Poland Wants To Reclaim Forgotten Past as Haven for Jews

By Reuters

Intricate Recreation: Boaz Pash, chief rabbi of Krakow, explains the symbols on the reconstructed roof of a 18th century wooden synagogue that once stood in the town of Gwozdziec. The meticulous model is a centerpiece of the new Jewish museum in Warsaw. [ Getty Images ]

Poland, the country on whose soil Nazi Germany carried out the darkest acts of the Holocaust, is starting to re-connect with its other role in Jewish history, as a home for 1,000 years to one of the world’s biggest Jewish communities.

The country will take a step in that direction next week with the opening of the main exhibition at Warsaw’s newly built Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a project that sets out to remember not just how Jews in Poland died, but how they lived.

Poland’s effort to reach out to its Jewish heritage, tentative and incomplete though it is, contrasts with the mood in other parts of Europe, where Jewish groups say Jews are subject to hostility and sometimes violent attacks.

Some in the Jewish community say Poland – site during the German occupation of the Warsaw ghetto and the Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor camps where millions of Jews were killed – is now more welcoming than many western European countries.

“When you take into account that Jews are being beaten up in the streets in Germany or France or Scandinavia, you even have synagogues being burned down, murders – we don’t have any of that,” said Piotr Kadlcik, vice-president of the Jewish community of Warsaw, one of the country’s biggest Jewish groups.

“I think that right now it’s safer to walk around Warsaw in a yarmulke than it is in certain neighborhoods in Paris.”

On May 24, a man with a Kalashnikov rifle walked into a Jewish museum in Brussels and killed three people, while in July people protesting against Israel’s military operation in Gaza clashed with riot police outside two Paris synagogues.

Incidents like that have created a climate of fear among Europe’s Jews, even though some data from Jewish groups point to a decline last year in the number of anti-Semitic acts recorded in Britain and France.

FEAR AND SHAME

If Poland is, relatively, a haven for Jews, it may be because there are too few of them – 7,508 according to the 2011 census – to make them a big target, or because Poland has no sizeable Muslim community. In other countries, the perpetrators of some high-profile attacks on Jewish targets were Muslim.

It could also be that because the Holocaust has left such a deep stain on the way Poland is perceived, any steps to embrace the Jewish past, however small, feel like important progress.

On Tuesday, the presidents of Israel and Poland will lead the dignitaries at a ceremony to open the main exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in a glass-sided building on the site of what was Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto.

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Program Director of the Core Exhibition, said she hopes the museum will reach the Poles who, because of the Holocaust and persecution of Jews under Communist rule, have suppressed their Jewish identity. They are estimated to number in the tens of thousands.

“One of the things which we were looking to do is for this museum to be transformative, to support the renewal of Jewish life, by showing those in Poland today who hid their Jewish roots that there is nothing to fear and nothing to be ashamed of,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s father grew up in Opatow, a town in south-eastern Poland. He emigrated to Canada before the war. In 1942, the Nazis deported the town’s Jewish population to the death camp at Treblinka.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, for many years a professor at New York University, accompanied her father on his first trip back to his hometown in 1988.

Initially, she said, her father was a reluctant visitor, and local people kept their distance. But after a decade of visits, the townspeople started to embrace her father, and the Jewish history that he represented.

Read more: Poland Wants To…

In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis

By ERIC LICHTBLAUOCT

Aleksandras Lileikis was a Nazi officer implicated in 60,000 Jews’ deaths. He later worked for the C.I.A. before immigrating.

WASHINGTON — In the decades after World War II, the C.I.A. and other United States agencies employed at least a thousand Nazis as Cold War spies and informants and, as recently as the 1990s, concealed the government’s ties to some still living in America, newly disclosed records and interviews show.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.

The agency hired one former SS officer as a spy in the 1950s, for instance, even after concluding he was probably guilty of “minor war crimes.”

And in 1994, a lawyer with the C.I.A. pressured prosecutors to drop an investigation into an ex-spy outside Boston implicated in the Nazis’ massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Lithuania, according to a government official.

Evidence of the government’s links to Nazi spies began emerging publicly in the 1970s. But thousands of records from declassified files, Freedom of Information Act requests and other sources, together with interviews with scores of current and former government officials, show that the government’s recruitment of Nazis ran far deeper than previously known and that officials sought to conceal those ties for at least a half-century after the war.

In 1980, F.B.I. officials refused to tell even the Justice Department’s own Nazi hunters what they knew about 16 suspected Nazis living in the United States.

The bureau balked at a request from prosecutors for internal records on the Nazi suspects, memos show, because the 16 men had all worked as F.B.I. informants, providing leads on Communist “sympathizers.” Five of the men were still active informants.

Refusing to turn over the records, a bureau official in a memo stressed the need for “protecting the confidentiality of such sources of information to the fullest possible extent.”

Some spies for the United States had worked at the highest levels for the Nazis.

One SS officer, Otto von Bolschwing, was a mentor and top aide to Adolf Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution,” and wrote policy papers on how to terrorize Jews.

Read more In Cold War,…

Roman Dmowski – „Postać wybitna, dziejowa, historyczna,
ale nie do końca znana” wystawa i konferencja w Sejmie.

fot. M. Czutko

Wzwiązku z przypadającymi w tym roku 150. rocznicą urodzin i 75. rocznicą śmierci Romana Dmowskiego posłowie podjęli uchwałę upamiętniającą posła, sygnatariusza Traktatu Wersalskiego, ministra spraw zagranicznych i twórcę ruchu narodowego Romana Dmowskiego.

Sejm Rzeczypospolitej oddaje hołd wybitnemu mężowi stanu, sygnatariuszowi Traktatu Wersalskiego, ministrowi spraw zagranicznych, który dobrze przysłużył się Ojczyźnie

— czytamy w dokumencie.

Gości w parlamencie powitał wicemarszałek Sejmu Marek Kuchciński.

— powiedział prof. Jan Żaryn, historyk IPN, redaktor naczelny miesięcznika „wSieci Historii”.

Dr Andrzej Zawistowski, dyrektor Biura Edukacji Publicznej IPN wyraził zadowolenie i satysfakcję, że „instytut ma okazję pokazać wybitną postać w tym szczególnym gmachu”.

Uczestnicy pogrzebu oddają faszystowskim pozdrowieniem honor zmarłemu Romanowi Dmowskiemu.

Uczestnicy pogrzebu oddają faszystowskim pozdrowieniem honor zmarłemu Romanowi Dmowskiemu.

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