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The Canadian Jewish News, Thursday, October 13. 1988-Page 9
Opinion
The Country suffers phantom pains over the disappea^^ of the Jews
DOW MARMUR, senior rabbi at T()ronto's Holy Blossom Temple, reports here on a recent visit to Poland.
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"Why are you Poles so interested in us Jews nowadays?" Tasked our guide fronvOrbis. the official Polish tourist agency. When I left Poland in 1948, there was no love of Jews among Poles but. rather, much anti^seniitlsm. despite the Holocaust. Returning 40 years later. I was amazed at the guides' familiarity with the sites of Jewish interest, both in Warsaw and Cracow, the availability of paintings, drawings and souvenirs on Jewi^lbemes and the displays in shops of books on the destruction of Polish Je\yry.
Last year there even appeared a,comprehen-sive 1-volume introduction to Judai.sm in Polish. Its author, a nonr-Jewish professor of Hebrew ait the University of Warsaw. WitoldTyloch, refleicts in the preface on the fact thatwhen 10% of Poland's 35 million population at the outbreak of World Warllwas Jewish, there was no need tp write such books because Jews knew what they were about and the Poles were riot interested. But now. when there-are barely 5,000 Jews left in the country, there is a need for it because Poles today want to know about the Jewish presence in their past.
That.desire to know is undoubtedly one reason for the interest. The country suffers phan-■ torn pains, The disappearance of Polish Jewry — some three milJion murdered by the. Nazis, the rest scattered throughout the world — has deprived Poland of a limb. Although it is no longer there, the pain persists and Poles want to face it.
I could sense something of that pain in the words of a professor of religious philosophy at a Polish university. This non-Jew believes that Jewish thought is more fundamental than Greek thought for Western philosophy, and he is prepared to argue his case with scholarship and vigor. But he has nobody to argue with, apart from the occasional international conference he is able to attend. Neither he per-sohally nor the university library can afford : to acquire the books he and his students need. Yet, he perseveres, heroically, far beyond the call of academic duty, or scholarly excellence.
But there was no trace of heroism in the answer that the Orbis guide offered to my question. In a genuine attempt to be nice tp the visitor, he revealed himself as a victini of old, prejudices. "The government of Poland wishes to have friendly relations t9 the Jews," he told me, "because the Jews are so rich and so powerful." Here we go again.
Whether anti-semitishi is endemic ornot" to the Polish psyche in view of a thousand years of na-• tionalist and j-eligious indoctrinatioii, is open to argument. The victims, i.e. surviving Jews, are convinced that anti-semitism exists; Christian Poles are genuinely hurl by the allegation. Our guide-at the Majdanek.cpncentration camp was a devout Christian and a Polish nationalist. Like the guide in Auschwitz, arid in accordance with official policy, he was anxious to tell us that "citizens from many countries died here." We retorted: "But they were all Jews." With due and justified allegiance to historic fact, he said:"No, not all Jews." ; ^ ; ..1
The guides in both concentration camps, as well as the exhibition in the Jewish Historical Museum in Warsaw, stressed the number of Poles who had been identified by Yad Vashem; the Israeli institute devoted to the preservatiori of the memory of the Holocaust, as "Righteous Geri-tiies" and honored accordingly. When we wanted to talk about Polish Nazi collaborators, our guide insisted that there were mpre collaborators. in France than in Poland.
One of the women who now lives in the apaii-ment block where I was born in Sosnowiec, Upper Silesia, was telling us that .y/i^ had always been friends with Jews.' 'When they: were in the ghetto dtiring the war," she said, "we risked our lives to bring them food." But, then, as. if she ; had a need to set the record straight, she added: ''Mind you, they gave us clothes and money for
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She regretted th^ fact that the Jews had all gone and the apartment block — by all accounts untouched sinCe^IIaststayM there in 1939 was so badly neglected. Yet she haigreat difficulty in calling Jews "Zydzi,'' the proper fgpnT and frequeiitly referred to the "Zytki,"^ slightly derogatory diminiiitive. : To call her;an anti-semite would be tojclo her
Tan injustice. She is a simple woman expressing herself iri#ie stereotype with which she had been reared. Siriiilarly, the authors of the seemingly anti-Jewish graffiti that we saw in Lodz and elsewhere may not be ariti-semites either. Yet they would scrawl. Stars of David on walls, inscribe the German w'prd "Jude" — reminiscent of the yellow badge the Nazis forced the Jews to wear — and add an obscenity for good measure. One such configuration also included initials
e to
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I could not decipher. I was told that these were of the opposing football team. When an ignorant Polish youngster wants to express his contempt, he choo.ses an anti-Jewisb symbol without even kriowi.ig what it is.
Ariti-semitism is a function of ignorance, not of endemic prejudice. That Is how .several Jews put it to us. They do not deny that it exists and they admit that it has been u.sed r— in the past, of course — by those in power, but they are adamant that it should not be viewed out of context. They legitimately ask If I can be sure there is no mindless and vulgar anti-scmitism in Canada or in Britain.
