Invention or Revision?
Jan. 27th, 2005 02:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ltmurnauI found this piece in yesterday's Globe and Mail. Found it strangely ironic.
***
A Jewish revival in Poland without any Jews
Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Poles are celebrating those who were once victims
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - Page A9
KRAKOW, POLAND -- If you looked around the streets of Krakow this week, you could easily convince yourself that the Jews had returned to this city of 800,000 on the edge of Auschwitz, where the ashes of more than a million Jewish victims lie beneath the snow.
Inside the city's Jewish cultural centre last night, 100 people showed up to hear an Auschwitz survivor deliver a monologue on his experiences. Outside, the streets of the once-abandoned Jewish quarter were teeming with life.
But look again. Not a single member of the Jewish cultural centre's staff is Jewish. The Auschwitz survivor is not Jewish, nor, it seems, are any members of the audience.
Out in the street, which is lined with restaurants bearing Yiddish names and serving traditional Jewish dishes, and packed with fashionable young people, it proves impossible to encounter a single Jew who is not a foreign visitor, or even anyone who knows a local Jew. Much of the district was restored in the early 1990s for the filming of Schindler's List, and has the eerie feel of a movie set.
As the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz tomorrow, Poland is in the midst of an all-out Jewish revival. But it is a revival that seems to be taking place without Jews.
"It is now considered very sexy in Poland to have anything to do with anything Jewish, or to be able to say that you are partly Jewish," said Joachim Russek, director of the Centre for Jewish Culture.
A Roman Catholic, he helped found the centre in 1988, mostly with U.S. foreign-aid money, because he considered Jewish culture "very spicy" after it had been censored by the Communist authorities. It turned out that a lot of young people shared his views.
"Now everyone wants to be part of Jewish culture," he said, "but your chances of actually meeting a Jew here are about the same as your chances of winning the lottery."
That is no exaggeration. Before the war, Krakow was home to 70,000 Jews. After the war, only a couple of thousand remained.
After 1968, a wave of government-sponsored anti-Semitism forced thousands of Polish Jews to emigrate to the West and to Israel.
Today there are only an estimated 200 Jews, most over 65, who often prefer not to appear in public.
There are seven synagogues in the city, but five are used only by tourists.
It is the same all over Poland, whose prewar Jewish population of 3.5 million now stands at about 8,000.
What is left, for many young Poles , is a fetishization of anything remotely Jewish.
"For me, my Judaism is a way of showing people that I am not just another boring Polish girl," said Eva Zawadzki, a 20-year-old university student who is helping organize a trip to Israel for the campus Jewish students association. She said she is "probably one-quarter Jewish," citing a grandfather who was at least partly Jewish.
For her friend Katja Pawlowski, also 20, the motives for joining a Jewish organization were more scholarly. "We have to preserve the Jewish history of this city because it is so important to what it means to be from Krakow. . . . You wouldn't understand unless you came from a place that used to have several cultures but now has only one."
Of course, the other Polish phenomenon is anti-Semitism, which rears its head, especially in elections, when the economy is poor. Extremist parties with anti-Semitic views attract a marginal, but ever-present, percentage of the vote.
"The differences between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism are not really all that big -- they both tend to emerge in people who do not actually know any Jews, so they mythologize the image of Jews in one way or another," Mr. Russek said.
He added that the Polish government decided to found Jewish-culture centres and to rebuild the old Jewish neighbourhoods in Krakow, Warsaw and other cities, in part to counter anti-Semitism and encourage a more cosmopolitan outlook in what was once a multicultural nation.
But he concedes that Poland was addressing a serious problem: Huge numbers of tourists come here every year in search of their Jewish heritage.
But that culture was in danger of being erased because there were no Jews left.
"We decided to step in, as a civic and civil project, to keep our Jewish culture alive in the memory of Poles," Mr. Russek said.
"We don't pretend to be a Jewish cultural organization, just a centre for Jewish culture. Do you understand the distinction?"
