Poland Chief Rabbi Meets Ex-Leader’s Kin

Marshal Jozef Pilsudski led Poland during the period between the two world wars. Image by getty images

By JTA June 26, 2014

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, met with the daughter and other descendants of Poland’s iconic interwar leader Marshal Jozef Pilsudski.

During their hourlong conversation Thursday, Jadwiga Jaraczewska, 94, showed Schudrich a famous photograph of Jewish leaders in the town of Deblin greeting her father with bread and salt after the Polish army under his leadership captured the town from the Bolsheviks in August 1920.

Also present at the meeting, which came at the invitation of the family, were Pilsudski’s grandchildren, some of his great-grandchildren and his 2-month-old great-great-granddaughter.

Polish Jews widely supported Pilsudski, who died in 1935, as an opponent of extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. He served as head of state and prime minister, among other positions, between 1918 and 1935, the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II.

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