Warsaw, Poland - After one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Poland was vandalized last week, the chief rabbi of Poland found an unexpected source of help for the clean-up: 20 Polish art students and the mayor of the town himself, all of whom helped scrub the 100 gravestones spray-painted with black swastikas.
The incident, which took place in the southern Polish city of Czestochowa, revealed a great deal about the rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who has been managing the complex task of growing a Jewish community in this very Catholic country. Besides ministering to the needs of the congregants in his Warsaw synagogue — leading Sabbath and holiday services, officiating at circumcisions, bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals — Schudrich also serves as the official mediator with the Polish government and the Catholic Church, guides the Jewish day schools and summer camps throughout the country, and works to preserve the more than 1,400 cemeteries, Nazi death camps and mass graves.
“He has wings under his suit jacket,” Helise Lieberman, founding director of a new Jewish day school in Warsaw, told the Forward.
After the Holocaust, most of Poland’s surviving Jews either left Poland or assimilated into Polish society. Of those who stayed, many kept their Jewish identity a secret from their own children, fearing persecution by the repressive Communist government. Jewish community leaders today agree that if not for the fall of Communism in 1989, the Jewish population in Poland might very well have disappeared — a shocking thought, considering that before the outbreak of World War II, Poland constituted the second largest Jewish community in the world, with more than 3.3 million Jews. After the Holocaust, only 369,000 remained and today Jews number between 10,000 and 12,000.
What we see here in Poland today, Schudrich told the Forward in an interview in his office in Warsaw, “is a post-assimilationist community.”
Poland’s new democracy poses a challenge for the Jews as they learn to integrate their Jewish and Polish identities. At the same time, a new pride is taking root, as evidenced by the growing number of worshippers in Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. Every Sabbath, between 50 and 70 people attend the Orthodox synagogue. Ten years ago, simply getting the minimum quorum of 10 men was a struggle.
Even more impressive: This past June, the Nozyk Synagogue, which the Nazis once used as a stable, hosted a double wedding, bar mitzvah and baby-naming ceremony — all in one weekend. For one of the two couples, Tsuriel and Ora Kuvarik, this was not their first wedding — they were married years ago, and already had an 8-year-old son — but rather an opportunity to finally experience a Jewish marriage ceremony: standing under the chupah (wedding canopy), receiving a ketuba (wedding contract) and breaking the glass.
But the community’s greatest success story may be Rabbi Maciej Pawlak, the 29-year-old principal of the Lauder-Morasha School, a Jewish day school in Warsaw founded by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in 1994. Growing up in Szczecin in an assimilated Jewish family, he started exploring his roots at age 15. After turning to Schudrich, he began studying Judaism in earnest, and eventually went to learn more at New York’s Yeshiva University. Today he is the country’s first Polish-born rabbi ordained since the Holocaust.
Jewish community leaders all agree: None of this could have happened without Schudrich’s leadership. It began in 1973, when Schudrich came to Poland on a high school trip. His uncle, Henry Starer, a survivor of the Terezin and Birkenau concentration camps, had taught him about the Holocaust, and, Schudrich says, “everyone was saying there was nothing left in Poland, but I refused to believe it.” He returned several times, took up Polish and received rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University. In 2000 he became the spiritual leader of the Nozyk Synagogue, and in 2004, the chief rabbi of Poland.
Tad Taube, whose Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture provides the largest financial support for Poland’s Jewish community, says Schudrich has “an infinite reservoir of patience and compassion. He’s seldom off his cell phone, helping a kid somewhere who lost his wallet or passport. He even lends money to Jewish students so they can study Judaism in the U.S. That’s why everyone trusts him and loves him.”
The admiration for Schudrich also exists among Polish officials — something he attributes to a tactical decision on his part: “When I’m dealing with people in the government,” Schudrich told the Forward, “I praise them publicly, and criticize them privately.”
There are also other signs of Jewish life in Warsaw. The 400-seat National Jewish theater, named after the late Yiddish actress Esther Rokhel Kaminska, features Yiddish plays, performed by a troupe of Jewish and non-Jewish actors. A Yiddish club meets regularly to read literary works in their original Yiddish. A progressive synagogue, Beit Warszawa, has also been attracting interest among Polish Jews seeking to explore their heritage.
But still, it is Schudrich’s Orthodox community that engenders the most awe. On the day of the double wedding, his ingenuity was once again in clear view. Instead of the pastel-colored tents usually used for outside weddings, a group of soldiers had set up three huge army tents. It may not have been pretty, but it saved the community a bundle. According to Jewish tradition, a wedding is open to the entire community, and indeed, over 400 people showed up. They chatted, laughed and nibbled the home-cooked delicacies under the dark olive tents. After years of living in the shadow of the Holocaust, the Jews of Warsaw finally have reason to celebrate.
