In search of a lost world: Poland revives its Jewish past

By Ursula Hyzy (AFP) – 7 hours ago

WARSAW — Almost seven decades since Nazi Germany decimated Poland's Jews in death camps like the notorious Auschwitz, Europe's former Jewish heartland is reconnecting with a lost part of its identity.

The communists who took over after World War II imposed a wall of silence on a century of Jewish life here, but this has steadily crumbled since the regime's collapse in 1989.

Today, cultural festivals, cemetery restoration programmes across Poland, school Jewish history classes, national commemorations and burgeoning academic research are reclaiming the past.

"Actually the fact there was silence for 50 years, 20 years later many people have a greater appreciation of the role of Jews -- that's a very fast change," Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told AFP.

On the eve of the German invasion in 1939, Poland was home to Europe's largest Jewish community -- around 3.2 million people, representing 9-10 percent of the country's total population in the 1931 census.

Half of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish. Most died in camps set up by the Germans in occupied Poland, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, which has come to symbolise Nazi genocide, and whose January 27, 1945 liberation is being commemorated this week.

By early 1946, a year after the end of the war, Poland's Jews numbered only around 200,000, according to the Polish statistics office.

Most emigrated amid the creation of Israel in 1948, or during anti-Semitic campaigns by the communist regime in the 1950s and 1960s sparked in part by power struggles within the ruling party.

"Up until the 1990s there was no way to have an open, public and broad discussion on these issues, because of communism," said French academic Jean-Yves Potel, author of the 2009 work "The End of Innocence: Poland Facing its Jewish Past".

The Holocaust wiped out centuries of shared history between Jews and non-Jewish Poles. Jews first emigrated to Poland from western Europe to escape persecution there in the Middle Ages.

"Jews have been in Poland for almost 1,000 years. Jews were part and parcel of Polish existence, of the culture, of the intellectual life, of the economic life, of the political life," said Schudrich.

No one knows exactly how many Jews there are in the population of present-day Poland, a country of 38.5 million people, said Schudrich.

"Estimates are anywhere from 20,000-50,000 and the criteria is anecdotal," he explained.

Warsaw secondary school history teacher Robert Szuchta is a pioneer in Holocaust education in Poland who has also built an international reputation.

He regularly takes his pupils around Warsaw's former Jewish quarter -- mostly razed by the Nazis during a failed revolt in 1943 -- to help them empathise with the past in what before the war was the city with the second-largest Jewish population in the world, after New York.

"Look around you," he tells the youngsters. "One resident in three in the town where you live, where you were born and go to school, spoke Yiddish. Where's that world gone?"

"I don't have any family reason for doing this," he told AFP, noting that he does not have Jewish roots. "My personal reason is that this all hurts me everywhere."

Polish-Jewish and Holocaust history are compulsory subjects through three levels of secondary schooling in Poland, taught within the main history curriculum as well as in literature, geography, civics and philosophy classes.

Szuchta said he seeks to paint an honest picture. He steers his way between those in Poland who push the idea that every Pole heroically saved a Jew from the Nazis and those abroad who push a caricatural image of Polish anti-Semites turning in their Jewish neighbours.

Schudrich has seen attendees at his Warsaw synagogue -- the only one in the capital that survived the Nazi occupation -- get younger over the years as so-called "new Jews" discover lost roots and chose to leave the mainstream in a country that is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

The southern city of Krakow, long an important Jewish centre, buzzes every July to a major Jewish cultural festival.

Schudrich regularly gets asked for advice on small-town projects -- renovation of abandoned cemeteries, for example -- and says he's noticed a subtle but crucial change in the past couple of years.

"Beforehand, wonderful people would call and they would want to save 'your Jewish cemetery', and now they want to save 'our Jewish cemetery'," he said.

"It's really the return of Jewish memory as part of the national Polish memory," he explained.

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Pope visit to Rome synagogue under cloud

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict's decision to move his controversial wartime predecessor Pius XII closer to sainthood has put a cloud over his planned visit next month to Rome's synagogue, with some fearing it risks being canceled.

The pope on Saturday approved a decree recognizing the "heroic virtues" of Pius, accused by some Jews of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. The two remaining steps are beatification and canonization, which could take years.

Jewish leaders expressed concern because they said the Vatican had given them private assurances that the procedure leading to possible sainthood would be frozen until more study of Vatican archives for the wartime period could be studied.

The World Jewish Congress said the beatification of Pius would be "inopportune and premature" before opening of the archives and said "strong concerns about Pope Pius XII's political role during World War II which should not be ignored."

