History of the Jews in Poland
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| Total population | |
|---|---|
| est. 1,300,000+ | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Poland | 10,000–20,000[1][2] |
| Israel | 1,250,000 (ancestry, passport eligible[a]);[3] 202,300 (born in Poland or with a Polish-born father)[b][4] |
| Languages | |
| Polish, Hebrew, Yiddish, German | |
| Religion | |
| Judaism | |
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| History of Jews and Judaism in Poland |
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The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries,
From the founding of the
In 1939, at the start of World War II, Poland was partitioned between
In the post-war period, many of the approximately 200,000 Jewish survivors registered at the
Early history to Golden Age: 966–1572
Early history: 966–1385
The first Jews to visit Polish territory were traders, while permanent settlement began during the
As elsewhere in
The first extensive Jewish migration from
Another factor for the Jews to emigrate to Poland was the Magdeburg rights (or Magdeburg Law), a charter given to Jews, among others, that specifically outlined the rights and privileges that Jews had in Poland. For example, they could maintain communal autonomy, and live according to their own laws. This made it very attractive for Jewish communities to pick up and move to Poland.[38]
The first mention of Jewish settlers in Płock dates from 1237, in Kalisz from 1287 and a Żydowska (Jewish) street in Kraków in 1304.[34]
The tolerant situation was gradually altered by the
During the next hundred years, the Church pushed for the persecution of Jews while the rulers of Poland usually protected them.[41] The Councils of Wrocław (1267), Buda (1279), and Łęczyca (1285) each segregated Jews, ordered them to wear a special emblem, banned them from holding offices where Christians would be subordinated to them, and forbade them from building more than one prayer house in each town. However, those church decrees required the cooperation of the Polish princes for enforcement, which was generally not forthcoming, due to the profits which the Jews' economic activity yielded to the princes.[34]
In 1332, King
The early Jagiellon era: 1385–1505
As a result of the marriage of
In the 14th and 15th centuries, rich Jewish merchants and moneylenders leased the royal mint, salt mines and the collecting of customs and tolls. The most famous of them were Jordan and his son Lewko of Kraków in the 14th century and Jakub Slomkowicz of Łuck, Wolczko of Drohobycz, Natko of Lviv, Samson of Zydaczow, Josko of Hrubieszów and Szania of Belz in the 15th century. For example, Wolczko of Drohobycz, King Ladislaus Jagiełło's broker, was the owner of several villages in the Ruthenian voivodship and the soltys (administrator) of the village of Werbiz. Also, Jews from Grodno were in this period owners of villages, manors, meadows, fish ponds and mills. However, until the end of the 15th century, agriculture as a source of income played only a minor role among Jewish families. More important were crafts for the needs of both their fellow Jews and the Christian population (fur making, tanning, tailoring).[34]
In 1454 anti-Jewish riots flared up in Bohemia's ethnically-German Wrocław and other Silesian cities, inspired by a Franciscan friar, John of Capistrano, who accused Jews of profaning the Christian religion. As a result, Jews were banished from Lower Silesia. Zbigniew Olesnicki then invited John to conduct a similar campaign in Kraków and several other cities, to lesser effect.
The decline in the status of the Jews was briefly checked by
Center of the Jewish world: 1505–1572
Poland became more tolerant just as the
The most prosperous period for Polish Jews began following this new influx of Jews with the reign of
The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth: 1572–1795
After the childless death of
Decline
Despite Warsaw Confederation agreement, it did not last for long as with the beginning of Counter-Reformation in the Commonwealth and after Union of Brest in 1595-1596, Orthodox church was outlawed. That lead to religious, social and political tensions, which sparkled series of Cossack Uprisings. The largest one of them started in 1648 and was followed by several conflicts, in which the country lost over a third of its population (over three million people). The Jewish losses were counted in the hundreds of thousands. The first of these large-scale atrocities was the Khmelnytsky Uprising, in which the Cossacks of the Zaporozhian Host under Bohdan Khmelnytsky massacred tens of thousands of Jews as well as Catholic and Uniate population in the eastern and southern areas of Polish-occupied Ukraine.[56] The precise number of dead is not known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during this period is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and jasyr (captivity in the Ottoman Empire). The Jewish community suffered greatly during the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack uprising which had been directed primarily against the wealthy nobility and landlords. The Jews, perceived as allies of the Poles, were also victims of the revolt, during which about 20% of them were killed.
Ruled by the elected kings of the
As soon as the disturbances had ceased, the Jews began to return and to rebuild their destroyed homes; and while it is true that the Jewish population of Poland had decreased, it still was more numerous than that of the Jewish colonies in Western Europe. Poland continued to be the spiritual center of Judaism. Through 1698, the Polish kings generally remained supportive of the Jews. Although Jewish losses in those events were high, the Commonwealth lost one-third of its population – approximately three million of its citizens.
The environment of the Polish Commonwealth, according to Hundert, profoundly affected Jews due to genuinely positive encounter with the Christian culture across the many cities and towns owned by the Polish aristocracy. There was no isolation.[64] The Jewish dress resembled that of their Polish neighbor. "Reports of romances, of drinking together in taverns, and of intellectual conversations are quite abundant." Wealthy Jews had Polish noblemen at their table, and served meals on silver plates.[64] By 1764, there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The worldwide Jewish population at that time was estimated at 1.2 million.
In 1768, the Koliivshchyna, a rebellion in Right-bank Ukraine west of the Dnieper in Volhynia, led to ferocious murders of Polish noblemen, Catholic priests and thousands of Jews by haydamaks.[65] Four years later, in 1772, the military Partitions of Poland had begun between Russia, Prussia and Austria.[66]
The development of Judaism in Poland and the Commonwealth
The culture and intellectual output of the Jewish community in Poland had a profound impact on Judaism as a whole. Some Jewish historians have recounted that the word Poland is pronounced as Polania or Polin in Hebrew, and as transliterated into Hebrew, these names for Poland were interpreted as "good omens" because Polania can be broken down into three Hebrew words: po ("here"), lan ("dwells"), ya ("God"), and Polin into two words of: po ("here") lin ("[you should] dwell"). The "message" was that Poland was meant to be a good place for the Jews. During the time from the rule of Sigismund I the Old until the Holocaust, Poland would be at the center of Jewish religious life. Many agreed with Rabbi David HaLevi Segal that Poland was a place where "most of the time the gentiles do no harm; on the contrary they do right by Israel" (Divre David; 1689).[67]
Jewish learning
Yeshivot were established, under the direction of the rabbis, in the more prominent communities. Such schools were officially known as gymnasia, and their rabbi principals as rectors. Important yeshivot existed in Kraków, Poznań, and other cities. Jewish printing establishments came into existence in the first quarter of the 16th century. In 1530 a Torah was printed in Kraków; and at the end of the century the Jewish printing houses of that city and Lublin issued a large number of Jewish books, mainly of a religious character. The growth of Talmudic scholarship in Poland was coincident with the greater prosperity of the Polish Jews; and because of their communal autonomy educational development was wholly one-sided and along Talmudic lines. Exceptions are recorded, however, where Jewish youth sought secular instruction in the European universities. The learned rabbis became not merely expounders of the Law, but also spiritual advisers, teachers, judges, and legislators; and their authority compelled the communal leaders to make themselves familiar with the abstruse questions of Jewish law. Polish Jewry found its views of life shaped by the spirit of Talmudic and rabbinical literature, whose influence was felt in the home, in school, and in the synagogue.[citation needed]
In the first half of the 16th century the seeds of Talmudic learning had been transplanted to Poland from
The rise of Hasidism
The decade from the Khmelnytsky Uprising until after the Deluge (1648–1658) left a deep and lasting impression not only on the social life of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews, but on their spiritual life as well. The intellectual output of the Jews of Poland was reduced. The Talmudic learning which up to that period had been the common possession of the majority of the people became accessible to a limited number of students only. What religious study there was became overly formalized, some rabbis busied themselves with quibbles concerning religious laws; others wrote commentaries on different parts of the Talmud in which hair-splitting arguments were raised and discussed; and at times these arguments dealt with matters which were of no practical importance. At the same time, many miracle-workers made their appearance among the Jews of Poland, culminating in a series of false "Messianic" movements, most famously as Sabbatianism was succeeded by Frankism.[citation needed]
In this time of
The Partitions of Poland
In 1742 most of Silesia was lost to
The permanent council established at the instance of the Russian government (1773–1788) served as the highest administrative tribunal, and occupied itself with the elaboration of a plan that would make practicable the reorganization of Poland on a more rational basis. The progressive elements in Polish society recognized the urgency of popular education as the very first step toward reform. The famous
A second partition of Poland was made on 17 July 1793. Jews, in a Jewish regiment led by Berek Joselewicz, took part in the Kościuszko Uprising the following year, when the Poles tried to again achieve independence, but were brutally put down. Following the revolt, the third and final partition of Poland took place in 1795. The territories which included the great bulk of the Jewish population was transferred to Russia, and thus they became subjects of that empire, although in the first half of the 19th century some semblance of a vastly smaller Polish state was preserved, especially in the form of the Congress Poland (1815–1831).[citation needed]
Under foreign rule many Jews inhabiting formerly Polish lands were indifferent to Polish aspirations for independence. However, most Polonized Jews supported the revolutionary activities of Polish patriots and participated in national uprisings.[70] Polish Jews took part in the November Insurrection of 1830–1831, the January Insurrection of 1863, as well as in the revolutionary movement of 1905. Many Polish Jews were enlisted in the Polish Legions, which fought for the Polish independence, achieved in 1918 when the occupying forces disintegrated following World War I.[70][71]
Jews of Poland within the Russian Empire (1795–1918)
Official Russian policy would eventually prove to be substantially harsher to the Jews than that under independent Polish rule. The lands that had once been Poland were to remain the home of many Jews, as, in 1772, Catherine II, the Tzarina of Russia, instituted the Pale of Settlement, restricting Jews to the western parts of the empire, which would eventually include much of Poland, although it excluded some areas in which Jews had previously lived. By the late 19th century, over four million Jews would live in the Pale.
