Jewish Polish history during the 1900s
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Jewish Polish history during the 1900s:
| This article is part of the History of Jews in Poland series. |
| Main article |
| Chronology of Jewish Polish history |
| The Holocaust camps and Poland |
| Jewish Polish current events |
| List of Polish Jews |
Contents |
[edit] Interwar period 1918-1939
[edit] Independence and Polish Jews
Jews also played a role in the fight for crisps for independence in 1918, some joining Józef Piłsudski, but many other communities decided to remain neutral in the fight for a Polish state. In the wake of the World War I and the ensuing series of conflicts that engulfed Eastern Europe like the Russian Civil War, Polish-Ukrainian War, Polish-Soviet War, many pogroms were launched against the Jews by all sides. As a significant number of Jews were perceived to have supported the Bolsheviks in Russia, they came under frequent attack by those opposed to the Bolshevik regime.
Just after the end of World War I the West became alarmed by reports about alleged massive pogroms in Poland against Jews. Pressure for government action reached the point where president Woodrow Wilson sent an official commission to investigate the issue. The commission, led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., announced that the reports of pogroms were exaggerated, and in some cases may even have been fabricated. It identified eighty nine major incidents in years 1918-1919, and estimated the number of victims at 200-300 Jews. Four of these were attributed to the actions of deserters and undisciplined individual soldiers, none were blamed on official government policy. Among the incidents, in Pinsk a Polish officer accused a group of Jewish communists of plotting against the Poles, shooting 35 of them. In Lviv (then Lemberg) in 1918, after the Polish army captured the city, hundreds of people were killed in the chaos, among them about 72 Jews. In Warsaw soldiers of Blue Army assaulted Jews on the streets, but they were punished by military authorities. Many other events in Poland were later found to have been exaggerated, especially by contemporary newspapers like New York Times, although serious abuses against the Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in the Ukraine. The result of the concern over the fate of the Jews of west Poland was a series of explicit clauses in the Paris Peace Conference protecting the rights of Jews in Poland.
[edit] Jewish and Polish culture
The newly independent Second Polish Republic had a large Jewish minority -- by the time World War II began, Poland had the largest concentration of Jews in Europe. According to the 1931 National Census there were 3,130,581 Polish Jews measured by the declaration of their religion. Estimating the population increase and the emigration from Poland between 1931 and 1939, there were probably 3,474,000 Jews in Poland as of September 1, 1939 (approximately 10% of the total population). Jews were primarily centered in large and smaller cities: 77% lived in cities and 23% in the villages. During the school year of 1937-1938 there were 226 elementary schools and 12 high schools as well as 14 vocational schools with either Yiddish or Hebrew as the instructional language. Jewish political parties, both the Socialist General Jewish Labor Union (The Bund), as well as parties of the Zionist right and left wing and religious conservative movements, were represented in the Sejm (the Polish Parliament) as well as in the regional councils.
The Jewish cultural scene was particularly vibrant. There were many Jewish publications and over 116 periodicals. Yiddish authors, most notably Isaac Bashevis Singer, went on to achieve international acclaim as classic Jewish writers, and in I.B. Singer's case, win the 1978 Nobel Prize. Other Jewish authors of the period, like Bruno Schulz or Julian Tuwim, were less well-known internationally, but made important contributions to Polish literature. Yiddish theatre also florished, Poland had 15 Yiddish theatres and theatrical groups. Warsaw was home to the most important Yiddish theater troupe of the time, the Vilna Troupe, which staged the first performance of The Dybbuk in 1920 at the Elyseum Theatre.
[edit] Rising Anti-Semitism
As the Second Republic matured, there was rising persecution of Jews in Poland, who were often not identified as true Poles; a problem both caused both by Polish nationalism, supported by the Sanacja government, and the fact that a substantial proportion of Jews lived separate lives from the Polish majority: 85% of Polish Jews listed Yiddish or Hebrew as their native language, for example. Although matters improved for a time under the rule of Piłsudski, who opposed anti-semitism, by the 1930s persecution had become common. Academic harassment, anti-Jewish riots, and semi-official or unofficial quotas (Numerus clausus) introduced in some universities halved the number of Jews in Polish universities between independence and the 1930s. In 1937 the trade unions of Polish doctors and lawyers restricted their new members to Christian Poles while many government jobs continued to be unavailable to Jews during this entire period. This was accompanied by physical violence: between May 1936 and January 1937, 118 Jews were killed, 1350 were wounded, and 137 Jewish stores were bombed in anti-Jewish violence in Poland. Western press continued to report about the tragic situation of Jews in Poland, e.g. reporting that in Bialystock alone in 1936 there were 248 assaults on Jews, including 21 mass riots or pogroms (New York Times, Feb 7, 1937). 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 Polish Jews until it was among the worst among major Jewish communities in the world. The result was that at 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.
