There are few Jews in Poland. This is an indisputable, rather sad fact. Some estimates put the number at roughly 20,000 Polish citizens who identify as Jewish — out of a population of 36 million. So finding a partner in our own community is no easy task.
Take Magda, 27, from Wroclaw. She is energetic, intelligent, attractive and very active in the Jewish community. And she’s been single for years, since she broke up with her last (non-Jewish) boyfriend. Now that she’s become so involved in Jewish life, she’d like her next boyfriend to be Jewish. But because of the small number of Jews in her city, she has to look elsewhere.
How far will she have to look?
Ania, from Warsaw, is in her mid-20s. She became involved in the Jewish community when she was 20 and now works for a large Jewish organization. She’s also a popular burlesque dancer. Like Magda, she’s been single for years. She, too, had a non-Jewish boyfriend, and after she went to Israel on a Birthright trip, she says she realized how hard it would be for her not to be with a Jewish man. “My ex-boyfriend saw my new interests as a temporary whim,” she said, “while I was in fact searching for my identity.”
Neither Ania nor Magda is observant. Why then such a strong desire to look for a partner in the Jewish community? “So that my children do not have an identity problem like I had, and so that there is a bond of understanding between us,” Ania says. “It’s important to have common interests you can share.”
Though it may seem odd to readers across the pond, there is a good deal of philo-Semitism in Poland today. In Warsaw, the capital, it is very fashionable to have Jewish friends. The trend has even reached Polish celebrities, who want to be seen at Purim balls. It’s not surprising, then, that some younger Jews are afraid of being seen as “exotic” by potential partners and yearn, instead, for deeper relationships.
Unfortunately, the 20-something Jews who make up the current generation don’t have good role models in their parents, most of whom were intermarried. What often happened is that the Jewish parent discovered his or her roots in the 1980s or later and become more Jewishly involved, which alienated the non-Jewish partner and led to divorce. The children of these relationships, young professionals, prefer to wait quietly for the right partner rather than build a life with someone who won’t understand their complicated identity.
In Poland, as in other post-Communist countries, Jewish identity is marked by the previous era, when the Communist states suppressed religions, including Judaism. Polish Jews often do not speak Hebrew and know little about Judaism, yet strongly support Israel as the spiritual center of “being Jewish.” Polish Jews were not raised Jewish but made the conscious choice as young adults to affiliate. But they also have another identity, formed by the reality of the world in which they were raised.
Polish Jews engage in discussions about God, cultural events and Sabbath suppers, yet they say they are not religious. They don’t miss any Jewish conference or Limmud because they want to see everyone else. They are also searching for who they are. It is hard to straddle two such different worlds, but when that’s your destiny, you must cope with it.
Ania’s Jewish mother had no Jewish upbringing. She converted to Catholicism before marrying Ania’s father, who was criticized for marrying a Jew. At the time, he didn’t care. That changed when Ania and her mother got involved in the Jewish community in Warsaw 10 years ago, and Ania’s father and his family turned against them.
The situation is even more difficult for observant Jews in Poland, whose pool of potential partners is miniscule. Magda moved to Israel at 34 because she couldn’t find a suitable husband in her native Krakow. Either they weren’t religious enough, weren’t the right age, or were gay. In Israel, she found her husband on a Jewish dating site.
While not blaming secular Jews for choosing non-Jewish partners, Magda says that wasn’t an option for her. “The Jewish partner has no opportunity in that situation for development and is unable to follow their religious path, provide a Jewish education for their children or experience the full expression of their own identity,” she told me.
Both women described above were born in Poland and each is marked by a strong sense of Jewish identity. Each found her own way and made a conscious choice. To live religiously or not? To live in Poland or Israel? To be more Jewish or be “Polish with a Jewish background”?
These and other questions arise for every Jew in Poland, both those who had Jewish upbringings and those who discover their Jewish identity only as adults. What all these people have in common is a desire to find themselves in a postmodern world that constantly forces us to make choices, declarations and re-evaluations.
Klaudia Klimek is a sociologist and Jewish activist in her native Poland, where she is the founder of the Jewrnalism Foundation, which promotes the work of young European Jews. She met her boyfriend at a Jewish summer camp in Poland, where they both worked as counselors.