Rukhl Schaechter is a staff writer and editor at the Forverts.
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I applaud your interest in the currnet Jewish revival in Poland and your description of Rabbi Schurich's work. However, I need to remind you that there was a thriving Jewish community in Poland of about 30,000 people from the post World War II period until 1968. We had Jewish Schools, Jewish Cultural Clubs, we belonged to Jewish scout groups and spent summers at Jewish Summer Camps. The majority of us were not religious but we have been Jewish, mosly survivors of the Holocaust and their children. We were not members of the current "discovering their Jewish roots" phenomenon and a large etnic group which largerly left in 1968 as the result of government antisemitic policies. Although Rabbi Schudrich and Rabbi Schuman are to be comended for building their respective communities, we should not forget that there were Jews in Poland during the post-war period in numbers far exceeding the current population of 10,000 to 12,000. If 1968 expulsion would not have happened the community would have grown without interuption and their numbers would have been much higher and beyond to what is estimated today.
THANK you Rabai Schudrich for the work you are doing on behalf the Jewish community.I hope you have good luck with the Polish govt.I was born in Lodz and was in the ghetto and never went back to see my birhplace,I hope some day the poles will welcome us as Jewish citisen that will make us more visible to visit Poland.
Rukhl Schaechter's article did not resonate with me -- it read as hageography rather than objective journalism. "Wings under his coat"? Rabbi Schudrich is a person of great stamina and strong convictions. But there are many of us in Poland who see him as a large part of the problem, not part of the solution. Take for example his extreme conservatism and his uncompromising Zionism. The former was the reason that he denied access to the Warsaw mikvah to Conservative Jews from Wroclaw. The latter is the reason that he overseas a scheme of restitution of Jewish communal and sacred properties that includes selling them off and sending the proceeds to Israel via the WJRO, Given that Bibi Netanyahu himself advocated this, let me guess where the money ends up. I doubt it goes to Peace Now, and we have plenty of reasons to think that it does not go to Polish Jewish holocaust survivors in Israel. Rabbi Schudrich has for years fought against the recognition or support of any Jewish groups in Poland other than the one of which he is rabbi, known as the ZGWŻ. He has routinely thrown Polish Jewish leaders out of the ZGWŻ if they dared to challenge his authority. Most of those leaders have gone on to form their own organizations, but Schudrich is still the only Jewish leader in Poland with access to the government (another story, since this government is not worth shaking hands with) and the press. Writing "the only Jewish leader in Poland" reminds me of another peculiarities of Rabbi Schudrich. In spite of being the self-proclaimed Chief Rabbi of Poland (a title he assumed when Poland had just three rabbis), he does not live in Poland at all. He commutes from his home on West End Avenue, NYC. For approximately three weeks of the month, Rabbi Schudrich is not in Poland. For approximately one week of the month, he is. Go ahead, try calling his office in Warsaw and asking for him. He's always traveling. Another question worth asking is why is it that Tad Taube is financing the community in Warsaw. What happened to the Lauder Foundation? After all, for several years the Lauder Foundation employed Rabbi Schudrich -- and now they won't touch him, won't talk about him in public. But they will talk about him in private, and what they have to say is not very nice. Don't take my word for it, give them a call. This "saintly" rabbi is not all that he seems. He is up to a lot of mischief in Poland that never gets reported. Check with Beit Warszawa in Warsaw or with Severyn Ashkenazy in Beverly Hills (the chief benefactor of Beit Warszawa); they can tell you stories that will make you think twice about the wings beneath his coat.
I always looked at the Jewish culture in Poland with big sympathy. My grand parents were taking care of Jewish people who were escaping the country after Nazi Germans brutally started the war in 1939 in Poland. Many of them were escaping from Krakow through Bukowina Tatrzanska.... I was always curious what happen with all people who went through my grandparents house in 1943 and 1944.... I hope they survived. My grandfather was guiding them through the Tatry Mountains. I wish that it would be more of the biger historical picture presented to the public about how cruel war was to Poles and Jewish on Polish territories. What mechanisms were created to terrorized and destroy the country as a whole. How both cultures and nations suffered, antagonized by two foreign totalitarian powers; first Nazi Germany and later communist Soviets. I think the whole story should be told about the war, and yes it is great to see that Jewish culture is again flourishing in Poland! All the best, G.
Wonderful.
It is a grate thing that Jewish Community is growing in Poland. I thing that we should all live the past behind . As a polish catholic I thing we should reach an agreement. Beafore Warld War II we were able to get along . I thing everybody should have a right to believe what they want to believe .