[edit] WWII and the destruction of Polish Jewry (1939-1945)
Main articles: The Holocaust and History of Poland (1939-1945)
Concerning:
the Sheltering of Escaping Jews.
....There is a need for a reminder, that in accordance with paragraph 3 of the decree of October 15, 1941, on the Limitation of Residence in General Government (page 595 of the GG Register) Jews leaving the Jewish Quarter without permission will incur the death penalty.
....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
[edit] The Polish September campaign
During the Invasion of Poland of 1939, some 120,000 Jewish Polish citizens took part in battles with the Germans as member of the Polish Armed Forces. It is estimated that as many as 32,216 Jewish soldiers and officers died and 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans, the majority did not survive. The soldiers and non-commissioned officer who were released ultimately found themselves in the ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians.
[edit] Soviet-Occupied Poland
In newly partitioned Poland, according to Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, (according to 1931 census) 61.2% of Polish Jews found themselves under German occupation while 38.8% were in Soviet-occupied territory. Based on population migration from West to East during and after the Invasion of Poland the percentage of Jews in the Soviet-occupied areas was probably higher than that of 1931 census. Among Polish officers killed by the NKVD in 1941in the Katyn Massacre there were 500-600 Jews. Between 1939-1941 between 100,000-300,000 Polish Jews were deported from Soviet-occupied Polish territory into the Soviet Union. Some of them, especially Polish Communists (e.g. Jakub Berman) moved voluntarily, however, most of them were forcibly deported to Gulags. Small numbers of Polish Jews (about 6,000) were able to leave the Soviet Union in 1942 with the Wladyslaw Anders army, among them the future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin. During the Polish army's II Corps' stay in the British Mandate of Palestine, 67% (2,972) of the Jewish soldiers deserted, many to join the Irgun.
[edit] The Holocaust: German-occupied Poland
The Polish Jewish community suffered the most in the massacres of the Holocaust. About 3 million Jews (all but about 300,000-500,000 of the Jewish population) died of starvation in ghettos and labor camps or were killed at the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibór, Chelmno. Many Jews in what was then eastern Poland also 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 even active participation by, Poles themselves. For example, the massacre in Jedwabne, in which between 300 (Institute of National Remembrance's Final Findings [1]) and 1,600 (Jan T. Gross [2]) Jews were tortured and beaten to death by part of Jedwabne's citizens. The full extent of Polish participation in the massacres of the Polish Jewish community remains a controversial subject, but the Polish Institute for National Remembrance identified 22 other towns that had pogroms similar to Jedwabne. [3]. The reasons for these massacres are still debated, but they included anti-Semitism, resentment over alleged cooperation with the Soviet invaders in Polish-Soviet War and during 39' invasion of Kresy regions, and simple greed for the possessions of the Jews.
The Germans also established a number of ghettos in which Jews were confined, and eventually killed. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people and Łódź, the second largest, holding about 160,000. Other Polish cities with large Jewish ghettos included Białystok, Częstochowa, Kielce, Kraków, Lublin, Lwów, and Radom. The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the ghetto was estimated to be about 380,000 people, about 30% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 2.4% of the size of Warsaw. The Germans then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16 of that year, building a wall around it. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages were brought into the Warsaw Ghetto, while diseases (especially typhoid) and starvation (rations for Jews were officially limited to just 333 kcal per day (average rations 1940-1941), as opposed to 1,800 for Poles and 2,400 for Germans in Warsaw) kept the inhabitants at about the same number. On July 22, 1942, the mass expulsion of the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; in the next 52 days (till September 12, 1942) about 300,000 people were transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp. The deportations were carried out by 50 German SS-men, 200 Latvian, 200 Ukrainian Police, and 2,500 Jewish Ghetto Police. Employees of the Judenrat, including the Ghetto Police, along with their families and relatives, were given immunity from deportations in return for their cooperation. Additionally, in August of 1942, Jewish Ghetto policemen, under the threat of deportation themselves, were ordered to personally "deliver" five ghetto inhabitants to the Umschlagplatz train station. On January 18, 1943, some Ghetto inhabitants, including members of ZOB, resisted, often with arms, German attempts for additional deportations to Treblinka. The final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto came four months later during and after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Some of the survivors ot this uprising still held in camps at or near Warsaw were freed a year later during the larger Warsaw Uprising led by Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa.
Poland was the only occupied country during World War II where the Nazis formally imposed the death penalty for anybody found sheltering and helping Jews. Despite these draconian measures by the Nazi Germans, Poland has the highest amount of Righteous Among The Nations awards at the Yad Vashem Museum.
