the generations that came after them is Maya Lashinsky, aged 80.
Maya was a young girl in an extermination camp during the Holocaust. Her parents were murdered in the camp but she was saved and returned to her parents’ house in Wroclaw. She married a Polish Gentile after the war and bore three children. Her children are Jewish according to Halachah, but they do not feel a Jewish, did not receive any Jewish education from their mother, not even Jewish symbols.
Maya is strict about coming to the synagogue every Shabbat for the morning prayers and the Kiddush held afterwards. She wears a big Magen David around her neck, which she doesn’t hide as she walks in the street. I asked her how she felt about her children not feeling that they are Jews and why hadn’t she taught them anything Jewish? Maya looked at me with eyes filled with both pain and anger, screaming at me: “You weren’t there! You don’t understand and you won’t ever understand!!!”
It is hard to describe how much the discovery of one’s Jewish roots in the family creates a feeling of belonging and commitment. Most youth who discover their Jewish roots do not remain apathetic to this knowledge.
Usually, the discovery causes them to want to learn, to know more about Judaism and the Jewish people. Many of them, after a short process, decide take a step forward and return to live as Jews just as their forefathers did and if necessary, to convert according to the Halachah.
This is a surprising thing since Poland is a country undergoing accelerated modernization in all realms and is now part of the European Union. Also, it is hard to say that in Poland of today one can proudly announce, “I am a Jew!” It appears to me that this tells us something about the sincerity of this phenomenon of truthfully seeking and desiring to belong and identify.
The Seed of Israel materially and spiritually
There are those who ask why bring the children of Jewish fathers back to the Jewish People? Why not be content with those who are Jewish by birth and have always remained in the Jewish fold? Who requires us to hearken to lost Jews and their descendents that because of “historic accidents” became separated from the Jewish people but now wish to rejoin and become part of the family?
Don’t we have enough problems of our own that we have to go looking for additional ones? These questions, in my opinion, are questions in outlook, Halachah, morality and contemporary (a detailed article on this will appear in the future).
However, in the case of Polish youth, the situation is different. Firstly, their parents or their grandparents were part and parcel of Judaism, sometimes from the mother’s side and sometimes from the father’s side. Secondly, they themselves do not doubt Judaism. In public, they declare to all, “I am a Jew in Poland.” One must heed and relate with all seriousness to this brave and sincere statement.
Many historical accidents in Jewish history caused individuals and families to become separated from the Jewish family tree. Sometimes willingly but mostly under duress. From the Inquisition, through pogroms until Communism and the Holocaust, they attempted to distance the Jew from his Judaism and his Jewish brethren. However, Israel is not alone, and God, who appears as the Angel of History, brings our brethren back home, back to their family.
It seems to me that far too few think about the future of the Jewish people. Many deal with the past, with history, but only a few give thought to the future: What can we do to prevent the loss of the Jewish people in the Diaspora and perhaps even in Israel?
One cannot speak about the Jewish people only in deterministic and futuristic terms. One cannot base the survival of the Jewish people on numbers and statistics alone.
On the one hand there are signs of spiritual and demographic weakening – the Holocaust, assimilation, loss of identity, estrangement form Judaism and a shrinking number of Jews in the world.
However, on the other hand, it seems that aside from all the efforts in the realm of education, bringing people closer to religion, through an effort to strengthen people from within, we must go and search out our lost brethren, flesh of our flesh, in order to strengthen the Jewish people’s existence.
Rabbi Tzadok of Lublin teaches us that when we speak about the ingathering of the exiles and the return of lost Jews, those who are lost are not only those who are certainly Jewish but also those who are not Jews according to Halachah, or do not even know that they are of “Jewish seed” materially and spiritually.