***
Emphasis mine in the above.
***
A Jewish revival in Poland without any Jews
Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Poles are celebrating those who were once victims
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - Page A9
KRAKOW, POLAND -- If you looked around the streets of Krakow this week, you could easily convince yourself that the Jews had returned to this city of 800,000 on the edge of Auschwitz, where the ashes of more than a million Jewish victims lie beneath the snow.
Inside the city's Jewish cultural centre last night, 100 people showed up to hear an Auschwitz survivor deliver a monologue on his experiences. Outside, the streets of the once-abandoned Jewish quarter were teeming with life.
But look again. Not a single member of the Jewish cultural centre's staff is Jewish. The Auschwitz survivor is not Jewish, nor, it seems, are any members of the audience.
Out in the street, which is lined with restaurants bearing Yiddish names and serving traditional Jewish dishes, and packed with fashionable young people, it proves impossible to encounter a single Jew who is not a foreign visitor, or even anyone who knows a local Jew. Much of the district was restored in the early 1990s for the filming of Schindler's List, and has the eerie feel of a movie set.
As the world prepares to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz tomorrow, Poland is in the midst of an all-out Jewish revival. But it is a revival that seems to be taking place without Jews.
"It is now considered very sexy in Poland to have anything to do with anything Jewish, or to be able to say that you are partly Jewish," said Joachim Russek, director of the Centre for Jewish Culture.
A Roman Catholic, he helped found the centre in 1988, mostly with U.S. foreign-aid money, because he considered Jewish culture "very spicy" after it had been censored by the Communist authorities. It turned out that a lot of young people shared his views.
"Now everyone wants to be part of Jewish culture," he said, "but your chances of actually meeting a Jew here are about the same as your chances of winning the lottery."
That is no exaggeration. Before the war, Krakow was home to 70,000 Jews. After the war, only a couple of thousand remained.
After 1968, a wave of government-sponsored anti-Semitism forced thousands of Polish Jews to emigrate to the West and to Israel.
Today there are only an estimated 200 Jews, most over 65, who often prefer not to appear in public.
There are seven synagogues in the city, but five are used only by tourists.
It is the same all over Poland, whose prewar Jewish population of 3.5 million now stands at about 8,000.
What is left, for many young Poles , is a fetishization of anything remotely Jewish.
"For me, my Judaism is a way of showing people that I am not just another boring Polish girl," said Eva Zawadzki, a 20-year-old university student who is helping organize a trip to Israel for the campus Jewish students association. She said she is "probably one-quarter Jewish," citing a grandfather who was at least partly Jewish.
For her friend Katja Pawlowski, also 20, the motives for joining a Jewish organization were more scholarly. "We have to preserve the Jewish history of this city because it is so important to what it means to be from Krakow. . . . You wouldn't understand unless you came from a place that used to have several cultures but now has only one."
Of course, the other Polish phenomenon is anti-Semitism, which rears its head, especially in elections, when the economy is poor. Extremist parties with anti-Semitic views attract a marginal, but ever-present, percentage of the vote.
"The differences between anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism are not really all that big -- they both tend to emerge in people who do not actually know any Jews, so they mythologize the image of Jews in one way or another," Mr. Russek said.
He added that the Polish government decided to found Jewish-culture centres and to rebuild the old Jewish neighbourhoods in Krakow, Warsaw and other cities, in part to counter anti-Semitism and encourage a more cosmopolitan outlook in what was once a multicultural nation.
But he concedes that Poland was addressing a serious problem: Huge numbers of tourists come here every year in search of their Jewish heritage.
But that culture was in danger of being erased because there were no Jews left.
"We decided to step in, as a civic and civil project, to keep our Jewish culture alive in the memory of Poles," Mr. Russek said.
"We don't pretend to be a Jewish cultural organization, just a centre for Jewish culture. Do you understand the distinction?"
***
Emphasis mine in the above.