The timing of the decision, which a number of Jewish leaders called "insensitive," has cast a cloud over the German pope's plan to make his first visit to Rome's synagogue, on January 17.

"I hope it goes ahead but after this latest move I wouldn't be surprised if it is canceled," said Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, president of the Assembly of Italian Rabbis.

"While I respect the autonomy of the Church in matters of sainthood, I don't see how the pope could have taken such an untimely decision. Anything can happen now," he was quoted as telling the Rome newspaper La Repubblica.

Since his election in 2005 Benedict has visited synagogues in his native Germany and in the United States.

But his visit to the synagogue on the Tiber is significant because relations between the Vatican and Rome's Jewish community -- the oldest in the diaspora -- have often been considered a bellwether of Catholic-Jewish relations worldwide.

NOW OR NEVER

Vatican sources feared that if the Jewish community withdrew its invitation for the visit -- which would be only the second by a pope to the Rome temple -- the move could have devastating consequences on long-term Catholic-Jewish relations.

"If he does not go to the Rome synagogue on January 17, he will never go," one Vatican source said. "They will never want to reschedule something like that."

Pope Benedict has come under great pressure from both Catholics and Jews over the possible sainthood of Pius, who led the Catholic church from 1939 to 1958, years when the current pope was a teenager and young priest. "He admires Pius as the pope of his youth," another source said.

The Vatican department that makes saints submitted the heroic virtues decree to the Benedict in 2007 but he decided not to approve it immediately, opting instead for what the Vatican called a period of reflection. The delay pleased Jews concerned about Pius' place in history.

Some Jews have accused Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of not doing enough to help Jews, a charge the Vatican denies.

The Vatican maintains that Pius worked quietly behind the scenes because direct interventions might have worsened the situation for both Jews and Catholics in Europe. Many Jews have rejected this position.

In a speech on Monday recapping the year's events, the pope recalled his visit in May to Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, calling it "a monument against hate." He made no mention of Pius.

Rabbi David Rosen, the American Jewish Committee's head of Inter-religious Relations, called the move "undiplomatic."

"While it is not the business of the Jewish community to tell the Holy See who its saints are, if the Church claims as it does that it seeks to live with the Jewish community in a relationship of mutual respect, we expect it to take our sensitivities into serious consideration," Rosen said.

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

5 arrested as Auschwitz sign recovered

(CNN) -- Police in Poland have recovered the infamous sign stolen from the front gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp and arrested five men, they announced Monday.

The "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign, which means "Work Sets You Free" in German and is synonymous with the Nazi camps of World War II, was stolen late last week from Auschwitz in Poland, police said Friday.

The theft prompted outrage around the world.

Five men in their 20s and 30s have been arrested, journalist Tomas Machala of CNN affiliate Polsat in the Polish capital Warsaw said Monday.

They were not neo-Nazis, he said, in response to speculation at the time of the theft that the far right was responsible.

"They have some criminal background," he said, noting they had been arrested for robbery and brawling in the past. He did not give their names.
Video: Holocaust symbol stolen
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"They wanted to sell the sign and earn some money," he said. Police said it was too early to say if they acted on their own or were hired to commit the robbery. They face up to 10 years in prison if they are convicted, Machala said.

It is not clear how they managed to steal the sign, which was cut into three pieces into order to fit it into a car, he said.

They were arrested hundreds of miles north of the concentration camp memorial, near the city of Gdansk. The sign had been hidden in a forest, Machala said.

Police were "alerted at 5 a.m. local time on Friday by museum guards" that the sign, was stolen, according to police spokeswoman Agnieszka Szczygiel.

The heavy iron sign "was removed by being unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other," Szczygiel said.

The police investigation is ongoing.

The chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, called the theft shocking.

"The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would like to return us to darker days," Avner Shalev said Friday.

"I call on all enlightened forces in the world -- who fight against anti-semitism, racism, xenophobia and the hatred of the other -- to join together to combat these trends," he said.

More than 1 million people died in gas chambers or were starved to death in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex; about 90 percent of the victims were Jews.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, called the sign "the defining symbol of the Holocaust.

"Everyone knew that this was not a place where work makes you free, but it was the place where millions of men, women, and children were brought for one purpose only -- to be murdered," Hier said. "The audacity and boldness of this crime deserves the full attention of the Polish government."

The center calls itself one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations.

CNN's Laura Perez Maestro contributed to this report.