Post by Jaga on Aug 12, 2007 8:45:42 GMT -7
Rabbi Navigates Polish-Jewish Minefield
Warsaw, Poland - After one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Poland was vandalized last week, the chief rabbi of Poland found an unexpected source of help for the clean-up: 20 Polish art students and the mayor of the town himself, all of whom helped scrub the 100 gravestones spray-painted with black swastikas.
The incident, which took place in the southern Polish city of Czestochowa, revealed a great deal about the rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who has been managing the complex task of growing a Jewish community in this very Catholic country. Besides ministering to the needs of the congregants in his Warsaw synagogue — leading Sabbath and holiday services, officiating at circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals — Schudrich also serves as the official mediator with the Polish government and the Catholic Church, guides the Jewish day schools and summer camps throughout the country, and works to preserve the more than 1,400 cemeteries, Nazi death camps and mass graves.
“He has wings under his suit jacket,” Helise Lieberman, founding director of a new Jewish day school in Warsaw, told the Forward.
After the Holocaust, most of Poland’s surviving Jews either left Poland or assimilated into Polish society. Of those who stayed, many kept their Jewish identity a secret from their own children, fearing persecution by the repressive Communist government. Jewish community leaders today agree that if not for the fall of Communism in 1989, the Jewish population in Poland might very well have disappeared — a shocking thought, considering that before the outbreak of World War II, Poland constituted the second largest Jewish community in the world, with more than 3.3 million Jews. After the Holocaust, only 369,000 remained and today Jews number between 10,000 and 12,000.
What we see here in Poland today, Schudrich told the Forward in an interview in his office in Warsaw, “is a post-assimilationist community.”
Poland’s new democracy poses a challenge for the Jews as they learn to integrate their Jewish and Polish identities. At the same time, a new pride is taking root, as evidenced by the growing number of worshippers in Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. Every Sabbath, between 50 and 70 people attend the Orthodox synagogue. Ten years ago, simply getting the minimum quorum of 10 men was a struggle.
www.forward.com/articles/11358/
Warsaw, Poland - After one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Poland was vandalized last week, the chief rabbi of Poland found an unexpected source of help for the clean-up: 20 Polish art students and the mayor of the town himself, all of whom helped scrub the 100 gravestones spray-painted with black swastikas.
The incident, which took place in the southern Polish city of Czestochowa, revealed a great deal about the rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who has been managing the complex task of growing a Jewish community in this very Catholic country. Besides ministering to the needs of the congregants in his Warsaw synagogue — leading Sabbath and holiday services, officiating at circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals — Schudrich also serves as the official mediator with the Polish government and the Catholic Church, guides the Jewish day schools and summer camps throughout the country, and works to preserve the more than 1,400 cemeteries, Nazi death camps and mass graves.
“He has wings under his suit jacket,” Helise Lieberman, founding director of a new Jewish day school in Warsaw, told the Forward.
After the Holocaust, most of Poland’s surviving Jews either left Poland or assimilated into Polish society. Of those who stayed, many kept their Jewish identity a secret from their own children, fearing persecution by the repressive Communist government. Jewish community leaders today agree that if not for the fall of Communism in 1989, the Jewish population in Poland might very well have disappeared — a shocking thought, considering that before the outbreak of World War II, Poland constituted the second largest Jewish community in the world, with more than 3.3 million Jews. After the Holocaust, only 369,000 remained and today Jews number between 10,000 and 12,000.
What we see here in Poland today, Schudrich told the Forward in an interview in his office in Warsaw, “is a post-assimilationist community.”
Poland’s new democracy poses a challenge for the Jews as they learn to integrate their Jewish and Polish identities. At the same time, a new pride is taking root, as evidenced by the growing number of worshippers in Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. Every Sabbath, between 50 and 70 people attend the Orthodox synagogue. Ten years ago, simply getting the minimum quorum of 10 men was a struggle.
www.forward.com/articles/11358/