Tsarist policy towards the Jews of Poland alternated between harsh rules, and inducements meant to break the resistance to large-scale conversion. In 1804,
During the reign of
Pale of Settlement
 |
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The
With its large Catholic and Jewish populations, the Pale was acquired by the Russian Empire (which was a majority Russian Orthodox) in a series of military conquests and diplomatic maneuvers between 1791 and 1835, and lasted until the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. It comprised about 20% of the territory of European Russia and mostly corresponded to historical borders of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth; it covered much of present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Ukraine, and parts of western Russia.
From 1791 to 1835, and until 1917, there were differing reconfigurations of the boundaries of the Pale, such that certain areas were variously open or shut to Jewish residency, such as the Caucasus. At times, Jews were forbidden to live in agricultural communities, or certain cities, as in Kyiv, Sevastopol and Yalta, excluded from residency at a number of cities within the Pale. Settlers from outside the pale were forced to move to small towns, thus fostering the rise of the shtetls.
Although the Jews were accorded slightly more rights with the Emancipation reform of 1861 by Alexander II, they were still restricted to the Pale of Settlement and subject to restrictions on ownership and profession. The existing status quo was shattered with the assassination of Alexander in 1881 – an act falsely blamed upon the Jews.
Pogroms in the Russian Empire
The assassination prompted a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots, called
An even bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, at least some of them believed to have been organized by the Tsarist Russian secret police, the Okhrana. They included the Białystok pogrom of 1906 in the Grodno Governorate of Russian Poland, in which at least 75 Jews were murdered by marauding soldiers and many more Jews were wounded. According to Jewish survivors, ethnic Poles did not participate in the pogrom and instead sheltered Jewish families.[78]
Haskalah and Halakha
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The Jewish Enlightenment,
Politics in Polish territory
By the late 19th century, Haskalah and the debates it caused created a growing number of political movements within the Jewish community itself, covering a wide range of views and vying for votes in local and regional elections. Zionism became very popular with the advent of the
Many Jews took part in the Polish insurrections, particularly against Russia (since the Tsars discriminated heavily against the Jews). The
During the Second Polish Republic period, there were several prominent Jewish politicians in the Polish Sejm, such as Apolinary Hartglas and Yitzhak Gruenbaum. Many Jewish political parties were active, representing a wide ideological spectrum, from the Zionists, to the socialists to the anti-Zionists. One of the largest of these parties was the Bund, which was strongest in Warsaw and Lodz.
In addition to the socialists, Zionist parties were also popular, in particular, the Marxist
In 1914, the German Zionist Max Bodenheimer founded the short-lived German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, with the goal of establishing a buffer state (Pufferstaat) within the Jewish Pale of Settlement, composed of the former Polish provinces annexed by Russia, being de facto protectorate of the German Empire that would free Jews in the region from Russian oppression. The plan, known as the League of East European States, soon proved unpopular with both German officials and Bodenheimer's colleagues, and was dead by the following year.[79][80]
Interbellum (1918–39)
Polish Jews and the struggle for Poland's independence
While most Polish Jews were neutral to the idea of a Polish state,
In the aftermath of the Great War localized conflicts engulfed Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1919. Many attacks were launched against Jews during the
The historians Anna Cichopek-Gajraj and Glenn Dynner state that 130 pogroms of Jews occurred on Polish territories from 1918 to 1921, resulting in as many as 300 deaths, with many attacks conceived as reprisals against supposed Jewish economic power and their supposed “Judeo-Bolshevism”
The number of Jews immigrating to Poland from Ukraine and Soviet Russia during the interwar period grew rapidly. Jewish population in the area of former
Jewish and Polish culture
The newly independent Second Polish Republic had a large and vibrant Jewish minority. By the time World War II began, Poland had the largest concentration of Jews in Europe although many Polish Jews had a separate culture and ethnic identity from Catholic Poles. Some authors have stated that only about 10% of Polish Jews during the interwar period could be considered "assimilated" while more than 80% could be readily recognized as Jews.[100]
According to the
Jewish youth and religious groups, diverse political parties and Zionist organizations, newspapers and theatre flourished. Jews owned land and real estate, participated in retail and manufacturing and in the export industry. Their religious beliefs spanned the range from Orthodox Hasidic Judaism to Liberal Judaism.
The Polish language, rather than
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The Jewish cultural scene [108] was particularly vibrant in pre–World War II Poland, with numerous Jewish publications and more than one hundred periodicals. Yiddish authors, most notably Isaac Bashevis Singer, went on to achieve international acclaim as classic Jewish writers; Singer won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. His brother Israel Joshua Singer was also a writer. Other Jewish authors of the period, such as Bruno Schulz, Julian Tuwim, Marian Hemar, Emanuel Schlechter and Bolesław Leśmian, as well as Konrad Tom and Jerzy Jurandot, were less well known internationally, but made important contributions to Polish literature. Some Polish writers had Jewish roots e.g. Jan Brzechwa (a favorite poet of Polish children). Singer Jan Kiepura, born of a Jewish mother and Polish father, was one of the most popular artists of that era, and pre-war songs of Jewish composers, including Henryk Wars, Jerzy Petersburski, Artur Gold, Henryk Gold, Zygmunt Białostocki, Szymon Kataszek and Jakub Kagan, are still widely known in Poland today. Painters became known as well for their depictions of Jewish life. Among them were Maurycy Gottlieb, Artur Markowicz, and Maurycy Trębacz, with younger artists like Chaim Goldberg coming up in the ranks.
Many Jews were film producers and directors, e.g. Michał Waszyński (The Dybbuk), Aleksander Ford (Children Must Laugh).