I recall particularly a long conversation with a former communist party boss in a provincial Polish'town, demoted in several stages and finally denounced as a Zionist conspirator. When I first knew him 40 years ago he refused to utter even a word in Yiddish, for he insisted that he was a.Pole and Polish-was his language. His origins and his surname may have been Jewish but he was not a Jew. When we inet again recently, he insisted on speaking Yiddish "so that the' neighbors wouldn't understand."
What is it that he wanted to keep from them?
That as a Jew he was wronged by the new Poland and betrayed by his old comrades. Why did he not go to the United States where his children and grandchildren live? Because he woiild be even more of an alien there, finding both the English language and the American way of life beyond him.
It seems that other Jews who have remained in Poland have come to similar conclusions. A man 1 sat next to on Shabbat in the synagogue in. Warsaw told me that he escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and survived the Holocaust thanks to a.Polish woman, who has been recognized by Yad Vashem and given a pension by the Joint Distribution Committee. After the war, he married her daughter. They now have a daughter who, together with her family, lives in Western Europe. .
Although he has forgotten much of the Judaism he knew as a.youngster, he has started coming to synagogue again, not .so much for the religion, and not even because of the companionship, but because of thememories. For him. the Holocaust is not over.yet; the nightmares give: him no peace. Perhaps God will help, even though he doeis not even know how to address Him.
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Perhaps, ultimately, that is the reason why many Jews from abroad are taking advantage of the ostensibly welcoming attitude on the part of . the Polish authorities and vjsiling in large numbers. There wasn't a hotel in which we stayed that did not house one or more bus loads of Israelis, apart from Jewish visitors from Latin America, the United States and Europe. And most spoke Polish, despite the fact that it had gone rusty in the meantime. We had all come to seek some relief from the trauma.
In a strange sort of way, we were successful. Although we knew that, wherever we went, we walked on Jewish graves, most of them unmarked, we also felt that we were paying homage to the dead, telling them by our very presence that they are not forgotten; showing that we had not squandered the heritage that they left us; proving that those who survived have tried to make sure that Hitler does hot have his posthumous victory.
My wife and i had an additional purpose: we wanted to .show our adult children their roots — the rock we were hewn from, even if it consisted mainly of broken and neglected tombstones. We took them, therefore, to the places we had known before we left the country in an effort to establish a tangible link with the past. They responded with interest and curiosity, and with much love,:
The real meaning of nostalgia, the dictionaries tell us, is ^'the pain of return." No Jew can go on a nostalgic visit to Poland today without experiencing such pain and yet recognizing its therapeutic effect.
Agudath Israel opens office in Washington
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Agudath Israel will become the 15th Jewish organization with offices here. .
Israel, Kasnett said, will not bea niajor focus of the new office. "Israel is an issue that nobody disagrees with," Kasnett said, and it's already "well represented'' in Washirigton,
"What distinguished us from the other Jewish groups is domestic issues," Kasnett explained. For example, the other Jewish groups oppose federal state aid to hpn-public schools and are for free choice in abortion, vyhile Orthodox Jews, take the opposite point of view. \
Kasnett said that when Agudath Israel recent: ly backed legislation to exempt religiously supported institutions from anti-discrimination laws, that go against their religious beliefs, reporters were shocked that a Jewish group would take this position, ;
Kasnett said Congress seeks advice in draft-irig bills because legislators and theirstaff do not always know the ramifications in a proposed bill.
"This will be the bread and butter function of the'office," kasnett stressed. '
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DAVID FRIEDMAN
WASHINGTON (JTA) -
When: a representative of Agudath Israel of Ariierica was on Capitol Hill some tirne back., several Senate staff members were suiprised by his appearance. y . •
While he had on the dark hat and dark suit worn by many Orthodox men. he was fairiy young. "We thought all Orthodox Jews were old men witK long white beards.'' the aides said.
That perception is expected to change with the opening of a Washington office by Agudath Israel, and with Rabbi Stephen Kasnett, Agudath's representative, expected to become a familiar figure at the Capitol.
Kasnett, a 42-year-old lawyer, has a beard, but it hasn't turned white yet. -
He said he plans to change the perception of how the Jewish community is seen on various issues in Congress by adyoeating the viewpoint of Orthodox Jews,
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Having a Washington office ha^ been a long-. time dream of Rabbi MdsheSherer, Agudath Is-' rael's president.
Sherer told Kasnett that during World War II, when he and other Agudath leaders. went to Washington to plead for European Jews, they frequently had to borrow the train fare.
Up until Sept. 1, David Zweibel, Agudath Is-, rael's genei;al counsel and director of government affairs, had come to Washington twice a month from the organization's national headquarters in New York, t6"represeril the group's interests-Zweibel. win continue to assist the new \yashingtqn office along with MordechaiAvig-dor, associate general counsel aiid executive director of Agudath Israel's commission on legis-latiori and civic action.
Kasnett, who has established an advisory board of Orthodox lawyers and people in government to assist him, said his job is also to monitor legislation as the "watchdogs" of the Orthodox community, and to edticate lawhiakers on the Orthodox viewpoint; : "
TRADITIONS UPHELD
Despite and possibly because of the intifada, Orthodox Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip uphold one of their traditions— heralding the new month (Rosh Chodesh) on the site of the ancient synagogue in Gaza. The photo shows Jewish settlers marking the arrival of Rosh Chode-sh in the synagogue. [IPPA photo]