May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

They eventually succeeded in persuading their friend “how terrible her crime was.”²⁵⁹

Traditional Jewish schools were not known for their tolerance of others. Zosia Goldberg, who grew up in a culturally assimilated family in Warsaw, recalled the reception she and her sister experienced when they started to attend a Jewish school:

So father … put us in a private school, a gymnasium that was owned by Jews where the teachers and the students were all Jews. But since I was accustomed to eating ham with matzos and learning from the kids how to say “Jesus, Maria” and so on, the Jewish children were soon calling me a goy.

That was no good either. So my father turned to another school where the children were all Jewish and the teachers were mixed, some Gentiles and some Jews, and this school was much better.²⁶⁰

In large cities, even among Jewish children who attended Polish-language state schools, interaction outside the classroom was generally minimal. Marian Małowist, a teacher in interwar Warsaw, recalled a survey that he a Christian teacher conducted among their students. Jewish and Polish students were each asked what Poles or Jews they know, etc. It turned out that the only Pole the Jewish students knew was caretaker of the building in which they lived. It was not better among the Polish students.²⁶¹ Regrettably, measures taken to overcome barriers often proved to entrench them. As one Jew from Otwock recalls,
There were other incidents as well, like the annual athletic contests between pupils from the Jewish school and those from the nearby Polish school, contests by which some well-meaning but overoptimistic educators hoped to encourage closer contact between the two. The result was usually the reverse; the competition merely aggravated their mutual dislike and hostility. The young spectators would gather on opposite sides of the running track, the Jews in one group, the Poles in another, each cheering the runners from its own school, each jeering at those from the other. What had intended to foster greater understanding only revealed their underlying mistrust and resentment.

Worse still, the athletic contests sometimes led to displays of hostility more graphic even than cheers and jeers. There were also epithets and insults and occasional blows. I remember how at one of those competitions a little Polish boy made the mistake of standing on the Jewish side of the track. Trying to encourage the runners from his school, he urged them loudly to show those ‘mangy Jews’ who the real athletes were. That had unfortunate consequences for him. On the other side of the racecourse his remark would have gone unnoticed … But on this side it brought swift reprisal. An older girl who had overheard his exhortation, outraged, berated him angrily, underscoring her disapproval with a sharp blow to the back of his head. The little fellow seemed startled; he was not even aware that he had said anything improper. … He lowered his head, tears came to his eyes, and sobbing softly he crossed over to the opposite side. There he undoubtedly found a more sympathetic audience.²⁶²

Tolerance and enlightenment were not hallmarks of traditional Jewish schools, as a Jewish village boy learned when he started to attend cheder in a synagogue in the nearby town of Dębica near Tarnów:
Within the sanctuary itself, though, I felt ill at ease. The city boys were mainly Chassidic, their long payes—sidelocks—just one visible expression of their faith. I had been raised to observe the Jewish holidays, including the Sabbath as a day of rest; I kept kosher, and I was, after all, studying for my bar mitzvah—but I did not wear sidelocks like most of the other boys, did not dress in the traditionalist black caftan and felt hat, did not practice my religion with anything near their fervor.

“Are you a goy?” they often taunted me, using a Yiddish term for “gentile.” “You dress like a goy!”

“I don’t have to look different to be Jewish,” I would reply, which left me open for the retort, “But you do look different. Different from us, and we’re Jewish.”

There would never be a meeting of the minds, it seemed, between us so-called assimilated Jews and the Chassidim.

By the time Friday afternoon came around, I could not wait to get back home.²⁶³

A Jewish boy from Działoszyce recalled:

Father, an ultraorthodox Gerer Hasid, did not want his sons going to public school. … Nobody taught us math, science, or Polish in heder. In fact, the rebbe often did not even know Polish.²⁶⁴
A Jewish girl from an assimilated family in Grudziądz recalled the cold reception she received when she started to study the Jewish religion: “So, starting in fourth grade, I attend the afternoon classes of Jewish religion at the Wydzialowa [Wydziałowa] School—where the Jewish pupils look at me suspiciously as if I did not belong. … And I wonder if I belong with these stuck-up Jewish kids who give me a cold shoulder because I missed a year of Jewish religion.”²⁶⁵ A Jewish schoolboy from Warsaw who dared to say a Christian prayer soon faced the wrath of his Jewish peers:
Every morning at school, when the Christian boys crossed themselves and said the Lord’s Prayer, I found myself wondering what would happen if I prayed along with them. Would I get stoned? Would my hand fall off? Would I drop dead?