Scientist
There also were several Jewish sports clubs, with some of them, such as Hasmonea Lwów and Jutrzenka Kraków, winning promotion to the Polish First Football League. A Polish–Jewish footballer, Józef Klotz, scored the first ever goal for the Poland national football team. Another athlete, Alojzy Ehrlich, won several medals in the table-tennis tournaments. Many of these clubs belonged to the Maccabi World Union.[citation needed]
Between antisemitism and support for Zionism and Jewish state in Palestine
In contrast to the prevailing trends in Europe at the time, in
Besides the persistent effects of the Great Depression, the strengthening of antisemitism in Polish society was also a consequence of the influence of Nazi Germany. Following the German-Polish non-aggression pact of 1934, the antisemitic tropes of Nazi propaganda had become more common in Polish politics, where they were echoed by the National Democratic movement. One of its founders and chief ideologue Roman Dmowski was obsessed with an international conspiracy of freemasons and Jews, and in his works linked Marxism with Judaism.[112] The position of the Catholic Church had also become increasingly hostile to the Jews, who in the 1920s and 1930s were increasingly seen as agents of evil, that is, of Bolshevism.[113] Economic instability was mirrored by anti-Jewish sentiment in the press; discrimination, exclusion, and violence at the universities; and the appearance of "anti-Jewish squads" associated with some of the right-wing political parties. These developments contributed to a greater support among the Jewish community for Zionist and socialist ideas.[114]
In 1925, Polish Zionist members of the Sejm capitalized on governmental support for Zionism by negotiating an agreement with the government known as the Ugoda. The Ugoda was an agreement between the Polish prime minister Władysław Grabski and Zionist leaders of Et Liwnot, including Leon Reich. The agreement granted certain cultural and religious rights to Jews in exchange for Jewish support for Polish nationalist interests; however, the Galician Zionists had little to show for their compromise because the Polish government later refused to honor many aspects of the agreement.[115] During the 1930s, Revisionist Zionists viewed the Polish government as an ally and promoted cooperation between Polish Zionists and Polish nationalists, despite the antisemitism of the Polish government.[116]
Matters improved for a time under the rule of
The
With the influence of the Endecja (
While the average per capita income of Polish Jews in 1929 was 40% above the national average – which was very low compared to England or Germany – they were a very heterogeneous community, some poor, some wealthy.[127][128] Many Jews worked as shoemakers and tailors, as well as in the liberal professions; doctors (56% of all doctors in Poland), teachers (43%), journalists (22%) and lawyers (33%).[129] In 1929, about a third of artisans and home workers and a majority of shopkeepers were Jewish.[130]
Although many Jews were educated, they were almost completely excluded from government jobs; as a result, the proportion of unemployed Jewish salary earners was approximately four times as great in 1929 as the proportion of unemployed non-Jewish salary earners, a situation compounded by the fact that almost no Jews were on government support.[131] In 1937 the Catholic trade unions of Polish doctors and lawyers restricted their new members to Christian Poles.[132] In a similar manner, the Jewish trade unions excluded non-Jewish professionals from their ranks after 1918.[citation needed] The bulk of Jewish workers were organized in the Jewish trade unions under the influence of the Jewish socialists who split in 1923 to join the Communist Party of Poland and the Second International.[133][134]
Anti-Jewish sentiment in Poland had reached its zenith in the years leading to the
The national boycott of Jewish businesses and advocacy for their confiscation was promoted by the National Democracy party and Prime Minister Felicjan Sławoj-Składkowski, declared an "economic war against Jews",[145] while introducing the term "Christian shop". As a result a boycott of Jewish businesses grew intensively. A national movement to prevent the Jews from kosher slaughter of animals, with animal rights as the stated motivation, was also organized.[146] Violence was also frequently aimed at Jewish stores, and many of them were looted. At the same time, persistent economic boycotts and harassment, including property-destroying riots, combined with the effects of the Great Depression that had been very severe on agricultural countries like Poland, reduced the standard of living of Poles and Polish Jews alike to the extent that by the end of the 1930s, a substantial portion of Polish Jews lived in grinding poverty.[147] As a result, on the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish community in Poland was large and vibrant internally, yet (with the exception of a few professionals) also substantially poorer and less integrated than the Jews in most of Western Europe.[citation needed]
The main strain of antisemitism in Poland during this time was motivated by Catholic religious beliefs and centuries-old myths such as the blood libel. This religious-based antisemitism was sometimes joined with an ultra-nationalistic stereotype of Jews as disloyal to the Polish nation.[148] On the eve of World War II, many typical Polish Christians believed that there were far too many Jews in the country, and the Polish government became increasingly concerned with the "Jewish question". According to the British Embassy in Warsaw, in 1936 emigration was the only solution to the Jewish question that found wide support in all Polish political parties.[149] The Polish government condemned wanton violence against the Jewish minority, fearing international repercussions, but shared the view that the Jewish minority hindered Poland's development; in January 1937 Foreign Minister Józef Beck declared that Poland could house 500,000 Jews, and hoped that over the next 30 years 80,000-100,000 Jews a year would leave Poland.[150]
As the Polish government sought to lower the numbers of the Jewish population in Poland through mass emigration, it embraced close and good contact with Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, and pursued a policy of supporting the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.[151] The Polish government hoped Palestine would provide an outlet for its Jewish population and lobbied for creation of a Jewish state in the League of Nations and other international venues, proposing increased emigration quotas[152] and opposing the Partition Plan of Palestine on behalf of Zionist activists.[153] As Jabotinsky envisioned in his "Evacuation Plan" the settlement of 1.5 million East European Jews within 10 years in Palestine, including 750,000 Polish Jews, he and Beck shared a common goal.[154] Ultimately this proved impossible and illusory, as it lacked both general Jewish and international support.[155] In 1937 Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Józef Beck declared in the League of Nations his support for the creation of a Jewish state and for an international conference to enable Jewish emigration.[156] The common goals of the Polish state and of the Zionist movement, of increased Jewish population flow to Palestine, resulted in their overt and covert cooperation. Poland helped by organizing passports and facilitating illegal immigration, and supplied the Haganah with weapons.[157] Poland also provided extensive support to the Irgun (the military branch of the Revisionist Zionist movement) in the form of military training and weapons. According to Irgun activists, the Polish state supplied the organisation with 25,000 rifles, additional material and weapons, and by summer 1939 Irgun's Warsaw warehouses held 5,000 rifles and 1,000 machine guns. The training and support by Poland would allow the organisation to mobilise 30,000-40,000 men.[158]
In 1938, the Polish government revoked Polish citizenship from tens-of-thousands Polish Jews who had lived outside the country for an extended period of time.[159] It was feared that many Polish Jews living in Germany and Austria would want to return en masse to Poland to escape anti-Jewish measures. Their property was claimed by the Polish state.[145]
By the time of the German invasion in 1939, antisemitism was escalating, and hostility towards Jews was a mainstay of the right-wing political forces post-Piłsudski regime and also the Catholic Church. Discrimination and violence against Jews had rendered the Polish Jewish population increasingly destitute. Despite the impending threat to the Polish Republic from Nazi Germany, there was little effort seen in the way of reconciliation with Poland's Jewish population. In July 1939 the pro-government Gazeta Polska wrote, "The fact that our relations with the Reich are worsening does not in the least deactivate our program in the Jewish question—there is not and cannot be any common ground between our internal Jewish problem and Poland's relations with the Hitlerite Reich."[160][161] Escalating hostility towards Polish Jews and an official Polish government desire to remove Jews from Poland continued until the German invasion of Poland.[162]
World War II and the destruction of Polish Jewry (1939–45)
Polish September Campaign
The number of Jews in Poland on 1 September 1939, amounted to about 3,474,000 people.
