Shabbat in Auschwitz
In two and a half weeks, a group of young Jews will spend Shabbat in Auschwitz.
That opening line is nearly impossible to comprehend, and does not refer to a visit to a concentration camp. It is the first attempt since the onset of World War II to revive Jewish life, in what was once a mainly Jewish town with a name that will be linked forever to one of the great tragedies of Jewish history.
This is not an effort to re-establish the Jewish community – there are no Jews living openly in the town of Oswiecim, as it is called in Poland. But it is an attempt to establish a renewed tradition of ongoing, Jewish activity, prayer in the town’s only remaining synagogue, lessons, lectures, and observance of holidays.
This activity is the brainchild of a group of Polish-Jewish youngsters in Krakow, 50 kilometers to the east, who belong to a larger wave of Jewish renewal currently taking place in Poland, and promoted by the Shavei Yisrael organization.
A growing number of young Jews have begun to identify as Jews and join Jewish communities in the context of this initiative. There are currently no Jews living openly in Oswiecim. The goal of the program is symbolic, and meant to provide an address for Jews who hide their heritage or those who visit the town.
“Local people, and some who lived there in the past, turned to us and asked for help in renewing Jewish life there,” explains Rabbi Boaz Pash, who was sent by Shavei Yisrael a year and a half ago to serve as a rabbi in Krakow. “We are not going there to establish a significant campus or community. There is not even a minyan [a quorum of 10 or more Jews] for prayers. But we will at least hold monthly prayers and something else. That will preserve the connection with the five or six Jews who live there, in my opinion.” 
Those Jews now refuse to be identified. The last Jew who openly lived as such in Oswiecim, Shimon Kluger, died in 2000.
According to Pash, few Jews who live outside of major cities are willing to be exposed because of remaining fear of anti-Semitism.
“It clearly seems strange to people outside, that we are renewing Jewish life in the ‘valley of killing,’ Auschwitz, but as far as we are concerned, it has nothing to do with the place, but with the people,” said Pash. “When I arrived in Poland, I also had the feeling that Jews shouldn’t live here. But I came to understand that for those who are raising children here, there is an important statement in showing that they tried to annihilate us but we are still here. That is even stronger in Oswiecim.”
About 30 young Jews will participate in the Shabbat that he is planning. Most of those coming to participate in a program of lectures and tours will come from Krakow, but others will come from communities like Warsaw and Wroclaw.
Jews first settled in Oswiecim at the beginning of the 16th century, but only in 1636 did King Wladyslaw IV grant them the right to live freely in the town and own property. During the 19th century, the town became a significant center of Jewish life in the Krakow district – Synagogues, Jewish schools, yeshivas, and a factory that produced kosher vodka were established in the town. Leading rabbis served there, and a branch of Hassidic Judaism was even founded there. At the end of the century, about half of the town’s 5,000 residents were Jewish.
When World War II erupted, about 14,000 people lived in Oswiecim, and 60 percent of them were Jews. The German army arrived in the town only days after the invasion of Poland, in early September 1939.
A reign of terror was directed at the Jews. The Great Synagogue was burned, and a few months later Jews were exiled from the town to ghettos in neighboring towns: Bedzin, Czerno, and Sosnowitz.
The Germans concurrently began to build the Auschwitz concentration camp, which was first established for Polish political prisoners. Later, at the end of 1940, they began construction on the adjoining Birkenau death camp.
The Jews of Oswiecim were among those in the first transports, sent back to the town in which they were born, to be murdered. After the town was liberated and the death-camp was captured by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, about 200 Jewish survivors returned to the town, but in subsequent years, most of them emigrated to Israel and the United States.
Nearly all of those few who remained left during the wave of anti-Semitic persecution in the 1960s.
“I got chills up my back when they came to us with the idea,” says Shavei Yisrael chairman Michael Freund. “Members of my family were murdered there, and it’s hard to think about that place in terms other than death and horror. But we also have a responsibility to assist the last sparks of Judaism that remain in those places.”
A Jewish Center now operates in Oswiecim, but all of its employees are non-Jews. The center maintains a museum devoted to the town’s Jewish heritage; the remaining Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot Synagogue, renovated in 2000; and an educational center. The center is funded by a private foundation based in the U.S., and it is affiliated with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
“I know a few people in town who have Jewish roots,” says center director Tomasz Kuncewicz. “But they are not identified or attached to the Jewish community. The activities here are important to us because Oswiecim was actually an example of a typical, Jewish town in this region before the war. Thousands of visitors come here every year, after they were in the death camp, and it is strange to them, at first. But one must come here to see the faces, and hear the stories, of Jews who lived here.”
Chantal Maas is one Jew who moved to Oswiecim to live, after deciding three years ago to divide her time between Brussels and Oswiecim. During the months of spring and summer, she maintains a guest apartment, and provides tours and lectures to visiting groups who are mainly French and Belgian.
“Many people ask me how a Jewish woman can return to a place like this,” she says. “But it’s important to me to show that in Europe, today, we can live together, Jews and Christians, and that is the message that I want to express here.”