One day I got up my courage and, right out loud, said the Lord’s Prayer and crossed myself with the rest of them. The Christian boys paid no attention, though a couple of them gave me puzzled looks over their shoulders, but when it was over the Jewish boys—there were only a few girls, and they had separate classes—cornered me and yelled, “You’re not supposed to do that; you know it’s against our religion. We’re going to tell your mother.”

I didn’t say anything, and I certainly didn’t think they’d really tell her, but when I left school that day all the Jewish boys cornered me. “What kind of Jew are you?” they asked. “What’s wrong with you?” When I didn’t answer—what could I say?—they started punching me and kicking me, not letting up until I was bruised and lying on the ground in tears. After that they all disappeared together. I did not see where they went, but when I made my way slowly home and was standing across the street from our apartment house, I saw them all trooping out, with righteous little smirks on their faces, so I knew they had told my mother.

My hands were trembling when I opened the apartment door. I had to be in for a beating this time. But my mother just glanced over at me, then went back to her sewing. She never said a word to me about it—not one word. I’ve never understood that.²⁶⁶

Maintaining close contacts with Christians was also a basis for social sanctions. A popular Yiddish play, Der Dorfs Jung, railed out against the evils of marrying a Christian and warned of the fires of hell that such a vile deed invited.²⁶⁷ For many Jews intimate relationships with Christians were anathema. In Baranowicze, Sara Bytenski, the daughter of a pious Jew was spotted one afternoon behind some trees kissing her Christian boyfriend. A group of teenaged Jewish boys spontaneously rallied to her “defence”:
When the man turned his head, our horror turned to outrage. He was a ‘goy’—a Gentile! For us, it was not only sin, it was mortal sin—a Jewish soul was in danger of being lost! We looked at each other, wild-eyed. She had to be saved—it was our sacred duty! There were plenty of stones lying around; collecting pocketfuls of them we stormed forward, valiant saviours, hurling our weapons of destruction at the infamous desecrators … A few months later we all had a second shock. The poor girl had had no success in convincing her family that her lover was willing to convert to our faith in order to marry her, so she ran away with him. The shame of it was too much for her father, a poor but well-respected tailor. He declared a whole year of mourning, closed his shop and sat, all day long on the floor, wearing a torn black garment praying loudly and begging the Almighty for forgiveness for the daughter, now dead to him, who had brought such shame and humiliation on her parents and her people alike.²⁶⁸
Another account states: “How many tears of sorrow and anguish he had brought upon his parents by her visits to his house. … His parents were furious and enraged when they saw them together. They never tired of reminding him that it was high time he be at heder and not mooning about with a non-Jewish girl. Misha was not insensitive to their pain and tried to avoid Lucia as best he could.”²⁶⁹ Yet another states: “Morris, then sixteen, had committed an unpardonable sin. He was observed by several Jews holding hands with a shiksa in a little park behind the church in Łęczna, where his family lived. On Saturday the rabbi reported the shameful event to the congregation, and Jankel, Morris’s father, was so humiliated that he slapped the youthful offender in front of everyone. That night Morris took whatever money he could find in the house and ran away from home.”²⁷⁰ This attitude was pervasive is small towns populated by Jews. Leon Lepold recalled the “nationalistic, chauvinistic” upbringing he received in his native town of Tłumacz, in eastern Galicia. “You could not go out on the street with a gentile girl… The whole city would know about it… You would be thrown out from the shul… It would be the biggest shmanda [shame], the biggest embarrassment for the family.” While “Gentile people went to the Jewish doctor and the Jewish people went to the Jewish doctor, … the Jewish people didn’t go to the gentile doctor.”²⁷¹