Territories annexed by the USSR (1939–1941)
The Soviet Union signed a Pact with Nazi Germany on 23 August 1939 containing a protocol about partition of Poland (generally known but denied by the Soviet Union for the next 50 years).[170] The German army attacked Poland on 1 September 1939. The Soviet Union followed suit by invading eastern Poland on 17 September 1939. The days between the retreat of the Polish army and the entry of the Red Army, September 18-21, witnessed a pogrom in Grodno, in which 25 Jews were killed (the Soviets later put some of the pogromists on trial).[171]
Within weeks, 61.2% of Polish Jews found themselves
The Soviet annexation was accompanied by the widespread arrests of government officials, police, military personnel, border guards, teachers, priests, judges etc., followed by the NKVD prisoner massacres and massive deportation of 320,000 Polish nationals to the Soviet interior and the Gulag slave labor camps where, as a result of the inhuman conditions, about half of them died before the end of war.[174]
Jewish refugees under the Soviet occupation had little knowledge about what was going on under the Germans since the Soviet media did not report on the goings-on in territories occupied by their Nazi ally.[175][176] [177][pages needed] Many people from Western Poland registered for repatriation back to the German zone, including wealthier Jews, as well as some political and social activists from the interwar period.[citation needed]
Synagogues and churches were not yet closed but heavily taxed. The Soviet ruble of little value was immediately equalized to the much higher Polish zloty and by the end of 1939, zloty was abolished.[178] Most economic activity became subject to central planning and the NKVD restrictions. Since the Jewish communities tended to rely more on commerce and small-scale businesses, the confiscations of property affected them to a greater degree than the general populace. The Soviet rule resulted in near collapse of the local economy, characterized by insufficient wages and general shortage of goods and materials. The Jews, like other inhabitants of the region, saw a fall in their living standards.[172][178]
Under the Soviet policy, ethnic Poles were dismissed and denied access to positions in the civil service. Former senior officials and notable members of the Polish community were arrested and exiled together with their families.[179][180] At the same time the Soviet authorities encouraged young Jewish communists to fill in the newly emptied government and civil service jobs.[178][181]
While most eastern Poles consolidated themselves around the anti-Soviet sentiments,[182] a portion of the Jewish population, along with the ethnic Belarusian and Ukrainian activists had welcomed invading Soviet forces as their protectors.[183][184][185] The general feeling among the Polish Jews was a sense of temporary relief in having escaped the Nazi occupation in the first weeks of war.[89][186] The Polish poet and former communist Aleksander Wat has stated that Jews were more inclined to cooperate with the Soviets.[187][188] Following Jan Karski's report written in 1940, historian Norman Davies claimed that among the informers and collaborators, the percentage of Jews was striking; likewise, General Władysław Sikorski estimated that 30% of them identified with the communists whilst engaging in provocations; they prepared lists of Polish "class enemies".[181][187] Other historians have indicated that the level of Jewish collaboration could well have been less than suggested.[189] Historian Martin Dean has written that "few local Jews obtained positions of power under Soviet rule."[190]
The issue of Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation remains controversial. Some scholars note that while not pro-Communist, many Jews saw the Soviets as the lesser threat compared to the German Nazis. They stress that stories of Jews welcoming the Soviets on the streets, vividly remembered by many Poles from the eastern part of the country are impressionistic and not reliable indicators of the level of Jewish support for the Soviets. Additionally, it has been noted that some ethnic Poles were as prominent as Jews in filling civil and police positions in the occupation administration, and that Jews, both civilians and in the Polish military, suffered equally at the hands of the Soviet occupiers.[191] Whatever initial enthusiasm for the Soviet occupation Jews might have felt was soon dissipated upon feeling the impact of the suppression of Jewish societal modes of life by the occupiers.[192] The tensions between ethnic Poles and Jews as a result of this period has, according to some historians, taken a toll on relations between Poles and Jews throughout the war, creating until this day, an impasse to Polish–Jewish rapprochement.[185]
A number of younger Jews, often through the pro-Marxist Bund or some Zionist groups, were sympathetic to
There were also Jews who assisted Poles during the Soviet occupation. Among the thousands of Polish officers killed by the Soviet
The Holocaust
Poland's Jewish community suffered the most in
Poland was where the German program of extermination of Jews, the "Final Solution", was implemented, since this was where most of Europe's Jews (excluding the Soviet Union's) lived.[199]
In 1939 several hundred synagogues were blown up or burned by the Germans, who sometimes forced the Jews to do it themselves.[163] In many cases, the Germans turned the synagogues into factories, places of entertainment, swimming pools, or prisons.[163] By war's end, almost all the synagogues in Poland had been destroyed.[200] Rabbis were forced to dance and sing in public with their beards shorn off. Some rabbis were set on fire or hanged.[163]
The Germans ordered that all Jews be registered, and the word "Jude" was stamped in their identity cards.[201] Numerous restrictions and prohibitions targeting Jews were introduced and brutally enforced.[202] For example, Jews were forbidden to walk on the sidewalks,[203] use public transport, or enter places of leisure, sports arenas, theaters, museums and libraries.[204] On the street, Jews had to lift their hat to passing Germans.[205] By the end of 1941 all Jews in German-occupied Poland, except the children, had to wear an identifying badge with a blue Star of David.[206][207] Rabbis were humiliated in "spectacles organised by the German soldiers and police" who used their rifle butts "to make these men dance in their praying shawls."[208] The Germans "disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate",[209] made little attempts to set up a collaborationist government in Poland,[210][211][212] nevertheless, German tabloids printed in Polish routinely ran antisemitic articles that urged local people to adopt an attitude of indifference towards the Jews.[213]
Following Operation Barbarossa, many Jews in what was then Eastern Poland fell victim to Nazi death squads called Einsatzgruppen, which massacred Jews, especially in 1941. Some of these German-inspired massacres were carried out with help from, or active participation of Poles themselves: for example, the Jedwabne pogrom, in which between 300 (Institute of National Remembrance's Final Findings[214]) and 1,600 Jews (Jan T. Gross) were tortured and beaten to death by members of the local population. The full extent of Polish participation in the massacres of the Polish Jewish community remains a controversial subject, in part due to Jewish leaders' refusal to allow the remains of the Jewish victims to be exhumed and their cause of death to be properly established. The Polish Institute for National Remembrance identified twenty-two other towns that had pogroms similar to Jedwabne.[215] The reasons for these massacres are still debated, but they included antisemitism, resentment over alleged cooperation with the Soviet invaders in the Polish–Soviet War and during the 1939 invasion of the Kresy regions, greed for the possessions of the Jews, and of course coercion by the Nazis to participate in such massacres.
Some Jewish historians have written of the negative attitudes of some Poles towards persecuted Jews during the Holocaust.
Ghettos and death camps
The German Nazis established six
Between October 1939 and July 1942 a system of ghettos was imposed for the confinement of Jews. The
During the occupation of Poland, the Germans used various laws to separate ethnic Poles from Jewish ones. In the ghettos, the population was separated by putting the Poles into the "Aryan Side" and the Polish Jews into the "Jewish Side". Any Pole found giving any help to a Jewish Pole was subject to the death penalty.[228] Another law implemented by the Germans was that Poles were forbidden from buying from Jewish shops, and if they did they were subject to execution.[229] Many Jews tried to escape from the ghettos in the hope of finding a place to hide outside of it, or of joining the partisan units. When this proved difficult escapees often returned to the ghetto on their own. If caught, Germans would murder the escapees and leave their bodies in plain view as a warning to others. Despite these terror tactics, attempts at escape from ghettos continued until their liquidation.[178]
....According to this decree, those knowingly helping these Jews by providing shelter, supplying food, or selling them foodstuffs are also subject to the death penalty
....This is a categorical warning to the non-Jewish population against:
.........1) Providing shelter to Jews,
.........2) Supplying them with Food,
.........3) Selling them Foodstuffs.
Dr. Franke – Town Commander – Częstochowa 9/24/42
Since the Nazi terror reigned throughout the Aryan districts, the chances of remaining successfully hidden depended on a fluent knowledge of the language and on having close ties with the community. Many Poles were not willing to hide Jews who might have escaped the ghettos or who might have been in hiding due to fear for their own lives and that of their families.
