Shabbat in Warsaw: "Mir Zeinen Da" [We are still here]

I spent this past Shabbat in Warsaw. Later today [Sunday] I shall meet up with a group of Americans and Israelis who are arriving in Poland under the auspices of the Wexner Foundation.

Yesterday I attended services on Saturday morning at Beit Warszawa, the Jewish Cultural Association. It was a Reform/non-traditional service. [Though, in fact, the liturgy etc. were pretty traditional.] There were about 20 people in attendance. Afterwards Rabbi Burt Shuman, an American born rabbi who has been here a number of years, asked me to lead the group in a conversation about Holocaust denial. That was followed by lunch and Torah study.

One of the rabbis is an Israeli. She spoke about participating in an Israeli television show done recently in Poland. She lamented the fact that it began with Yiddish songs and was all about the past. There was no sense of a contemporary Jewish life.

The striking thing was the age of those there. I would say that the majority were in their 30s and 40s. There are many other people -- of all ages and stages -- involved in Beit Warshava's many other activities.

Later in the afternoon I spent a couple of hours with Jerzy Halberstat, the Director of the soon to be built Museum of Polish Jewish History. It is an amazing project with a dynamite group of people involved in the planning and conception of it, among them Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, one of the most creative people around.

Tomorrow a.m. I shall go to a retreat center outside of Warsaw to meet with a group of Polish students who will be working this summer as counselors in the JDC [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] sponsored summer camp. They are having an orientation session this weekend and I shall be having a discussion with them this morning.

The reason I write all this is that so many Jews who come to visit Poland think of it as a Jewish cemetery. They treat it as a place where Jews once lived and were destroyed. That's true. However, in the words of the Jewish Partisan anthem from the Holocaust, Zog Nit Keynmol, mir zeinen da, we [they] are still here.

[Many visitors come confused about who did the destroying, i.e. it was the GERMANs not the Poles. They come with the historically daft idea that the Poles were worse than the Germans.... but more on that in another post. For my previous thoughts on that see the my comments here.]

I am also reading Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew by Stanislaw [Stashek] Krajewski who is on the Philosophy faculty at the University of Warsaw and who is helping design the portion of the aforementioned museum dedicated to post-Holocaust Jewish life in Poalnd. In addition, Stashek consults to the American Jewish Committee about Polish Jewish matters.

Stashek has become a traditional Jew. [Had a fantastic Shabbat dinner at his home.] He grew up knowing nothing about tradition or Jewish practices. He is also a Polish Jew. During the very bleak days in the 1980s -- which turned out to be the death throes of communist rule -- Stashek wrote for the underground press. Some of those essays are included in the book.

When I was here in October I met with members of the Czulent [pronounced chulent] society, the Jewish "student" [many in the group are not students] organization in Cracow. I shall do so again later this week.

Visitors -- young and old -- often find it emotionally and intellectually simpler to treat this place as one with a past but with no future. The community may be small. There are many Jews still in the woodwork. There are many who are still hesitant about emerging. It is a complicated situation. But it is not just a place about the past. For visitors to come and see only that is to shortchange both themselves and a small but fascinating Jewish community.

More later. I am off for an early morning walk in the "Old City" of Warsaw.