But such attitudes were also common in large centres, even among the educated classes. When a Jewish teenager from Warsaw went out with a Polish Catholic student, a friend of her brother’s, a Jewish couple who passed them on the street exclaimed that it was shameful for a Jew to go out with a goy.²⁷² A Jew from a well-to-do Orthodox family from Warsaw faced universal ostracism on the part of his family, friends and community for courting a Polish Christian girl from his own neighbourhood. Some of his acquaintances were very frank about the consequences: “‘How can you walk down the street with her?’ he asked. ‘You’ll be ostracized, beaten, ridiculed. Your own people are going to hate you … What’s going to happen when your father finds out? You may give him a heart attack.’” To escape the harassment, they frequented one of the better Polish restaurants: “I didn’t have to worry about being heckled for dating a Polish girl. No one paid any attention to us.” Eventually, he “started calling for her at her apartment, and her parents didn’t seem to mind.”²⁷³

Jews who married Gentiles, even if they did not convert, were regarded as renegades by the Jewish community and were usually disowned by their families, as was the case in Wasilków near Białystok and in Włocławek.²⁷⁴ The Talmud contains a strict ban on intermarriage and Jews who embraced Christianity were treated with particular aversion. Those who intermarried were completely ostracized by the community, and their family members suffered too. Apostates were considered by all to be dead.²⁷⁵ In the town of Wilczyn, near Inowrocław,
A Jewish neighbor—one of seven brothers—joined the Polish army, and while in the service, met and married a Christian girl. It was a sin for a Jew to marry a Gentile and a really grave sin for this family. His father was a pious Jew and stood out in town with his long beard, wearing a fur hat known as a shtreimel. Married Haredi men grew beards and wore such hats on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. This man became very bitter over his son’s marriage and was shamed by other Jews. It put a huge blot on his family for the rest of his life.²⁷⁶
The apostate Tzipora, was universally regarded as “the blot on our Sochaczew—she who embarrassed and mocked not only her pious father but also the entire Jewish city.”²⁷⁷ The mother of a girl who ran off with her Polish tutor and married him in a church service, “burdened by shame, overwhelmed by grief threw herself into one of the town wells and fell to he death. Soon afterward the family disappeared from Kolbuszowa.”²⁷⁸ When a Jewish girl fell in love with a Polish officer,
she had to choose between never seeing her parents again or breaking off with her beloved. The entire Jewish community of Chodecz was in an uproar about it. In the end, the young woman drowned herself in a well and was buried outside the cemetery.²⁷⁹
In the town of Ejszyszki near Wilno, “the Jewish community lost no opportunity to express its revulsion toward [Goldke],” who had converted to Catholicism to marry a Catholic man. When Meir Hilke converted to Catholicism in 1921 to marry a Catholic woman, “Not a single Jew was to be found on the streets … and all the doors and windows were shut against the terrible sight.”²⁸⁰ Another Jew from Ejszyszki described the nature of some of the doubtless milder harassment endured by Goldke, who had married a Polish farmer. Whenever she ventured into town, local Jews taunted her in the streets with calls of “Goldke, the convert! Goldke, the convert!”²⁸¹ According to another account,
Little children pointed their fingers at her and yelled, “There goes Goldke the Mishumaidisteh!” when she attended church on Sundays. No one had any tolerance, much less sympathy, for her actions.²⁸²
A Jewish woman who married a Pole in Naliboki, and secretly converted to Catholicism so as not to incur the wrath of the local Jewish population, received an ominous gift from her own mother (who lived in Lwów): a cake containing broken pieces of glass.²⁸³ Another Jewish woman from the Wilno area who converted when she married a Pole “had done the most abominable deed that a Jewish child could do to her God-fearing parents.” It was her father’s duty according to Jewish law to “repudiate” her:
Now it was his duty to mourn her as if she were dead. He sat shivah for seven days and cried. Later he attempted to put her out of his mind, as if she had never existed.²⁸⁴
One memoir describes the reaction when the daughter of a rabbi fell in love with a Polish policeman in a small town near Lublin and insisted on marrying him after converting to Catholicism:
Her poor parents followed the carriage, crying and screaming and beating their heads to a bloody pulp on the sides of the wagon with their daughter not to go through with this woeful deed. … After this shameful tragedy, the girl’s family secluded themselves and never went out of the house. Her three sisters never married, neither did their cousins in the nearby town. No one would marry them.²⁸⁵
When Dobka Sztrum of Uniszowa near Ryglice married a Pole and converted to Catholicism before the war, the couple was forced to leave the village because of the harassment they experienced from local Jews. When she returned to the village during the war, she was denounced by a Jew; pregnant, she was executed by the Germans in front of her home.²⁸⁶

