New documentary digs up controversy as Polish Jewish cemetery restored

RENEE GHERT-ZAND

In ‘Scandal in Ivansk,’ opening May 9, a Canadian-Israeli filmmaker charts the maelstrom surrounding Poles’ relationship to the word ‘collaborators’ in a new nationalist era

Many years ago, David Blumenfeld read a testimony from one of the sole survivors of his grandfather’s shtetl, Ivansk (Iwaniska), near Kielce in south-central Poland.

The survivor, Yitzhak Goldstein, recalled how the day before the Nazis deported the village’s remaining Jews in October 1942, they gathered in the local Jewish cemetery to bury the community’s Torah scrolls.
“The whole shtetl participated. Each one saw themselves as though they were at their own funeral. The rabbi turned to us — the young ones — and swore on our behalf: All of those who survived the war should dig out the Torah scrolls and tell the world what the German nation, with the help of a large part of the Polish population, did to us,” Goldstein wrote.

Blumenfeld, a Jerusalem-based photographer and filmmaker was intrigued. Then when he learned a decade ago that members of an organization of descendants of Jews from Ivansk planned to restore the village’s Jewish cemetery, he decided to grab his camera and go film what would happen.

David Blumenfeld (Courtesy)

Blumenfeld, who was born in Toronto and lived in Canada and the United States before settling in Israel in 2000, thought he would essentially be documenting family history, creating something to hand down to his three children about where their great-grandfather Max Carl Blumenfeld came from.

However, as the cemetery work began and Blumenfeld recorded reactions of the local residents, he realized this would actually be a much more complex film dealing with explosive issues in contemporary Polish society about memory, responsibility and victimhood.

Over the course of the decade of the film’s making, the Poles, whose national narrative had been one of victimhood and suffering under the Germans and later the Soviets, began to confront the fact the some among them had not been only victims or innocent bystanders, but also perpetrators of atrocities against local Jews during the Holocaust. Then came a nationalist backlash claiming that such historical claims were mere anti-Polish propaganda.

In the film, “Scandal in Ivansk,” Blumenfeld, 49, does discover what happened to the Torah scrolls buried by the Jewish community on the eve of its destruction. But more crucially, he digs up differing perspectives on history — especially when the rededication of the Jewish cemetery unexpectedly becomes a national headline-grabbing scandal.

It wasn’t the 2006 cemetery restoration per se that was the problem. By that point, Poles were relatively used to neglected Jewish graveyards being cleaned up, and desecrated headstones being returned to their proper place by activists like young photographer Lukasz Baksik, who is seen in the film expertly negotiating with an elderly Ivansk resident who expects payment in exchange for a headstone fragment has stashed his basement.

Jewish gravestone sits in Iwaniska, Poland resident’s yard in ‘Scandal in Ivansk’ (Blumenfeld Pictures)

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