If American Jews want to meet one of their Polish brethren, they need not visit a museum. Polish Jews do, in fact, still exist.
Americans “believe Polish Jews are dead. Don’t bury me just yet,” said Polish Jewish journalist and activist Kostek Gebert.
“I realize there are more Jews on four New York blocks than all of Poland. But so what? Since when do we assess people’s value by their numbers?
“American Jewish identity seems to be concentrated around the Shoah. I’m not very happy with that. One might present the message of youth Holocaust-tourism to Poland as ‘Be Jewish, because if you had been Jewish then, they would have killed you.’ That doesn’t strike me as a great reason to be Jewish.”
In hopes of revitalizing Poland’s roughly 30,000-strong Jewish community and educating American Jews that such a community is still extant, longtime philanthropists Ronald Lauder and Tad Taube have joined forces to create the Lauder-Taube Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland.
The two have put up $1 million to $2 million in seed money to get the initiative off to a strong start.
Both Taube and Lauder have already been heavily involved in philanthropic work within Poland, and their move consolidates each man’s family foundation into one Polish office, with Gebert as the regional director.
The bearded, kippah-wearing Gebert sat beside Lauder and Taube at a mid-October board meeting of the Taube Family Foundation for Jewish Life & Culture held at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Lauder is Taube’s newest board member.
The pair hope to both rekindle the Jewish spark of what they refer to as the one-time “light of world Jewry for close to 1,000 years” and educate American Jews that Polish Jews have done more throughout history than be slaughtered.
“People told me there is no more Jewish life in Poland, it’s a cemetery. I want to prove them wrong. I want to prove Hitler did not win,” said Lauder, the former U.S. ambassador to Austria and the president of the N.Y.-based Jewish National Fund.
Added the Polish-born Taube, those who care about Jewish continuity must act in Poland, because there are simply too few Polish Jews to absorb Bay Area-levels of assimilation.
“There’s no choice about enriching Jewish life in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. They either move forward or they’re gone,” said Taube, the president of the Koret Foundation in San Francisco.
Lauder is already deeply involved in establishing Jewish schools in Poland and throughout Europe. Taube’s interests are more cultural, with emphases on the Jewish Cultural Festival and Center for Jewish Culture, both located in Krakow. And both Lauder and Taube have helped Gebert to put out his Midrasz magazine.
Lauder has never before partnered in a major philanthropic project. Taube described the pair as “kindred spirits.”
Polish Jews, according to Gebert, vitally need three things: funding, intellectual input and a pluralistic Jewish experience. “In the organized Jewish community, there are only 7,000 of us, so there are only so many ideas and concepts that can come to fruition,” he said.
“We need to learn Jewish diversity and we can do that through the American Jewish community.”
Americans, however, need to learn a bit about Polish Jews, he said. First of all, Poland is not a 1930s-style haven for anti-Semitism. Gebert said he has received fewer rude comments in 12 years of walking about Poland with a yarmulke on his head than he did in one week in Paris.
That’s not to say Poland is all fun and games.
“The idea is not to re-brand Poland and sell it as the fun story of the decade. Poland is not fun. The element of tragedy and despair is part of the Polish story. But it is not the whole story,” he said.
“The more important part of the story is who we overcome that, without negating or denying it, and continue living.”