“It could very well be that there are some amongst the lost who need the Great Shofar, as it is written: And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Great Shofar shall be blown, and those shall come who were lost in the land of Assyria, and the outcasts in the land of Egypt… …those …who were lost… These are the ones who assimilated between the nations and do not even know that they are of Jewish seed; and the outcasts in the land of Egypt, are those who are so outcast into the klippah (the husk), just as in Egypt they were so surrounded [in uncleanliness] similar to a fetus in its mother’s womb, that they need the Great Shofar to awaken them. So too, also those who are yet of Jewish seed shall not be utterly lost. Therefore, the verse states, If your outcasts…, (Pri Tzadik, Nitzabim).
To open the Gate of Hope
Modern arbiters of Halachah, such as Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kalischer and Rabbi Benzion Uzziel, expressed their very clear opinion regarding the appropriate way to guard the existence of the Jewish People both demographically as well as spiritually. They were asked many times on the Halachah’s attitude to the offspring of a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother.
The Halachic response is clear and simple, “the child is like her” – the child’s status is according to his mother’s. Therefore, according to Halachah, if his mother is not Jewish, the child is not Jewish. There is no dispute about this. However, what is to be our attitude to this child? Is he to be considered like all other non-Jews? Does he have a unique status? Is it a meritous act to bring him closer or to distance him from Judaism and the Jewish people?
Rabbi Kalischer wrote clearly on this topic: “For a child whose father is Jewish and his mother a gentile, shall not be effaced from the commandment that we are obligated to open before him the Gate of Hope to circumcise him now according to his father’s wish and when he grows up he can speedily do as his father wishes and immerse himself lawfully. If he is not circumcised, he is completely rejected from the Jewish community and not as it is written …shall not be utterly lost.
In addition, one is to be aroused to do this immersion for such a one whose father is Jewish, for it is more required of us in order to prepare for him a way of choice than we do for one born of a gentile [father] for despite the fact that by law he is like unto his mother, but withal that we have found that he is called one of holy seed… Thusly, if there is a possibility to remove the damaged seed from uncleanliness, to remove it from its imprisonment and return it to holiness, so fine and pleasant shall be our portion…
From such children, there is a chance that the greatest sages of Israel will arise from them, Like a lily among thorns shall sprout… But we are responsible to each other as much as possible to cleanse them and not to reject them, Heaven forbid.
Rabbi Uzziel Hildesheimer, from his many responsa, renewed the term “Seed of Israel” concerning a child who has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. In his opinion, it is a meritous act to bring this child closer, for his father’s sake and for the sake of the Jewish people:
“And all the more so it is a meritous act to bring closer the daughter of a Jew born of a gentile woman and married to an Israelite. Even though the children are drawn after their mother, and are considered as gentiles by all of their [the Sages’] statements, in any case they derive from the seed of Israel and it is a meritous act to return them to their origin, these are the Forefathers, so that …shall not be utterly lost.
And to remove their children, even though they are not recognized as children, however, paternally, they are of the seed of Israel and it is incumbent upon us to bring them closer to Judaism, and not to forever distance them from the Torah of Israel and from the midst of Judaism… From this we ascertain, all the more so that when this gentile, the son of an Israelite, whose father brings him to be converted, that the rabbinical court must take him in because, though he is called the son of a gentile woman, he does not leave the norm of the seed of Israel.
From this you have ascertained that the child of a gentile woman is called the seed of Israel and one transgresses over such a child, And you shall not let any of your seed pass through the fire to Molech. Therefore, if he comes to be converted, it is surely incumbent upon us to take him in, in order to atone for the father’s transgression after his conversion …shall not be utterly lost (Mishpetei Uzziel, vol 2, Yoreh Deah 58; Responsa Piskei Uzziel Besheilot Hazman 64, Par. 4. See also: Mishpetei Uzziel (vol. 2, Yoreh Deah 14, Par. 1)
Apparently, Rabbi Kalischer and Rabbi Uzziel meant also lost and distant Jews who are children of a Jewish father or of a Jewish grandmother, when they proposed to open our doors and to bring them closer to the heritage of Ancient Israel and the people of Israel. Thus shall God’s promise be fulfilled, And also the Eternal One of Israel will not lie nor shall not be utterly lost.