“We need more Jews”: Interview with Polish Jewish Activist Konstanty Gebert

How do we understand the burgeoning interest in Jewish culture in Poland today? Does this interest, which manifests itself in a plethora of festivals, restaurants, art, etc., help Poland’s Jews? Against the backdrop of the official opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews just a few weeks ago and the renewed conversation about the significance of Jewish life and history to Polish life, YIVO,  the Polish Cultural Institute and Tablet Magazine will present a public forum at 7:00pm on November 20 to discuss these and related issues: “Towards Life: Reviving Jewish Life in Contemporary Poland,” a roundtable discussion with leading activists, scholars, and writers.

Attend the event.

Helena Gindi, Public Programs Director at YIVO, interviewed one of the panelists, Konstanty Gebert, a foremost Jewish activist in Poland.

Konstanty Gebert

Konstanty Gebert is an international reporter and columnist for Polish and international media; associate fellow for the European Council on Foreign Relations; and media consultant for the Media Development Investment Fund. Gebert was a democratic opposition activist in the 1970s, and underground journalist (pen name: Dawid Warszawski) in the 1980s. He has covered the Polish Round Table negotiations in 1989, the wars in Bosnia, the Middle East, and the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. Gebert was also co-founder of the underground Jewish Flying University and the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, and founder of the Polish Jewish intellectual monthly Midrasz. He is author of eleven books, in Polish, about Poland’s Round Table negotiations in 1989, the Yugoslav wars, Israeli history, commentaries on the Torah, and a panorama of the European twentieth century. Gebert has served as Visiting professor at UC Berkeley, Grinnell College, and Hebrew University.

HG: There's a lot of talk about the "revival' of Jewish life in Poland. Is this a useful term to describe the situation in Poland today? What's being revived?

KG: The revival of Jewish life in Poland is old news. That process started 25 years ago, with the end of the oppressive Communist system: Jews, like other Poles, were free again to shape their individual and collective lives without political constraints. We proceeded to revive existing institutions, religious and secular, and set up new ones (schools and publications, in particular), and claimed for ourselves a legitimate part in the nation's life. Having said that, this process is demographically almost insignificant (members of all Jewish organizations combined are about eight thousand nationwide, while those who identify but do not affiliate are assessed at another 15 thousand). The process is also not uniform (while it is perfectly acceptable and safe to live Jewishly in the big cities, this is not the case in small towns). Also, major cultural manifestations, such as the deservedly famous Krakow Jewish Culture Festival or the splendid now-opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews, are not elements of that revival. These are elements of a deepening Polish cultural life, which also embraces minorities and their legacies, but are neither specifically oriented at Jews, nor organized by them.

HG: There are nearly 20 of these Jewish culture festivals in Poland today, really an impressive number, dwarfing the numbers of Jewish festivals in other countries (as of 2010: France - five, Germany - four, United Kingdom - two). At the same time, the recent national study conducted by the Center for Research on Prejudice at Warsaw University found that the belief in a Jewish conspiracy to control international banking and the media remains high in Poland: 63% in 2013. 90% said they've never met a Jew. How do we account for and make sense of the burgeoning of Polish excitement and interest in Jewish culture and these statistics?

KG: These are separate issues. Increased Polish interest in things Jewish started in the mid-1970s and continues unabated, reflecting a nostalgia for the multi-ethnic Poland of before the war, a discontent with the uniformly mono-ethnic postwar culture, and a spiritual homage to the victims of the Shoah, among other things. Sociological research on antisemitism has been conducted systematically and seriously since the early 1990s, and shows a consistent growth of anti-antisemitic attitudes (increasing to over 50%), and initially, a growth of antisemitic ones (to 25%) and then their very slow decline. The figures you quote, supported by another survey from 2013, buck that trend. They can possibly be attributed to exposure to the new tolerance of antisemitism in Western Europe.

HG: How many Jews live in Poland? I've seen statistics as low as 7,000 and as high as 40,000. What accounts for the discrepancy? How are we defining who is a Polish Jew?

KG: It of course depends on your definition and on your intuition. The latest (2012) national census has some eight thousand people self-defining as Jews, which is consistent with the membership figure given above, and that, in turn, reflects the number of Jews other Jews recognize as such (be they halachic or not). All other figures, including my assessment of 15 thousand non-affiliated Jews, are just estimates.

HG: Can you paint a picture of Jewish life in Poland: how many synagogues, yeshivas/Jewish schools, publications, and Jewish Community Centers are there? In Adam Zucker's new film The Return, some of the younger Jews featured discuss how difficult it is to live Jewishly in Poland today. Is it difficult for both religious and secular Jews?

KG: The Union of Jewish Religious Congregations represents eight kehillot nationwide. They are usually nominally Orthodox, with caveats (the Warsaw kehillah, for instance, accepts non-halachic Jews, but does not count them in the minyan), but in truth, only a minority of the members observe Shabbat, khagim [holidays], or kashrut. Reform congregations exist in Warsaw and Krakow; of those in Warsaw, one is autonomous (and split), the other is part of the Warsaw kehillah. Chabad has a synagogue in Warsaw and operates a yeshiva for students from abroad who come to Poland to study there for a year. There is a Jewish school system in Warsaw (supported by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation), from kindergarten to junior high, with a non-Jewish school with an extended program of Jewish and minority studies for senior high. Three very small elementary schools, the result of different splits in the community, exist in Wroclaw. Some kehillot and congregations publish newsletters; the Warsaw kehillah's Kolbojnik is a professionally-edited monthly. The secular Yiddishist Jewish Socio-Cultural Association, the largest membership organization, publishes the bilingual monthly Dos yidishe vort. The Jewish Historical Institute, a very well-respected research institution, publishes its quarterly bulletin. The independent bimonthly Midrasz in Polish (full disclosure: I founded it; Piotr Paziński has been its editor since 2000) is probably the most important Jewish publication. A very successful Jewish Community Center functions in Krakow; the one in Warsaw, set up last year, successfully attempts to emulate its success.

Though security problems are minimal, and no institutional discrimination exists, societal antisemitism is still there and can be quite vicious, for example, at sports events or in some schools. In the early years of the revival, it was much easier to be a religious Jew, as this fitted both the Polish stereotype of what a Jew is like and the then high level of religiosity  in Polish society. At present, a vibrant and variegated secular Jewish life exists, with interesting cultural developments straddling the blurred Polish-Jewish divide. At the same time, religious lifestyles are hampered by such disparate factors as the shortage of appropriate marriage partners and the limited availability of kosher foodstuffs.

HG: What do you think is the next step for building and supporting Jewish life in Poland? What do you think is needed?

KG: We need more Jews. Otherwise the whole edifice of Jewish life in Poland will be precarious. As Jews are no longer emerging from the woodwork in any significant numbers, and we can’t hope for a boom in the birthrate (even though median age in the synagogue has declined dramatically), they can only come from outside of Poland. This mainly means the FSU, the more so as the Jewish populations living there had originally been Polish Jews who got gobbled up by the expanding Russian/Soviet state (which is not to question the authenticity of their different non-Polish hyphenated identities). The migration of 100,000 of them to Germany has transformed that country's Jewish life. As Poland grows richer and safer, its greater cultural affinity to the FSU might prove a competitive advantage—and 20,000 ex-FSU Jews would completely transform the community. But will they come and would the Jewish community—not to mention society at large—really welcome them?