When a young Jewish woman converted to Catholicism in the village of Jaśliska near Krosno, the Jews nearly rioted. The situation became so precarious that she was escorted by a policeman on her way to the church. According to this woman, “Jews threw stones. … After this celebration, my father came and pleaded with me to go home. … But I was already baptised … Later Jews asked my father why he had not brought an axe or a knife with him and cut my head off … Because it is a horrible thing for Jews when one of them gets baptised.” Jews did not leave her in peace. “They tried to stop her from entering the church and they wanted to ‘kill her and stone her to death’. … After her baptism, [she] sold her second-hand sewing machine and escaped [from the village], because ‘I knew that the Jews would never leave me in peace.’” The initiative to convert had been entirely this woman’s who had shown a fascination with Catholicism since childhood: “It often happened that the priest would show her the door, because Jewish children were not allowed to participate in religious lessons. It also happened that her father would beat her and lift her up by the hair, because he did not like his daughter to attend Catholic services.”²⁸⁷

A similar situation is recorded in the small nearby town of Stoczek when a young Jewish woman, the daughter of a businessman, married a Polish peasant from a nearby village.
When one changed his faith in Stoczek, it signified to all that he had abandoned the Jewish community and went over to the hostile Poles. … Despite the period of mourning, the community insisted that they did not recognise the act of conversion because a Jew could never be anything but a Jew. It was inconceivable in Stoczek that a Jew could come to believe in another faith. The Jew who went through conversion was, therefore, considered a shmadnik, an apostate and traitor, a low and spiteful character, but he never became a Gentile in the eyes of the community.
When this Jewish woman arrived to be married in church, “almost all Jews, young and old, gathered around the town hall where she was staying and shouted insults at her.”²⁸⁸

An account by a Jew from a professional, largely Polish-speaking milieu in Kraków acknowledges: “Intermarriage had become more common in Poland during the 1930s, but it was still regarded as a tragedy by most orthodox parents. Some disowned their children, while others sat shivah for them as though they had died, observing seven days of mourning with slippers on their feet and ashes on their head.”²⁸⁹ A Jew from Łódź recalled:

I had been aware of a close relative of my father’s who had become a Christian, had married a Pole and was working as a senior clerk in the council offices of Lodz [Łódź]. The sorrow and shame felt by the family was so great that no one in the family dared to mention the convert’s name. So-much-so, that everyone tried to forget that she ever existed—her parents actually went through the traditional seven-day mourning period for her, broke all contact with her and felt so ashamed and disgraced that they isolated themselves from society.²⁹⁰
The daughter of a prominent industrialist in Borysław recalled that when her great-grandmother’s daughter married a Christian, she was “considered an outsider in the family. It was not until the war started, when the family wanted to find her to ask her if she could hide my sick grandfather, that I discovered this family secret. No one knew her married name, so the attempt to locate her did not succeed.”²⁹¹

The Second World War did not alter the situation for many. When a Jewish prisoner-of-war whose life had been rescued by a Polish nurse returned to his home in Warsaw in October 1939 to introduce his new Polish girlfriend to his father, Rabbi Moses Korngold, the reaction was one of shock:

“My son has brought a Christian girl home,” he thought, reflecting deeply. “A Polish girl, Is he going to marry her? That must never happen. Never! Never!” …

“You have brought a Christian into my house. What a disgrace!” his father scolded him. “You are killing me, Never shall I give my consent while I live.”