While the German policy towards Jews was ruthless and criminal, their policy towards Christian Poles who helped Jews was very much the same. The Germans would often murder non-Jewish Poles for small misdemeanors. Execution for help rendered to Jews, even the most basic kinds, was automatic. In any apartment block or area where Jews were found to be harboured, everybody in the house would be immediately shot by the Germans. For this thousands of non-Jewish Poles were executed.[230]
Hiding in a Christian society to which the Jews were only partially assimilated was a daunting task.[231] They needed to quickly acquire not only a new identity, but a new body of knowledge.[231] Many Jews spoke Polish with a distinct Yiddish or Hebrew accent, used a different nonverbal language, different gestures and facial expressions. People with physical characteristics such as dark curly hair and brown eyes were particularly vulnerable.[231]
Some individuals blackmailed
To discourage Poles from giving shelter to Jews, the Germans often searched houses and introduced ruthless penalties. Poland was the only occupied country during World War II where the
Food rations for the Poles were small (669 kcal per day in 1941) compared to other occupied nations throughout Europe and
The
The Warsaw Ghetto and its uprising
The
The population of the ghetto reached 380,000 people by the end of 1940, about 30% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was only about 2.4% of the size of the city. The Germans closed off the Ghetto from the outside world, building a wall around it by 16 November 1940. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages were brought into the Warsaw Ghetto, while diseases (especially
When we invaded the Ghetto for the first time – wrote
better source needed]
The Uprising was led by ŻOB (Jewish Combat Organization) and the ŻZW.
It took the Germans twenty-seven days to put down the uprising, after some very heavy fighting. The German general Jürgen Stroop in his report stated that his troops had killed 6,065 Jewish fighters during the battle. After the uprising was already over, Heinrich Himmler had the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Square (outside the ghetto) destroyed as a celebration of German victory and a symbol that the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw was no longer.
A group of fighters escaped from the ghetto through the sewers and reached the Lomianki forest. About 50 ghetto fighters were saved by the Polish "People's Guard" and later formed their own partisan group, named after Anielewicz. Even after the end of the uprising there were still several hundreds of Jews who continued living in the ruined ghetto. Many of them survived thanks to the contacts they managed to establish with Poles outside the ghetto. The Uprising inspired Jews throughout Poland. Many Jewish leaders who survived the liquidation continued underground work outside the ghetto. They hid other Jews, forged necessary documents and were active in the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was followed by other
The fate of the Warsaw Ghetto was similar to that of the other ghettos in which Jews were concentrated. With the decision of
The Białystok Ghetto and its uprising
In August 1941, the Germans ordered the establishment of a
In February 1943, approximately 10,000 Białystok Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. During the deportations, hundreds of Jews, mainly those deemed too weak or sick to travel, were killed.
In August 1943, the Germans mounted an operation to destroy the Białystok ghetto. German forces and local police auxiliaries surrounded the ghetto and began to round up Jews systematically for deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp. Approximately 7,600 Jews were held in a central transit camp in the city before deportation to Treblinka. Those deemed fit to work were sent to the
On 15 August 1943, the
Communist rule: 1945–1989
Number of Holocaust survivors
The estimates of Polish Jews before the war vary from slightly under 3 million to almost 3.5 million (
The number of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust is difficult to ascertain. The majority of Polish Jewish survivors were individuals who were able to find refuge in the territories of Soviet Union that were not overrun by Germans and thus safe from the Holocaust. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 800,000 Polish Jews survived the war, out of which between 50,000 and 100,000 were survivors from occupied Poland, and the remainder, survivors who made it abroad (mostly to the Soviet Union).[255]
Following the Soviet annexation of over half of Poland at the onset of World War II, all Polish nationals including Jews were declared by Moscow to have become Soviet nationals regardless of birth.[256] Also, all Polish Jews who perished in the Holocaust east of the Curzon Line were included with the Soviet war dead.[257] For decades to come, the Soviet authorities refused to accept the fact that thousands of Jews who remained in the USSR opted consciously and unambiguously for Polish nationality.[258] At the end of 1944, the number of Polish Jews in the Soviet and the Soviet-controlled territories has been estimated at 250,000–300,000 people.[259] Jews who escaped to eastern Poland from areas occupied by Germany in 1939 were numbering at around 198,000.[260] Over 150,000 of them were repatriated or expelled back to new communist Poland along with the Jewish men conscripted to the Red Army from Kresy in 1940–1941.[259] Their families were murdered in the Holocaust. Some of the soldiers married women with the Soviet citizenship, others agreed to paper marriages.[259] Those who survived the Holocaust in Poland included Jews who were saved by the Poles (most families with children), and those who joined the Polish or Soviet resistance movement. Some 20,000–40,000 Jews were repatriated from Germany and other countries. At its postwar peak, up to 240,000 returning Jews might have resided in Poland mostly in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Wrocław and Lower Silesia, e.g., Dzierżoniów (where there was a significant Jewish community initially consisting of local concentration camp survivors), Legnica, and Bielawa.[261]
The Jewish community in post-war Poland
Following World War II Poland became a
Anti-Jewish violence and discrimination
Some returning Jews were met with antisemitic bias in Polish employment and education administrations. Post-war labor certificates contained markings distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. The Jewish community in Szczecin reported a lengthy report of complaints regarding job discrimination. Although Jewish schools were created in the few towns containing a relatively large Jewish population, many Jewish children were enrolled in Polish state schools. Some state schools, as in the town of Otwock, forbade Jewish children to enroll. In the state schools that did allow Jewish children, there were numerous accounts of beatings and persecution targeting these children.[264]
The anti-Jewish violence in Poland refers to a series of violent incidents in
The best-known case is the
In a number of other instances, returning Jews still met with threats, violence, and murder from their Polish neighbors, occasionally in a deliberate and organized manner. People of the community frequently had knowledge of these murders and turned a blind eye or held no sympathy for the victims. Jewish communities responded to this violence by reporting the violence to the Ministry of Public Administration, but were granted little assistance.[264] As many as 1500 Jewish heirs were often murdered when attempting to reclaim property.[274]
Several causes led to the anti-Jewish violence of 1944–1947. One cause was traditional Christian anti-semitism; the pogrom in Cracow (11 August 1945) and in Kielce followed accusations of ritual murder. Another cause was the gentile Polish hostility to the Communist takeover. Even though very few Jews lived in postwar Poland, many Poles believed they dominated the Communist authorities, a belief expressed in the term Żydokomuna (Judeo-Communist), a popular anti-Jewish stereotype. Yet another reason for Polish violence towards Jews stemmed from the fear that survivors would recover their property.[26][264]
Jewish property
After the war ended, Poland's Communist government enacted a broad program of nationalization and land reform, taking over large numbers of properties, both Polish- and Jewish-owned.
Many of the properties that were previously owned or by Jews were taken over by others during the war. Attempting to reclaim an occupied property often put the claimant at a risk of physical harm and even death.[277][279][281][282][283] Many who proceeded with the process were only granted possession, not ownership, of their properties;[280] and completing the restitution process, given that most properties were already occupied, required additional, lengthy processes.[284] The majority of Jewish claimants could not afford the restitution process without financial help, due to the filing costs, legal fees, and inheritance tax.[279] While it is hard to determine the total number of successful reclamations, Michael Meng estimates that it was extremely small.[285]
In general, restitution was easier for larger organizations or well connected individuals,[286] and the process was also abused by criminal gangs.[280]
"Movable" property such as housewares, that was either given by Jews for safekeeping or taken during the war, was rarely returned willfully; oftentimes the only resort for a returnee looking for reappropriation was the courts.
Facing violence and a difficult and expensive legal process,[279][282] many returnees eventually decided to leave the country rather than attempt reclamation.[280][282][287]
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, a law was passed that allowed the Catholic Church to reclaim its properties, which it did with great success.[286][288] According to Stephen Denburg, "unlike the restitution of Church property, the idea of returning property to former Jewish owners has been met with a decided lack of enthusiasm from both the general Polish population as well as the government".[288]
Decades later, reclaiming pre-war property would lead to a number of controversies, and the matter is still debated by media and scholars as of late 2010s.
