May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

; Bob Weber and Andrew Livingstone, “Hungry Kids Used As Guinea Pigs: Federal Bureaucrats in 1940s and 1950s Tested Theories by Withholding Nutrients and Calories, Research Reveals,” Toronto Star, July 17, 2013. As late as the 1950s, Inuit families were uprooted from their traditional homes and shipped to remote reaches of the Arctic—an attempt by the government to assert Canada’s sovereignty in the uninhabited Arctic Islands. The transplanted people were left without assistance to endure winters in Igloos and tents made of muskox hide. Struggling to find food, many of them did not make it through the punishing winters. See Bill Curry, “An Apology for the Inuit Five Decades in the Making,” The Globe and Mail, August 19, 2010.

29 Regina Renz, “Small Towns in Inter-War Poland,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 17: The Shtetl: Myth and Reality (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Litman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 143–51, at 148.

30 Cited in Chone Shmeruk, “Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bruno Schultz,” The Polish Review, vol. 36, no. 2 (1991): 161–67.

31 Brian Horowitz, Empire Jews: Jewish Nationalism and Acculturation in 19^th- and Early 20^th-Century Russia (Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2009), 6. Polish nationalist writers are attacked for thinking that even assimilated Jews cannot understand the Polish spirit. Russian writers felt the same way about assimilated Russian Jews, as did German writers of the Weimar Germany about assimilated German Jews.

32 Cited in Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s: Ideology and Memory (London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 3.

33 Cornelis A. van Minnen, Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist, and FDR Confidant (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 31.

34 Daniel Stone, ed., The Polish Memoirs of William John Rose (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 100.

35 Stone, The Polish Memoirs of William John Rose, xxiii.

36 Elie Cohen as cited in Anton Gill, The Journey Back From Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors (London: Grafton Books, 1988), 371–72.

37 Apolinary Hartglas, Na pograniczu dwóch światów (Warszawa: Rytm, 1996), 18, 19, 30, 31, 35, 40, 46–47, 51, 54, 55, 107, 152, 174, 190–92. The summary in the text is from an Amazon review by Jan. Peczkis.

38 Fishman, The Rise of Modern Yiddish Culture, 101, 102, 103. Although Fishman attempts to soften the secularism of the Yiddishist movement, he finally admits to its militant atheist essence: “Discussion of God as creator, master of the universe, or providential force was beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. Consequently, prayer and religious ritual were likewise anathema. … While much of the religious tradition could be recast in national terms, the aversion to religion per se remained nearly total. … the Judaism of secular Yiddishists, even of the national-romantic variety, was a Judaism without religion and a Judaism without God.” Ibid., 112–3.

39 David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 136. Biale remarks, “That Jews throughout the world today are disproportionately more secular than their Gentile neighbors in all of the ways articulated in this book is one piece of evidence of the ongoing nature of this legacy.” (P. 181.) In addition: “The majority of Jews in the world today are, in some sense, secular. They either doubt the existence of God or consider the question superfluous.” (P. 192). As reviewer Jan Peczkis asks pointedly, “Were he alive today, would Polish Cardinal August Hlond feel vindicated for his much-maligned 1936 ‘Jews are freethinkers’ statement?” In 1936, August Cardinal Hlond made a much-condemned statement about “Jews as freethinkers, vanguards of Bolshevism, and a threat to morals,” etc., which he did not apply indiscriminately to Jews. This occurred after much of Poland’s Jewish population had undergone self-atheization to varying degrees. In fact, the self-atheization of Poland’s Jews, which had begun in tsarist Russia decades earlier (for example, through the Yiddishist movement) was by now well advanced. Many Jewish authors have written about this, and religious Jews condemned the large-scale Jewish departure from religion even more severely than the Catholic Poles. All this occurs even today—in Israel. The haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) condemn the mores of secular Israeli Jews in very much the same ways that Catholic Poles did their secular Jewish counterparts in the 1930’s.

Although author Joshua Karlip does not mention Hlond, he makes it easy for the reader to see where Hlond was coming from. Leading Yiddishist thinker Elias Tcherikower effectively corroborated Hlond, writing the following in 1939, in the context of an anti-assimilationist mindset: “The tragedy of our generation does not consist of afflictions that have befallen our lot, but rather in that the generation has lost the old beliefs and has despaired of the new. Through and through individualistic, skeptical, and rationalistic, our generation is devoured by assimilation—right or left—and has lost its past strength.” See Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation, 13. Furthermore, according to Tcherikower, the abandonment of religion by the Jewish masses had become so pervasive and so irreversible that there could be no return to Jewish religion as the foundation of Jewish self-identity. This was even in the face of the growing disillusionment with the Yiddish language and Jews-as-nationality as modern forms of Jewish self-identity.” Ibid., 207. After World War II, Yisroel Efroikin adopted a friendlier attitude to religion, and came to believe that, “The Jewish rejection of God had led not only to national disintegration but also to moral degradation.” Ibid. 311. In fact, Efroikin went even further. Nowadays, the Nazi-collaborating conduct of the Judenrats and Jewish ghetto police are usually framed solely in terms of powerless, desperate Jews trying to save their own lives. In contrast, “Efroikin contrasted what he deemed the immoral and opportunistic behavior of the acculturated Jews of the Judenräte and Jewish police with the much more exemplary behavior of those Jews who had remained loyal to the religious tradition.” Ibid. 311. Interestingly, the way that today’s Haredim experience Israel’s secular Zionist-oriented Judaism sounds very much like 1930’s Poland’s devout Catholics had experienced the emerging secularization of Poland’s Jews. Secularized Jews provoked the same reaction among pre-WWII Poles as they now do in Israel among the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews.) Noah Efron’s comments are instructive: “Ultra-Orthodox distanced themselves from Zionist culture, which was, as Rabbi Eliezer Schach put it memorably, ‘poisoned by the secular press, full of heresy and alienation, which incites and demeans all that is holy to us.’” Further: “Most Haredim regret exposing their children to the mores of secular Jews.” See Noah J. Efron, Real Jews: Secular Versus Ultra-Orthodox and the Struggle for Jewish Identity in Israel (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 51, 138.

40 Cited in Alina Cała, “The Social Consciousness of Young Jews in Interwar Poland,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 8: Jews in Independent Poland, 1918–1939 (London and Washington: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1994), 50.

41 Cited in Ewa Kurek, Poza granicą solidarności: Stosunki polsko-żydowskie 1939–1945 (Kielce: Wyższa Szkoła Umiejętności, 2006), 86; translated as Polish-Jewish Relations 1939-1945: Beyond the Limits of Solidarity (New York: iUniverse, 2012).

42 Evgeny Finkel, Victims’ Politics: Jewish Behavior During the Holocaust, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 2012, 275.

43 Isaac Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 54.

44 Deutscher, The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, 96.

45 Aviel Roshwald, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 165. See also Peter D. Stachura, “National Identity and the Ethnic Minorities in Early Inter-War Poland,” in Peter D. Stachura, ed., Poland Between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London: Macmillan Press, 1998), 67–70, 74–77.

46 Cited in Kurek, Poza granicą solidarności, 34–35.

47 Typical of sentiments in Jewish memoirs is the following: “We dreamed of living in Palestine, equal members of society in our own Jewish state.” See Shalom Yoran, The Defiant: A True Story ((New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 120. There was little place in such a state for non-Jews. The following excerpts from a memorial book from a typical shtetl in Eastern Poland, where most Jews were said to be “middle class” and better off economically than their Christian neighbours, are instructive:
The tradition of mutual assistance between peoples existed for many years. … The Torah commandment: “And your brother shall live among you,” became a prime concept for the Rokitno Jews. … They showed their love for their fellow Jews and their wish to help each other.
“Hashomer Hatzair” [a leftist-leaning political organization] in Rokitno was built on pure nationalism and Zionism. … On Polish Independence [sic, Constitution] Day, May 3^rd, we were forced to participate in a parade in order to show loyalty to the government.
When construction was completed, most of the Jewish students transferred from public schools to the Hebrew school. More than 90% of the children of the town and its surroundings were educated in the Tarbut School. It is important to point out the great dedication of the parents who willingly gave up the free public school whose building was spacious and well equipped. … Except for geography, Polish history and language—compulsory subjects taught in Polish, the language of instruction was Hebrew.
There were about 300 children in the Hebrew school in Rokitno in 1927–28, i.e., almost all the children in town. It seems to me that no Jewish children attended the Polish school, or at least very few did.
The members of the [Hebrew-speaking] association kept their vow and spoke Hebrew at home and outside, in spite of the Poles. When they entered a Polish store [the author must mean a government office, because Jews rarely, if ever, patronized Polish stores—M.P.] they used sign language or winking and pointing to show the shopkeeper what they wanted.
There was hardly a Jewish child in Rokitno who did not know Hebrew. … Parents denied themselves food to give their children a Jewish education, so they would grow up knowledgeable and comfortable with their background. … the children were educated with Jewish values and Hebrew language. When they made Aliyah, they seemed and felt like native-born.
From time to time a wall newspaper was published in the school. … The richest section was the one with news of Eretz Israel. This was our purpose in life. There were always enthusiastic students standing near that section.
The JNF [Jewish National Fund] served as a cornerstone for the nationalistic education—the value of the land [in Palestine] to the people. The notion: “The land will not be sold for eternity” was well received by the students. Every new purchase of land was received enthusiastically and donations were increased. There was a JNF corner in every classroom and the blue box was the center of the corner and of the life of the class. Every happy event was celebrated with a donation.
Although the Jews of Rokitno had dealings with non-Jews, they did not follow their customs. There was a division between them when it came to matters of faith and opinion. The locals fed calves for alien work and bowed to emptiness while we [Jews] thanked and blessed our G-d for his creation.
See E. Leoni, ed., Rokitno–Wolyn and Surroundings: Memorial Book and Testimony, posted on the Internet at: