Hidden Jews of Poland: Featured Articles

Some 80,000 Jews once called the city their home, before they were rounded up into its ghetto by the Nazi occupiers and sent to forced labor or death. The destruction of Polish Jewry marked an end not only to an ancient community but to a vast Jewish religious tradition.
Poland's latest generation of Jewish youth face a multitude of questions, choices and challenges as they address their past and plan their futures. Twenty-two of those young people are participating in a three-week Jewish learning seminar in Jerusalem organized by Shavei Israel, a nonprofit organization that aims to strengthen ties between Israel and the descendants of Jews around the world.
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.
Nearly 70 years after its demise, the Rabbinical Association of Poland was relaunched over the weekend at a ceremony in Lodz attended by Israel's Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger. Metzger signed a special scroll together with Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and other community rabbis serving in Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw and Lodz declaring the formal reestablishment of the group, which prior to the Holocaust had united all of Poland's rabbis.
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.

At a special gathering this weekend being organized by Shavei Israel in Lodz, Poland, a ceremony will take place to re-launch the rabbinical group, which comprised all of the country's rabbis prior to the Holocaust For the first time since the 1930's, Poland's rabbis will unite together under one organizational roof when the Rabbinical Association of Poland is re-launched at a special ceremony being organized by Shavei Israel this Saturday night, February 23, 2008 (17 Adar I 5768) at the Jewish community center in Lodz, Poland.

Slowly but energetically, the circle of worshipers made its way around the interior of Krakow's Kupa synagogue, their voices rising ever more forcefully in song and prayer. ...

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.
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