Bernie Sanders’ Ancestral Hometown in Poland Cheers Presidential Run
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Residents of the Polish town where Bernie Sanders’ father was born are watching the Jewish candidate’s presidential run with pride.
Many citizens of Slopnice, in southern Poland, viewed the results of the Democratic caucus in Iowa with interest on Tuesday, according to Agence France Press, the day after Sanders narrowly lost to Hillary Clinton.
“There’s quite a bit of excitement in the air here — we’re proud of Senator Sanders and we wish our ‘homeboy’ even greater success!” Mayor Adam Soltys told AFP.
Soltys met Sanders, 74, and his brother in 2013 when the two visited the town of 6,500 while retracing the footsteps of their father, Eli. The mayor helped the brothers find the house where Eli Sanders lived before emigrating in 1921 at age 17.
Many of Eli Sanders’ relatives were killed in the Holocaust.
Bernie Sanders “even speaks a few words of Polish,” Soltys said, describing the candidate as “very sympathetic, warmhearted and friendly.”
“After a couple hours, it felt like we were old friends,” he added.
Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont for nine years, was born and raised in Brooklyn. While his father was an immigrant, Sanders’ mother was a native New Yorker, the child of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Russia.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