Emigration to Palestine and Israel
For a variety of reasons, the vast majority of returning Jewish survivors left Poland soon after the war ended.[290] Many left for the West because they did not want to live under a Communist regime. Some left because of the persecution they faced in postwar Poland,[26] and because they did not want to live where their family members had been murdered, and instead have arranged to live with relatives or friends in different western democracies. Others wanted to go to British Mandate of Palestine soon to be the new state of Israel, especially after General Marian Spychalski signed a decree allowing Jews to leave Poland without visas or exit permits.[29] In 1946–1947 Poland was the only Eastern Bloc country to allow free Jewish aliyah to Israel,[28] without visas or exit permits.[29][30] Britain demanded Poland to halt the exodus, but their pressure was largely unsuccessful.[291]
Between 1945 and 1948, 100,000–120,000 Jews left Poland. Their departure was largely organized by the
A second wave of Jewish emigration (50,000) took place during the liberalization of the Communist regime between 1957 and 1959. After 1967's Six-Day War, in which the Soviet Union supported the Arab side, the Polish communist party adopted an anti-Jewish course of action which in the years 1968–1969 provoked the last mass migration of Jews from Poland.[290]
The Bund took part in the post-war
Rebuilding Jewish communities
For those Polish Jews who remained, the rebuilding of Jewish life in Poland was carried out between October 1944 and 1950 by the
Some Polish Communists of Jewish descent actively participated in the establishment of the communist regime in the
The March 1968 events and their aftermath
In 1967, following the
The vast majority of the 40,000 Jews in Poland by the late 1960s were completely assimilated into the broader society.[citation needed] However, this did not prevent them from becoming victims of a campaign, centrally organized by the Polish Communist Party, with Soviet backing, which equated Jewish origins with "Zionism" and disloyalty to a Socialist Poland.[299]
In March 1968 student-led demonstrations in Warsaw (see
There were several outcomes of the
First attempts to improve Polish–Israeli relations began in the mid-1970s. Poland was the first of the Eastern Bloc countries to restore diplomatic relations with Israel after these have been broken off right after the Six-Day's War.[11] In 1986 partial diplomatic relations with Israel were restored,[11] and full relations were restored in 1990 as soon as communism fell.
During the late 1970s some Jewish activists were engaged in the anti-Communist opposition groups. Most prominent among them, Adam Michnik (founder of Gazeta Wyborcza) was one of the founders of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR). By the time of the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989, only 5,000–10,000 Jews remained in the country, many of them preferring to conceal their Jewish origin.[citation needed]
Since 1989
With the fall of communism in Poland, Jewish cultural, social, and religious life has been undergoing a revival. Many historical issues, especially related to World War II and the 1944–89 period, suppressed by Communist censorship, have been re-evaluated and publicly discussed (like the Jedwabne pogrom, the Koniuchy massacre, the Kielce pogrom, the Auschwitz cross, and Polish-Jewish wartime relations in general).
Jewish religious life has been revived with the help of the
A large number of cities with synagogues include Warsaw, Kraków, Zamość, Tykocin, Rzeszów, Kielce, or Góra Kalwaria although not many of them are still active in their original religious role. Stara Synagoga ("Old Synagogue") in Kraków, which hosts a Jewish museum, was built in the early 15th century and is the oldest synagogue in Poland. Before the war, the Yeshiva Chachmei in Lublin was Europe's largest. In 2007 it was renovated, dedicated and reopened thanks to the efforts and endowments by Polish Jewry. Warsaw has an active synagogue, Beit Warszawa, affiliated with the Liberal-Progressive stream of Judaism.
There are also several Jewish publications although most of them are in Polish. These include
Former extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka are open to visitors. At Auschwitz the Oświęcim State Museum currently houses exhibitions on Nazi crimes with a special section (Block Number 27) specifically focused on Jewish victims and martyrs. At Treblinka there is a monument built out of many shards of broken stone, as well as a mausoleum dedicated to those who perished there. A small mound of human ashes commemorates the 350,000 victims of the Majdanek camp who were killed there by the Nazis.
The Great Synagogue in
The
A memorial to the victims of the Kielce Pogrom of 1946, where a mob murdered more than 40 Jews who returned to the city after the Holocaust, was unveiled in 2006. The funds for the memorial came from the city itself and from the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad.
Polish authors and scholars have published many works about the history of Jews in Poland. Notable among them are the
There have been a number of Holocaust remembrance activities in Poland in recent years. The United States Department of State documents that:
In September 2000, dignitaries from Poland, Israel, the United States, and other countries (including
Auschwitz Jewish Center. The synagogue, the sole synagogue in Oświęcim to survive World War II and an adjacent Jewish cultural and educational center, provide visitors a place to pray and to learn about the active pre–World War II Jewish community that existed in Oświęcim. The synagogue was the first communal property in the country to be returned to the Jewish community under the 1997 law allowing for restitution of Jewish communal property.[303]
The
An annual festival of Jewish culture, which is one of the biggest festivals of Jewish culture in the world, takes place in Kraków.[305]
In 2006, Poland's Jewish population was estimated to be approximately 20,000;[2] most living in Warsaw, Wrocław, Kraków, and Bielsko-Biała, though there are no census figures that would give an exact number. According to the Polish Moses Schorr Centre and other Polish sources, however, this may represent an undercount of the actual number of Jews living in Poland, since many are not religious.[306] There are also people with Jewish roots who do not possess adequate documentation to confirm it, due to various historical and family complications.[306]
Poland is currently easing the way for Jews who left Poland during the Communist organized massive expulsion of 1968 to re-obtain their citizenship.
In 2013, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews opened.[310] It is one of the world's largest Jewish museums.[311] As of 2019 another museum, the Warsaw Ghetto Museum, is under construction and is intended to open in 2023.[312]
Numbers of Jews in Poland since 1920
| Year | 1921 | 1939 | 1945 | 1946 | 1951 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 | 2000 | 2010 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Population | 2,845,000 (+14.2%) | 3,250,000[313][314] (100%) 9.14% of the total | 100,000 (−96.9%) 0.43% | 230,000 (+130.0%) 0.97% | 70,000 (−69.6%) 0.28% | 31,000 (−55.7%) 0.10% | 9,000 (−71.0%) 0.03% | 5,000 (−44.4%) 0.01% | 3,800 (−24.0%) 0.01% | 3,500 (−7.9%) 0.01% | 3,200[314] (−8.6%) 0.01% |
However, most sources other than YIVO give a larger number of Jews living in contemporary Poland. In the 2011 Polish census, 7,353 Polish citizens declared their nationality as "Jewish," a big increase from just 1,055 during the previous 2002 census.[315] There are likely more people of Jewish ancestry living in Poland but who do not actively identify as Jewish. According to the Moses Schorr Centre, there are 100,000 Jews living in Poland who don't actively practice Judaism and do not list "Jewish" as their nationality.[316] The Jewish Renewal in Poland organization estimates that there are 200,000 "potential Jews" in Poland.[317] The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Jewish Agency for Israel estimate that there are between 25,000 and 100,000 Jews living in Poland,[318] a similar number to that estimated by Jonathan Ornstein, head of the Jewish Community Center in Kraków (between 20,000 and 100,000).[319]
See also
- History of the Jews in Poland before the 18th century
- History of the Jews in 18th-century Poland
- History of the Jews in 19th-century Poland
- History of the Jews in 20th-century Poland
- Timeline of Jewish-Polish history
- Galician Jews
- Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain
- History of the Jews in Austria
- History of the Jews in Germany
- History of the Jews in Russia
- Israel–Poland relations
- Jewish ethnic divisions
- Jewish Roots in Poland
- List of Polish rabbis
Notes
References
- ^ a b "Poland". World Jewish Congress.
- ^ a b c The Canadian Foundation of Polish–Jewish Heritage. Polish-jewish-heritage.org (8 January 2005). Retrieved on 2010-08-22.
