8 — THE BULLETIN — Wednesday, September 19.1990
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A chief and only rabbi for Poland returns to his roots
By DAVID FREEDMAN
WASHINGTON — When Rabbi Menachem Joskowicz left Israel in 1989 — for War-
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saw to become chief rabbi of Poland, he wanted to revive Judaism in a country that was once a major centre of Jewish
life.
"For 2,000 years we didn!t_ have a state, a language,'* Joskowicz said in an interview during a visit to Washington. "Our religion unified us.*'
That was why he agreed to return to the country where he was born 70 years ago.
When the Polish Ministry of Religion asked Israel's Ministry of Religious Affairs to designate a chief rabbi for, Poland, Joskowicz seemed the natural choice. Born near Lodz, he was liberated by the
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British from the Bergeh-Belsen camp in 1945. He and other surviving rabbis established a yeshivafor Holocaust survivors at the camp.
They felt that "the youths, who^ had gone through the horror of the Holocaust, ^needed to be brought back to Judaism," Joskowicz said.
In 1947, he illegally entered Palestine, and continued his yeshiva studies that were interrupted by World War H.
Joskowicz also married, and he and his wife have lour sons and three daughter/4, all married.
But as he prospec^d m Israel, first with a pharmacy and then a frozen food business, Joskowicz continued his contacts with formei/students at the yeshiva in th^liberated concentration camp.
Until Joskowicz arrived in Poland, there was no chief rabbi there. He found a community of some 5/000 Jews, of whom about 2,000 are elderly Holocaust survivors.
For them, Joskowicz says^ his role is "to strengthen and fortify religioiis life, because that is what kept Jews together."
The elderly people were registered as Jews because they receive aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and other cities.
But most young Jews did not publicly identify themselves as Jews, Joskowicz said.
He said extensive media coverage of his arrival in Warsaw stimulated an interest in the young people.
While only about 20 elderly people attend the two daily minyanim he has instituted at the Warsaw synagogue, Joskowicz said 80 to 100 persons, including many young people, attend Shabbat services.
Joskowicz plans to publish a siddurin Polish so the young people can understand the services.
He has also established a kindergarten, where 21 children are registered, and hopes a religious school will follow.
Joskowicz is also building a mikva, and would like to establish a kosher restauant for residents and tourists-Kosher food is a major problem. A shochetiiom Hungary visits the various cities once a moipth to slaughter meat, but Joskowicz said that since there are no mashgichim in the butcher shops, he cannot certify it as kosher. He hopes to have mashgichim. ^ 4n speaking of the past, Joskowicz recalled that Po^ land had 3.5 million Jews before the war, and that he wants to perpetuate the memory of this lost Jewish culture, including preserving synagogues and cemeteries. But most of all, he wants to make sure the small number of Jews left do not assimilate.
Young Polish Jews are thirsting to regain the Jewish
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identity which they never had, Joskowicz said. But they are also worried that by identifying themselves as Jews, other
Poles will look at them differently, and this could result-in their becoming targets of anti-Semitism.
Joskowicz seemed ambivalent about whether Poland would again be fertile ground for anti-Semitism. He noted that the new freedom in Poland has increased anti-Semitic expressions, as it has in other East European countries.
JBut he sees hope in young Poles, whom he feels are too educated to believe the slander against Jews that was once so prevalent in Poland. He said the Polish government has been supportive of him since his arrival, and he has been welcomed by Catholic religious leaders as well.
Joskowicz believes one of the most important events since his arrival in Poland was his participation in November 1989 in the visit to Auschwitz of West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. He was invited at Kohrs request and recited kaddish.
Joskowicz said he believed the ceremony, in which he was seen on television as an identifiable rabbi, symbolized that Kohl as the representative of the German people was taking the German guilt on his shoulders. "It was like throwing Meirt Kampf into the crematorium," the chief rabbi
of Poland said. JTA inc./copyright
SOVIET ALIYAH
From Page 4
are not interested in settling in the West Bank. He says the Arabs took Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's comment that a big aliyah vvould require^i big Israel and tried to use it "to kill" aliyah to Israel.
"The Prime Minister should have immediately explained that this was a mistake and there was no policy to settle Soviet Jews in the Territories," said Sharansky. "But by not denying it, this hfelped other countries to paint it as a real problem."
In the meantime, Israel continues to rejoice over its single biggest aliyah (immigration) movement since its creation 42 years ago. The Soviet influx will increase the existing population by almost 25 percent to 5.5 million. There are 700,000 Israeli Arab citizens. For every 100,000 arrivals, 28,000 jobs are expected to be created. Sharansky notes that the new olim are bringing with them special skills. They are physicians, computer software experts, educators, engineers, technicians, musi-cians^nd artists.
Leaders of the intifadahaMQ contended they have no intention of halting their uprising. But when the cameras stop rolling and the media start staying away, who will they be playing for?
Shoah video lacJcs in focus
Ray Errol Fox received an Academy Award nomination for best short subject documentary this year, for Preserving the Past To Ensure the Future. It is now available on video from Ergo Media (P.O. Box 2037, Teaneck, N.J. 07666).
Fox, in this 15-minute documentary, focuses on the one-and-a-half million Jewish children murdered during the Holocaust. By taking the viewer to Yad Vashem — Israel's memorial to Shoah victims — Fox tries to tell us that if we will not remember our past, we will have to revive it. This thesis is more than obvious: In an era in which many, organizations believe that religion, gender, or age quarantines can solve societal problems, it is obvious that the horrors of the Holocaust areand should always be vivid in our minds.
There is one very brief scene in this documentary which captures all the horrors of which Fox warns. We witness a Ku Klux Klan demonstration in Atlanta, Georgia. A
young mother rallies along with her baby on her arms, teaching him to shout KKK, KKK. It is a brief, horrific moment.
But unfortunately Fox's short documentary is not able to maintain this image. Rather, there is a too melodramatic focus on dead children. Granted, their tale is horrible; But the meniory we must carry of those terrible days is not only of the young children on which this documentary focuses, but also^f all the Six Million who were massacred And we must try and answer that unanswerable
question: "Why?"
In Preserving our Past to Ensure The Future we get no answers. Rather we get an unfocused attempt to say one thing while presenting quite another thing on the screen. In a way it is a lost opportiinity.
M.A.
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