Back in the early 1980s, I was just becoming a journalist – in the democratic underground, for no self-respecting person would serve as a mouthpiece for the military regime that was running Poland at the time.
I was being interviewed by a Solidarity activist – and almost certainly, I thought, someone involved in the underground as well – but of course we did not discuss that. She was writing a book about contemporary Polish Jews and wanted to talk to me.
We weren’t discussing the intricate problems of the underground political struggle, but something more simple and personal – being Jewish.
“How do you see the future?” she asked.
“I believe we are the last ones. Definitely,” I said.
“And there will be no Jews in Poland?”
“In the sense of a religious, national group, no.”
I may have added that Poland might one day be independent and democratic again, no longer a Soviet satellite, though I did not expect to live to see the day. But Jews in Poland? No way. It all ends with us.
A quarter-century later, sitting at my desk in the booming capital of this NATO and European Union member country, I acknowledge that I have lived to see and even grown accustomed to a free Poland. And what about the other impossibility, the Jews?
Well, there is a bar mitzvah in my shul next week. The yearly Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow is just around the corner. Midrasz, the Jewish magazine, comes to my mailbox regularly late. My younger son graduated from the Jewish school. My older son was press spokesman of the Warsaw kehilla for some time. The invitation for the Israeli Independence Day reception just came in.
Why had I once been so sure that it was over? Maybe it was loneliness.
There were so few of us then, Jews trying to do something Jewish. True, there was the shul – but I was the youngest congregant by two generations. There was the officially sanctioned Jewish Socio-Cultural Association, but it mainly served to lay down the party line, even if in Yiddish.
And then it was all over. The Communist Party was out of the government coalition and soon dissolved. The underground press went above ground. The Soviet army left Poland. Poland left the Warsaw Pact. Everything we knew would never happen was happening all at once, the impossible was becoming yesterday’s news – so why not try to be Jewish?
Jews came out of the woodwork, went to shul for the first time in their lives, attended lectures about Jews in Poland, stood up to ask a question, hesitated, blurting out, “Well, I’m Jewish ” and waited for the lightning bolt they had spent their lives trying to avoid.
Society at large reacted favorably. It was a time in which everything was possible, but we were woefully unprepared to meet these fresh-out-of-the-closet Jews. Jewish institutions had to be reorganized from scratch, reoriented and redefined.
An extraordinary young American rabbi, Michael Schudrich, came along and today is chief rabbi of Poland. A kindergarten was set up. The Taube Foundation began supporting Jewish programs in Poland. With that aid and more, both spiritual and material, we grew.
The kindergarten was probably the catalyst. After the early graduates of the Jewish kindergarten of Warsaw entered the regular school system, we hardly expected their parents to return to us and say that the kids were missing out. They needed – and deserved – something more: a Jewish school.
Unlike a kindergarten, an institution of convenience that leaves no trace on those who attended, a school is an institution of commitment that is supposed to leave traces in the minds and hearts of the students.
These parents, even if they had shared the same experiences we did, no longer seemed to think that we were the last ones. When you have kids, the future becomes an everyday presence you want to shape into all that it can be.
I know: My younger boy was one of the first four kindergarten graduates.
So we set up the school, which now has more than 200 students. Parents who had decided to leave their closet wanted to make sure their kids would never need one. This commitment could be expressed only because the country was now free, because assistance and support was at hand, and because there were people around who wanted to be Jewish, even if they had thought of themselves as the last ones.