The Polish Government in Exile was also the first (in November 1942) [4] to reveal the existence of Nazi-run concentration camps and the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, through its courier Jan Karski and through the activities of Witold Pilecki, member of Armia Krajowa and the only person who volunteered for imprisoning in Auschwitz and organised a resistance movement inside the camp itself. The Polish government in exile was also the only government to set up an organization Zegota specifically aimed at helping the Jews in Poland [5].
[edit] Communist rule: 1945-1989
[edit] Post-war
Between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust in Poland by hiding or by joining the Polish or Russian partisan units. Another 50,000-170,000 were repatriated from the Soviet Union and 20,000-40,000 from Germany and other countries. At its post-war peak, there were 180,000-240,000 Jews in Poland settled mostly in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, and Wrocław.
Soon after the end of the Second World War, Jews began to flee Poland. Prompted by renewed anti-Jewish violence, especially the Kielce pogrom of 1946; the refusal of the Communist regime to return pre-war Jewish property; and a desire to leave communities destroyed by the Holocaust and build a new life in the British Mandate of Palestine, 100,000-120,000 Jews left Poland between 1945-1948. Their departure was largely organized by the Zionist activists in Poland such as Adolf Berman and Yitzhak Zuckerman under the umbrella of a semi-clandestine organization Berihah ("Flight"). Berihah was also responsible for the organized emigration of Jews from Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia totaling 250,000 (including Poland) Holocaust survivors. A second wave of Jewish emigration (50,000) took place during the liberalization of the Communist regime between (1957-1959).
For those Polish Jews who remained, the rebuilding of Jewish life in Poland was carried out between October 1944 and 1950 by the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydow Polskich, CKŻP) headed by Bund activist S. Herszenhorn. CKŻP was providing legal, educational, social care, cultural, and propaganda services. A country-wide Jewish Religious Community, led by David Kahane who served as chief rabbi of the Polish Armed Forces, was functioning between 1945 and 1948 until it was absorbed by the CKŻP. Eleven independent political Jewish parties, of which eight were legal, existed until their dissolution during 1949-1950.
A large percentage of Polish Jews participated in the establishment of the Communist regime in People's Republic of Poland between 1944-1956 holding, among others, prominent posts in the Politburo of the Polish United Worker's Party (e.g. Jakub Berman, Hilary Minc - responsible for establishing a Communist-style economy), and the security apparatus Urzad Bezpieczenstwa (UB). After 1956, during the process of destalinisation in Poland under Władysław Gomułka's regime, some Urzad Bezpieczenstwa officials including Roman Romkowski (b. Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel), Jacek Różański (b. Jozef Goldberg), Anatol Fejgin were prosecuted for "power abuses" including the torture of Polish anti-Communists (among them, Witold Pilecki) and sentenced to long prison terms. A UB official, Józef Światło, (b. Izak Fleichfarb), after escaping in 1953 to the West, exposed through Radio Free Europe the methods of the UB which led to its dissolution in 1954.
Some Jewish cultural institutions were established including the Yiddish State Theater founded in 1950 and directed by Ida Kaminska [6], the Jewish Historical Institute [7] an academic institution specializing in research of history and culture of the Jews in Poland, and the Yiddish newspaper Folks-shtime ("People's Voice").
[edit] From 1967-1989
In 1967, following the Six-Day War, Poland broke-off diplomatic relations with Israel. By 1968 most of Poland's 40,000 remaining Jews were assimilated into Polish society, but over the next year they became the centre of a centrally organised campaign, equating Jewish origins with Zionist sympathies and thus disloyalty to Poland.
In March of 1968 student-led demonstrations in Warsaw (March 1968 events) gave the government of Władysław Gomułka an excuse to channel public anti-government sentiment into another avanue. Thus Gumulka security chief, Mieczysław Moczar, used this affair as a pretext to launch an anti-Semitic press campaign (although the expression "Zionist" was officially used). The state-sponsored "anti-Zionist" campaign resulting in removal of Jews from the Polish United Worker's Party and public services jobs including teaching positions in schools and universities. Due to the economic, political and police pressure, 25,000 Jews were forced to emigrate during 1968-1970. The campaign, despite being ostensibly directed at Jews who had held office during the Stalin era and their families, affected most of the remaining Polish Jews whatever their backgrounds.
There were several outcomes of the March 1968 events, The campaign damaged Poland's reputation abroad, particularly in the United States. Many Polish intellectuals, however, were disgusted at the promotion of official anti-Semitism and opposed the campaign. Some of the people who emigrated to the West at this time founded organisations which encouraged anti-communistic opposition inside Poland.
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 Committee for the Defense of Workers (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.