- ^ סיקולר, נעמה (16 March 2007). "דרכון פולני בזכות הסבתא מוורשה". ynet.
- ^ "Jews, by Country of Origin and Age". Statistical Abstract of Israel (in English and Hebrew). Israel Central Bureau of Statistics. 26 September 2011. Archived from the original on 13 November 2011. Retrieved 11 February 2012.
- ^ Friedberg, Edna (6 February 2018). "The Truth About Poland's Role in the Holocaus". The Atlantic. Retrieved 15 August 2021.
"By the end of the war, 3 million Polish Jews—90 percent of the prewar population—had been murdered by the Germans and their collaborators of various nationalities, one of the highest percentages in Europe."
- ^ Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution, University of Chicago Press 1992, page 51. Quote: "Poland, at that time, was the most tolerant country in Europe." Also in Britain and the Netherlands by S. Groenveld, Michael J. Wintle; and in The exchange of ideas (Walburg Instituut, 1994).
- ^ Engel, David. "On Reconciling the Histories of Two Chosen Peoples." The American Historical Review 114.4 (2009): 914-929.
- ^ "Paradisus Iudaeorum (1569–1648)". POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. 13 May 2013.
- ^ a b George Sanford, Historical Dictionary of Poland (2nd ed.) Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2003. p. 79.
- ^ a b "European Jewish Congress - Poland". 11 December 2008. Archived from the original on 11 December 2008.
- ^ a b c d e The Virtual Jewish History Tour – Poland. Jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved on 22 August 2010.
- ^ In accordance with its tradition of religious tolerance, Poland refrained from participating in the excesses of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation "Central Europe: Enemies, Neighbors, Friends" by Lonnie R. Johnson Oxford University Press 1996
- ^ Although traditional narrative holds that as a consequence, the predicament of the Commonwealth’s Jewry worsened, declining to the level of other European countries by the end of the eighteenth century, recent scholarship by Gershon Hundert, Moshe Rosman, Edward Fram, and Magda Teter, suggest that the reality was much more complex. See for example, the following works, which discuss Jewish life and culture, as well as Jewish-Christian relations during that period: M. Rosman Lords' Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century (Harvard University Press, new ed. 1993), G. Hundert The Jews in a Polish Private Town: The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), E.Fram Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Law and Life in Poland, 1550–1655 (HUC Press, 1996), and M. TeterJews and Heretics in Pre-modern Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- ^ Beyond the Pale Online exposition
- ^ William W. Hagen, Before the "Final Solution": Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Jun. 1996), 351–381.
- Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, 8:1, 2014, pp. 103-114.
- Zionists' military arm, for the fight in Palestine. Weapons were provided for 10,000 men, and Polish officers trained Irgun fighters in the Tatra Mountains located in southern Poland." Archibald L. Patterson, Between Hitler and Stalin: The Quick Life and Secret Death of Edward Smigły, p. 101.
- ^ "The Hidden Jews of Poland". Shavei Israel. 22 November 2015. Archived from the original on 16 May 2018. Retrieved 20 February 2018.
- ^ "מידע נוסף על הפריט". 30 May 2008. Archived from the original on 30 May 2008. Retrieved 3 April 2017.
- ISBN 0-300-09546-5.
There were people everywhere who were prepared, for whatever motives, to do the Nazis' work for them. And if there was more anti-Semitism in Poland than in many other countries, there was also less collaboration.... The Nazis generally preferred not to count on outbursts of 'emotional anti-Semitism', when what was needed to realize their plans was 'rational antisemitism', as Hitler himself put it. For that, they neither received or requested significant help from the Poles.
- ^ a b Unveiling the Secret City Archived 12 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine H-Net Review: John Radzilowski
- ISBN 978-0-253-01074-2.
- ^ The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust, Mordecai Paldiel, KTAV Publishing House, pages 176-236
- ^ "I know this Jew!" Blackmailing of the Jews in Warsaw 1939–1945. Archived 7 October 2007 at the Wayback Machine Polish Center for Holocaust Research
- ^ a b Richard C. Lukas, Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust University Press of Kentucky 1989 – 201 pages. Page 13; also in Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944, University Press of Kentucky 1986 – 300 pages.
- ^ a b c Natalia Aleksiun. "Jewish Responses to Antisemitism in Poland, 1944–1947." In: Joshua D. Zimmerman, ed. Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. Rutgers University Press, 2003. Pages 249; 256.
- ^ a b Michael C. Steinlauf. "Poland.". In: David S. Wyman, Charles H. Rosenzveig. The World Reacts to the Holocaust. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
- ^ ISBN 0-8156-2969-9
- ^ a b c Aleksiun, Natalia. "Beriḥah". YIVO.
Suggested reading: Arieh J. Kochavi, "Britain and the Jewish Exodus...," Polin 7 (1992): pp. 161–175
- ^ ISBN 1-56639-955-6.
- ^ Dariusz Stola. "The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland of 1967–1968." The American Jewish Committee research grant. See: D. Stola, Fighting against the Shadows (reprint), in Robert Blobaum, ed.; Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland. Cornell University Press, 2005.
- ^ "THE HISTORY FROM THE JEWS POPULATION". kehilalinks.jewishgen.org.
- ^ Kalina Gawlas, kuratorka galerii Pierwsze Spotkania w MHŻP, historia.wp.pl.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l "The Polish Jews Heritage – Genealogy Research Photos Translation". polishjews.org. 2009. Retrieved 30 September 2015.
- ^ Postan, Miller, Habakkuk. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. 1948
- ^ "YIVO | Trade". www.yivoencyclopedia.org. Retrieved 2 July 2018.
- ISBN 978-0-415-52087-4.
- ^ "Origins of Polish Jewry (This Week in Jewish History)". Henry Abramson. 5 December 2013.
- ^ Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Varda Books (2001 reprint), Vol. 1, p. 44.
- ^ "The Jews of Poland". Beit Hatfutsot Open Databases Project, The Museum of the Jewish People at Beit Hatfutsot.
- ^ Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Varda Books (2001 reprint), Vol. 1, p. 42.
- ^ "Official portal of the city of Opoczno". Archived from the original on 5 December 2008.
- ^ American Jewish Committee, 1957, 1367 pogrom Poznan. Google Books
- ^ ISBN 1-886223-11-4. Retrieved 11 June 2011.
- ^ "Homework Help and Textbook Solutions | bartleby". www.bartleby.com. Archived from the original on 28 February 2008.
- ^ a b Bernard Dov Weinryb "Jews of Poland", p. 50
- ^ Sephardim - YIVO Encyclopedia
- ^ Singer, Isidore (1906). "Rapoport". Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16 September 2007.
- ^ Kayserling, Meyer; Gotthard Deutsch; M. Seligsohn; Peter Wiernik; N.T. London; Solomon Schechter; Henry Malter; Herman Rosenthal; Joseph Jacobs (1906). "Katzenellenbogen". Jewish Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16 September 2007.
- ISBN 0-8063-1741-8.
- ^ Reiner, Elchanan (11 October 2010). "Pollak, Ya'akov ben Yosef". YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Translated by Jeffrey Green.
- ^ "Remuh Synagogue. A relic of Kazimierz's Golden Age". Cracow-life.com. Retrieved 24 March 2013.
- ^ Hundert 2004, p. 11.
- ^ Hundert 2004, p. 19.
- Jewish Encyclopedia(1906) by Herman Rosenthal, S. M. Dubnow
- Jewish Encyclopedia1901.
- ^ Krwawa zemsta Stefana Czarnieckiego na Kozakach. Nie oszczędzał nawet kobiet i dzieci
- ^ [https://www.google.com.ua/books/edition/The_Jews_in_a_Polish_Private_Town/KMvHDwAAQBAJ?hl=uk&gbpv=1&dq=czarniecki+murder+jews&pg=PT50&printsec=frontcover The Jews in a Polish Private Town The Case of Opatów in the Eighteenth Century]
- Jewish Encyclopedia1901.
