Always be careful what you say to the media, or your words may return to haunt you.
Back in the early 1980s, I did not yet understand this. I was just becoming a journalist — in the democratic underground.
I was being interviewed by a Solidarity activist — and almost certainly, I thought, someone involved in the underground as well — but of course we did not discuss that. She was writing a book about contemporary Polish Jews and wanted to talk to me.
We weren’t discussing the problems of the underground political struggle, but something more simple and personal — being Jewish.
“How do you see the future?” she asked.
“I believe we are the last ones. Definitely,” I said.
“And there will be no Jews in Poland?”
“In the sense of a religious, national group, no.”
I may have added that Poland might one day be independent and democratic again, no longer a Soviet satellite, though I did not expect to live to see the day. But Jews in Poland? No way. It all ends with us.
A quarter century later, sitting at my desk in the booming capital of this NATO and European Union member country, I acknowledge that I have lived to see and even grown accustomed to a free Poland. And what about the other impossibility, the Jews?
Well, there is a bar mitzvah in my shul next week. The yearly Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow is just around the corner. Midrasz, the Jewish magazine, comes to my mailbox regularly late. My younger son graduated from the Jewish school. My older son was press spokesman of the Warsaw kehilla for some time. The invitation for the Israeli Independence Day reception just came in.
Why had I once been so sure that it was over?
There were so few of us then, Jews trying to do something Jewish. True, there was the shul — but I was the youngest congregant by two generations. There was the officially sanctioned Jewish Socio-Cultural Association, but it mainly served to lay down the party line. It did not observe the Jewish holidays, but its Yiddish theater did stage a few classics. And that was it.
And there was the anti-Semitism, too, from official statements to snide comments by “friends.” Add to this the desolation of tolerated Jewish life and the fact that I could count on two hands the number of Jews I knew, and there seemed little on which to build hopes.
To have a Jewish life, you need Jews. And a little bit of freedom. Forget it.
“We are the last ones. Definitely.”
There were Jews around us then; we just did not see them. Many would never admit their origins outside of the four walls of their rooms, and sometimes not even there. They had seen their share of tsuris and had no need for more.
And then it was all over. The Communist Party was out of the government coalition and soon dissolved. The underground press went above ground. The Soviet army left Poland. Poland left the Warsaw Pact. Everything we knew
would never happen was happening all at once, the impossible was becoming yesterday’s news — so why not try to be Jewish?
Jews came out of the woodwork, went to shul for the first time in their lives. They attended lectures about Jews in Poland.
Society at large reacted favorably. It was a time in which everything was possible, but we were woefully unprepared to meet these fresh-out-of-the-closet Jews. Jewish institutions had to be reorganized from scratch, reoriented and redefined. And most of these Jews could not contribute. They needed certainties on which to root their identities, not arguments about whether the shul should remain Orthodox. There were no Jewish schools and no kosher shops.
We did manage to do things right — with a little help from our friends. An extraordinary young American rabbi, Michael Schudrich, came along and today is chief rabbi of Poland. A kindergarten was set up, with funds provided by the R.S. Lauder Foundation from New York. American Jewry — itself, like us, a descendant of the great Polish Jewry of before the war — came to assist its long-lost relatives. Soon the Bay Area–based Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture joined the fray. With that aid, both spiritual and material, we grew.
The kindergarten was probably the catalyst. After the kids from Jewish kindergarten of Warsaw entered the regular school system, they needed — and deserved — something more: a Jewish school. So we set up the school, which now has more than 200 students.
While some were busy with the school, others brought the shul back to life. Today we have congregants’ children running up the aisles, and I am counted among the “alter kockers.” Others, uncomfortable with our shul’s Orthodoxy, set up a Reform congregation. Fine, the more the merrier. A youth association was created.
Twenty years later, this is what we have become: a normal Jewish community, with some people attending their kind of services — and certainly not the other kind — and others never going to pray. Not because there is no shul. Not because they are afraid. Not because they would not know what to do once they are there. Just because it is their Jewish pleasure to do it their way.
We’ve got it made — but always be careful what you say to the media.
Konstanty Gebert is the director of the Taube Center for Jewish Cultural Renewal in Poland and the founder of Midrasz, a Polish-Jewish monthly magazine.