He would not allow Leon to say a word, but covered his face with his hands, and walking back and forth in his despair, he continued, “Doesn’t your conscience bother you? Have you no sympathy for your old father?” …

Moses Korngold interrupted him brusquely, shouting at him, ‘You are a lost soul! Get out of my house!’”²⁹²

In German-occupied Lwów, a Jew who had been given shelter by his Polish girlfriend kept the relationship a secret from his parents for fear of being disowned: “Irka was David’s Gentile girlfriend. Giza had told me she thought David and Irka were secretly married, and I quite understood why David would keep the news from his family. He was even more under his Mother’s thumb than Karol, and I am sure she would rather have seen him dead than married to a non-Jewish girl.”²⁹³ Yet, although Janina Papliński had converted to Judaism when she married her Jewish husband before the war, her parents sheltered her and her Jewish sons during the war. After Janina was caught by the Germans when she was outside the family home, her parents and sister continued to hide the boys with different people in the surrounding villages. After the war, the boys were reunited with their father, who had been mobilized by the Red Army during the war. They moved to Israel severing contact with the Catholic family who had saved them.²⁹⁴

Two Jewish siblings who spent the German occupation moving from home to home in the countryside near Kańczuga were apprehensive about the relationships they struck up with their Polish peers. Faiga Rosenbluth wrote: “Much as it hurt me to tear myself away from Stasiek and this comfortable place, it was time to move on. Besides, I knew I could never marry a goy. My parents would die a second death, if such a thing were possible.” Her brother Luzer recalled his own dilemma: “All that night, I lay awake thinking about Andzia. I was trying to figure out whether it was all right to marry a shiksa if there were no other Jews left in the world. It seemed fair to me, but I wasn’t so sure what our rabbi would say.”²⁹⁵

The media reported a rather dramatic example of this phenomenon in present-day Israel when an anti-Arab protest occurred over a wedding between an Israeli Arab and a Jew. The bride’s father said of his son-in-law: “My problem with him is that he is an Arab.” Demonstrators shouted “Death to the Arabs” and sang a song with a line, “May your village burn down.” The two anti-Arab groups involved in the protests, Lehava and Yad L’Achim, oppose assimilation of Arabs and Jews.²⁹⁶

Nor is it surprising that assimilationists were generally frowned on by mainstream Jewish society for whom nationalism was a potent force. The creation of ghettos under the German occupation intensified markedly the precarious conditions for converts, assimilated Jews, and even Polish-speaking Jewish children living in traditional Jewish society.²⁹⁷ For some Jewish leaders, like Mordechai Chaim Rukowski, chairman of the Łódź ghetto council, the walled and fenced ghettos created by the Germans were not without their blessings.²⁹⁸ Jacob Gens, the German-appointed leader of the Wilno ghetto, boasted in a speech delivered on January 15, 1943: “For the first time in the history of Vilna [Wilno] we have achieved a purely Jewish school system.”²⁹⁹ (The Germans allowed schools to be reopened—at least for a time—in many ghettos, including Warsaw, Łódź and Lublin, where the language of instruction was Yiddish.³⁰⁰) Moreover, Jewish children who spoke Polish in the ghettos were harassed, ostracized and even beaten by Jewish children.³⁰¹ Curiously, even in the ranks of the Communist Party of Poland Jewish nationalism came to the forefront among the remnants of that disbanded party who found themselves in France in the late 1930s. The Jewish members, who were better connected and had more financial resources than their Polish colleagues, scorned the latter and even harassed Jews who spoke only the Polish language.³⁰²

Day-to-day relations between Christians and Poles in the interwar period are often portrayed in grim colours and violence directed against Jews has been written about extensively. Contrary to the dire picture presented by authors such as Celia Heller, the evidence does not support that extreme view, since on a personal level day-to-day relations were usually proper. Heller undermines her doom-and-gloom portrayal of Polish Jewry when she discusses Jews organizing defences against violent attacks by Polish hoodlums and extreme nationalists in the 1930s.³⁰³ Small groups of Jewish men, usually armed with such meager things as clubs and perhaps a few firearms, were often successful in preventing or beating off such attacks. Were the attacks anything other than unorganized, uncommon, and small-scale, how could such defences possibly enjoy success?