- ^ Lekcje tolerancji Pakiet edukacyjny dla nauczycielek i nauczycieli
- ISBN 978-83-11-08275-5.
- ^ Dariusz Milewski, Szwedzi w Krakowie (The Swedes in Krakow) Mówią Wieki monthly, 8 June 2007, Internet Archive. (in Polish)
- ^ Mgr inz. arch. Krzysztof Petrus. "Zrodla do badan przemian przestrzennych zachodnich przedmiesc Krakowa" (PDF). Architektura, Czasopismo techniczne. Politechnika Krakowska. pp. 143–145. Retrieved 5 May 2014.
- ^ a b Hundert 2004, pp. 51–52.
- ^ Hundert 2004, pp. 17–18.
- ^ "Timeline: Jewish life in Poland from 1098" Archived 29 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Jewish Journal, 7 June 2007.
- ^ David ben Samuel Ha-Levi, "Divre ̄ David Ture ̄ Zahav" (1689) in Hebrew. Published in: Bi-defus Y. Goldman, Warsaw: 1882. Quoted by the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
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- ^ Hundert 2004, p. 18.
- ^ ISBN 978-83-7976-222-4.
- ^ "Jew, Pole, Legionary 1914-1920". POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. 25 November 2014.
- ^ ISBN 1-930143-85-0. Retrieved 11 March 2012.
- ^ ISBN 9781930143852. Retrieved 11 March 2012.
- ISBN 9780521515733. Retrieved 26 March 2013 – via Books.google.com.
- ^ Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland, Oxford University Press (2000), p. 162.
- ^ Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Varda Books (2001 reprint), Vol. 2, p. 282.
- ^ Stanislawski, Michael. "Russian Empire". YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
- ISBN 978-1584657293. Retrieved 6 June 2015.
- ^ Walter Laqueur. A History of Zionism. Tauris Parke, 2003 pp. 173–4.
- ^ Isaiah Friedman. Germany, Turkey, Zionism, 1897–1918. Transaction Publishers, 1997, p. 233 ff.
- ^ Lwów, 1939, digitized at Forum Żydów Polskich. Internet Archive.
- ^ Marek Gałęzowski (10 November 2012). "Żydzi w Legionach" (in Polish). Uważam Rze Historia. Retrieved 26 December 2015.
- ^ Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I page 176 Jesse Kauffman 2015
- ^ A Deadly Legacy: German Jews and the Great War Timothy L. Grady page 82 2017
- ^ Neal Pease. 'This Troublesome Question': The United States and the 'Polish Pogroms' of 1918–1919. In: Ideology, Politics and Diplomacy in East Central Europe, ed. M. B. B. Biskupski. University of Rochester Press, 2003.
- ISBN 1580461379. Retrieved 4 June 2015.
- OCLC 715788575
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{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ ISBN 9781536110357. Archived from the original(PDF) on 23 June 2015.
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Translation: The Soviet methods were particularly misleading. The numbers were correct, but the victims were overwhelmingly not Russian. Original: Same liczby były całkowicie wiarygodne, ale pozbawione komentarza, sprytnie ukrywały fakt, że ofiary w przeważającej liczbie nie były Rosjanami.
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The most intense battles took place in the east but the fighting was not limited to this region; all over the country, partisans clashed with communist security forces. Repressions increased in the winter of 1945/46 and spring of 1946, when entire villages were burnt. The fighting lasted with varying intensity until 1948 and ended with thousands killed, wounded, arrested, or transported to the Soviet Union.[p. 26]
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- William W. Hagen, "Before the 'Final Solution': Toward a Comparative Analysis of Political Anti-Semitism in Interwar Germany and Poland", The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Jun. 1996), 351–381.
- Hundert, Gershon David (2004). Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23844-3.
- Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2014) [1942]. Rohde, Aleksandra Miesak (ed.). German Occupation of Poland. Washington, D.C.: Dale Street Books. ISBN 978-1941656105.
- )
- ISBN 0-7818-0604-6.
- David Vital, A People Apart: A Political History of the Jews in Europe 1789–1939, Oxford University Press, 2001.
- M. J. Rosman, The Lord's Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth During the Eighteenth Century, Harvard University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-916458-18-0
- Edward Fram, Ideals Face Reality: Jewish Life and Culture in Poland 1550–1655, HUC Press, 1996, ISBN 0-8143-2906-3
- Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Premodern Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-521-85673-6
- Laurence Weinbaum, The De-Assimilation of the Jewish Remnant in Poland, in: Ethnos-Nation: eine europäische Zeitschrift, 1999, pp. 8–25
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the OCLC 632370258.
Further reading
- Chodakiewicz, Marek Jan (2003). After the Holocaust: Polish–Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II, East European Monographs. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0-88033-511-4.
- Cichopek-Gajraj, A. (2021). Agency and Displacement of Ethnic Polish and Jewish Families after World War II. Polish American Studies, 78(1), 60–82.
- Dynner, Glenn. Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society NY: Oxford University Press, 2006.
- Engel, David (1998). "Patterns of Anti-Jewish Violence in Poland 1944–1946". Yad Vashem Studies.
- Korycki, Kate. Weaponizing the Past: Collective Memory and Jews, Poles, and Communists in Twenty-First Century Poland (Berghahn Books, 2023) online book review
- Krajewski, Stanisław. Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew, Kraków: Austeria P, 2005.
- Levine, Hillel (1991). Economic Origins of Antisemitism: Poland and Its Jews in the Early Modern Period. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. OCLC 22908198.
- ISBN 90-420-0850-4
- ISBN 978-1-874774-64-8
- Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume 2: 1881–1914 (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2009) ISBN 978-1-904113-83-6
- Polonsky, Antony. The Jews in Poland and Russia, Volume 3: 1914-2008 (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011) ISBN 978-1-904113-48-5
- Prokop-Janiec, E. (2019). Jewish Intellectuals, National Suffering, Contemporary Poland. The Polish Review, 64(2), 24–36.
- Ury, Scott. Barricades and Banners: The Revolution of 1905 and the Transformation of Warsaw Jewry, Stanford University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-804763-83-7
- Weiner, Miriam; Polish State Archives (in cooperation with) (1997). Jewish Roots in Poland: Pages from the Past and Archival Inventories. Secaucus, NJ: Miriam Weiner Routes to Roots Foundation. OCLC 38756480.
- A Marriage of Convenience: The New Zionist Organization and the Polish Government 1936-1939 Laurence Weinbaum, East European Monographs; dist. Columbia University Press, 1993
External links
Maps
- The Cossack Uprising and its Aftermath in Poland, Jewish Communities in Poland and Lithuania under the Council of the Four Lands, The Spread of Hasidic Judaism, Jewish Revolts against the Nazis in Poland (All maps from Judaism: History, Belief, and Practice)
History of Polish Jews
- Museum of the History of Polish Jews
- The Polish Jews Home Page
- Virtual Jewish History Tour of Poland
- Judaism in the Baltic: Vilna as the Spiritual Center of Eastern Europe
- The Jews in Poland. Saving from oblivion – Teaching for the future
- Historical Sites of Jewish Warsaw
- Polish–Jewish Relations section of the Polish Embassy in Washington
- Joanna Rohozinska, A Complicated Coexistence: Polish–Jewish relations through the centuries, Central Europe Review, 28 January 2000.
- Jewish organisations in Poland before the Second World War
- Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland
- Foundation for Documentation of Jewish Cemeteries in Poland
World War II and the Holocaust
- Chronicles of the Vilna Ghetto: wartime photographs & documents vilnaghetto.com
- Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from the US Holocaust Museum. From the same source see:
- Non-Jewish Polish Victims of the Holocaust
- Bibliography of Polish Jewish Relations Archived 8 December 2012 at the Wayback Machine during the War
- Chronology of German Anti-Jewish Measures Archived 2 July 2010 at the Wayback Machine during World War II in Poland
- The Catholic Zionist Who Helped Steer Israeli Independence through the UN
- Poland's Jews:A light flickers on, The Economist, 20 December 2005