May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

. (The entry in Israel Gutman and Sara Bender, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, volumes 4 and 5: Poland [Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004], Part 1, 175, does not mention this nor the fact that it was the Home Army that brought the Lewins to the Dobkowskis’ house and helped Lewin escape when he was arrested by the Germans.) Despite these numerous testimonies, one can find testimonies that condemn the “Polish Catholic Church” and especially its priests as being virulently anti-Semitic. Usually those charges are not based on concrete facts, but on biases. For example, a Jew born in 1926, and therefore only 13 when the Second World War broke out, states: “The Polish Catholic Church did an excellent job of instilling deep hatred for the Jews. During Good Friday services, the priests would harangue the masses about how the Jews had killed their God, Christ. When the people came out of the church, they would attack Jews, break windows in their homes, and damage their property. Often priests themselves participated in the violence.” See Edward Gastfriend, My Father’s Testament: Memoir of a Jewish Teenager, 1938–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 23. Good Friday services in Catholic churches in Poland did not differ from those in other countries, and the liturgy was set by the Vatican. Given the length of the pre-set service, priests generally did not preach on Good Friday. Moreover, Good Friday was not a day on which Catholics were required to attend church and, since there was but one long, late-afternoon service that day, most Catholics did not attend, certainly not those in the mood for a “pogrom.” The notion that priests incited those in attendance to attack Jews is baseless, as is the charge that priests “often” participated in violence against Jews, whether on Good Friday or any other time. There is no authentic account that sunstantiates that claim.

533 Lindeman, Shards of Memory, 8.

534 Sandberg-Mesner, Light from the Shadows, 30.

535 Lindeman, Shards of Memory, 11.

536 Heller, On the Edge of Destruction, 150.

537 Scharf, Poland, What Have I To Do with Thee…, 197. For further confirmation see Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944 (New Haven and London: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Yale University Press, 2002), 119 n.35.

538 Ibid., 195, 205.

539 D. Shtokfish, ed., Sefer Drohiczyn (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1969), 15ff.

540 Antoni Arkuszewski, “Co nie jest antysemityzmem,” Słowo–Dziennik Katolicki, August 9, 1995.

541 Yehuda Kellner, “Pernalities with Heart,” in Dov Shuval, ed., The Szczebrzeszyn Memorial Book (Mahwah, New Jersey: Jacon Solomon Berger, 2005), 202–3.

542 Richard C. Lukas, “A Response,” Slavic Review, Fall/Winter 1987: 584.

543 Richard C. Lukas, Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 9. See also his other books: The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944, Second revised edition (New York: Hippocrene, 1997), 124–25, 144; and Did the Children Cry?: Hitler’s War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939–1945 (New York: Hippocrene, 1994), 152–53.

544 Richard C. Lukas, “A Response,” Slavic Review, Fall/Winter 1987: 589–90.

545 Max I. Dimont, Jews, God and History (New York: New American Library, 1962), 387.

546 Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933–1945 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1968; reissued by Schoken Books, New York, 1973), 165.

547 Introduction to Vladka Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 3–4.

548 John Weiss, The Politics of Hate: Anti-Semitism, History, and the Holocaust in Modern Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 192.

549 Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time (New York: Rhinehart and Winston, 1968), 163.

550 Helen Fine, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 90–91.

551 “Wiesel assails Pontiff for ‘offensive behavior,’” JTA, The Canadian Jewish News, Toronto, July 7, 1988.

552 Internet: . In May 2013 Maram Stern was promoted to Associate Executive Vice-President of the World Jewish Congress.

553 “Reflections,” in Carol Rittner and Leo Goldberger, eds., Rescue of the Danish Jewry: A Primer (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1993).

554 Norman F. Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 345, 347.

555 Glenn Kurtz, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 190.

556 Jerome Ostrov’s article, “After a Trip to Poland,” is posted at