May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

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158 Poles are still frequently refered to as shkotsim in Jewish community memortial (yizkor) books. See, for example, Efraim Talmi et al., Memorial Book of Sierpc, Poland (New York: JewishGen, 2014), 80–81, 205, 393 (referring to assimilated Jews) 454, 473.

159 Nechah Hoffman-Shein, “Jews and Non-Jews in Serafinitz,” in Sh. Meltzer, ed., Sefer Horodenka (Tel Aviv: Former Residents of Horodenka and Vicinity in Israel and the U.S.A., 1963), 265ff., translated into English as The Book of Horodenka and posted on the Internet at: .

160 Katz, Gone to Pitchipoï, 39. Characteristic of many Jewish memoirs, this one too is full of primitive assertions that are lacking in substance. The author alleges that the Polish government devised a plan, the so-called Madagascar Plan, in order to “expel” the Jewish population but was prevented from carrying through with it only because the war broke out; this, in turn, inspired the Nazis to resurrect the plan to expel all the Jews under their control. Ibid., 30, 53. In fact, plans like this to resettle European Jews had been contemplated by the Germans, British and Zionists much earlier. With the cooperation of the French, the Polish government commissioned a task force in 1936 to examine the possibility of encouraging the emigration of Jews to Madagascar. The head of the commission, however, felt the island could accommodate 5,000 to 7,000 families, but Jewish members of the group estimated that only 500 or even fewer families could be accommodated. The plan was, therefore, effectively abandoned.

161 Talmi, Memorial Book of Sierpc, Poland, 321–22.

162 Moshe Rozdzial, “The Crucifix,” Brother: Newsletter of the National Organization For Men Against Sexism, Winter 1999, posted on the Internet at: .

163 There are also credible Polish reports of Polish servant girls being taken advantage of and sexually abused. See John J. Hartman and Jacek Krochmal, eds., I Remember Every Day…: The Fates of the Jews of Przemyśl during World War II (Przemyśl: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk w Przemyślu; Ann Arbor, Michigan: Remembrance & Reconciliation Inc., 2002), 196.

164 Leon Weliczker Wells, Shattered Faith: A Holocaust Legacy (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 1–10.

165 Zbigniew Hauser, Ilustrowany przewodnik po zabytkach Galicji Wschodniej (Warsaw: Burchard Edition, 2004), 270.

166 For a similar testimony from Przemyśl see the account of Fred Wahl in Hartman and Krochmal, eds., I Remember Every Day…, 59: “Jewish people in Przemyśl adored German democracy. They wished they could send their kids to Berlin to be educated, to Vienna to be educated. If you spoke German on the streets they called it hoch German (high German) and you were considered to be very intelligent. It is sad because they thought the Germans were the nicest people on earth, the most intelligent.” As Israeli scholars point out, Jewish philo-Germanism blossomed in the 19^th century and continued to grow in the 20^th century: “This situation, which endured until the rise of Nazism, made the Jews of eastern Europe strong German sympathizers and contributed to the rise of modern Polish anti-Semitism. Contrary to what Goldhagen has propagated, Jews of eastern Europe, even during World War I, regarded the Germans and the German occupying army as philo-Semitic. They had good reasons for holding this view.” See Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, New edition (London and Ann Arbor, Michigan: Pluto Press, 2004), 167.

167 Robert Melson, False Papers: Deception and Survival in the Holocaust (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 32.

168 Shimon Kanc, ed., Sefer Ripin: A Memorial to the Jewish Community of Ripin [Rypin] (Tel Aviv: Former Residents of Ripin in Israel and in the Diaspora, 1962), 9–10.

169 Lyn Smith, ed. Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust (London: Ebury Press/Random House, 2005), 71.

170 Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 2002), Chapter 1. According to one Jew, “The German Jews, likewise, bore a strong dislike for the eastern Jew, the Hasid. Some blamed the Hasidim for the dismal fate they had suffered, having been rejected as rightful citizens of their beloved Germany.” See William Samelson, “Piotrków Trybunalski: My Ancestral Home,” in Eric J. Sterling, ed. Life in the Ghettos During the Holocaust (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2005), 8.

171 Horowitz, Empire Jews, 15.

172 Allan Nadler, “The Scholarly Life of the Goan of Vilna,” in Fine, Judaism in Practice, 513. In the mid-19th century, the factional conflict between Bratslav Hasidism, and other forms of Hasidism, repeatedly became violent. Jewish violence against Bratslav Hasidim continued into the early 20th century. See Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim, 120–53.

173 Archival figures from the Polish revolutionary regime show that, during the 1830 uprising, 83 out of 288 accused spies were Jews. Even though most accused spies were Poles, 83/288 amounts to 28.9%, which, if valid, means that Jews were three times more common among spies than among the general population. The evidence for Jewish espionage during the 1863 uprising is more abundant than that for 1830. See Dynner, Yankel’s Tavern, 111, 122ff. On conditions in Brańsk see Zbigniew Romaniuk, The Jewish Community of Brańsk, 1795–1914, The American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies, Internet: