{"id":7826,"date":"2014-10-28T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2014-10-28T07:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=7826"},"modified":"2014-10-28T09:15:00","modified_gmt":"2014-10-28T07:15:00","slug":"poland-wants-to-reclaim-forgotten-past-as-haven-for-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=7826","title":{"rendered":"Poland Wants To Reclaim Forgotten Past as Haven for Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Poland Wants To Reclaim Forgotten Past as Haven for Jews<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/h4>\n

By Reuters<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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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 ]<\/p><\/div>
\nIs Warsaw Now More Welcoming Than Paris?<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s biggest Jewish communities.<\/span><\/p>\n

The country will take a step in that direction next week with the opening of the main exhibition at Warsaw\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Poland\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some in the Jewish community say Poland \u2013 site during the German occupation of the Warsaw ghetto and the Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor camps where millions of Jews were killed \u2013 is now more welcoming than many western European countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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 \u2013 we don\u2019t have any of that,\u201d said Piotr Kadlcik, vice-president of the Jewish community of Warsaw, one of the country\u2019s biggest Jewish groups.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI think that right now it\u2019s safer to walk around Warsaw in a yarmulke than it is in certain neighborhoods in Paris.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s military operation in Gaza clashed with riot police outside two Paris synagogues.<\/span><\/p>\n

Incidents like that have created a climate of fear among Europe\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

FEAR AND SHAME<\/span><\/p>\n

If Poland is, relatively, a haven for Jews, it may be because there are too few of them \u2013 7,508 according to the 2011 census \u2013 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s Jewish ghetto.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne 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,\u201d Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said.<\/span><\/p>\n

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