History of the Jews in Poland

The history of Jews in Poland dates back over a millennium.^[1] Poland was home to the largest Jewish population in Europe and served as the center for Jewish culture, ranging from a long period of religious tolerance and prosperity among the country's Jewish population, to its nearly complete genocidal destruction by Nazi Germany in the twentieth century during the German occupation of Poland and the Holocaust.

Summary

From the founding of the Kingdom of Poland in the eleventh century through the early years of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created in 1569, Poland was one of the most tolerant countries in Europe.^[2] Known as paradisus Iudaeorum (Latin for Jewish paradise) it became home to one of the world's largest and most vibrant Jewish communities. With the weakening of the Commonwealth and growing religious strife (due to the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation), Poland’s traditional tolerance^[3] began to wane from the seventeenth century onward.^[4] For centuries Poland was unique shelter for persecuted and expelled European Jewish communities. Polin, as the Jews called the place in Yiddish, a place which meant in Hebrew 'Here shalt thou lodge' in the exile from the Land of Israel. Famous rabbi of Kraków Moses Isserles living in the 16th century concluded: "had not the Lord left us this land as a refuge, the fate of Israel would have been indeed unbearable".^[5] In 1568 Polish King Sigismund II Augustus issued privilege de non tolerandis christianis for Jewish inhabitant of Kazimierz. It was an extraordinary prohibition for Christians to enter Jewish town. After the partitions of Poland in 1795 and the destruction of Poland as a sovereign state, Polish Jews were subject to the laws of the partitioning powers, primarily the increasingly anti-Semitic Russian Empire,^[6] but also Austro-Hungary and Prussian/German Empire. Still, as Poland regained independence in the twentieth century, immediately prior to World War II, it was the center of the European Jewish world with a vibrant Jewish community of over three million, one of the largest in the world, though anti-Semitism, both political and from the general population, common throughout contemporary Europe, was a growing problem.^[7]

Over 90% of the Polish Jewry, about three million, were killed during the Holocaust (also called Shoah in Hebrew) in German Nazi-occupied Poland, along with approximately three million of non-Jewish Poles. (For a discussion of how the number of Jewish deaths is determined, see Holocaust victims and death toll.) The Nazi occupation of Poland resulted in the death of one-fifth of the Polish population. There was no collaborationist government in Poland[1], and relatively little collaboration by individual Poles with the Nazis in Poland, including the Holocaust.^[8]^[9] The attitude of non-Jewish Poles ranged from extreme cases of participation in massacres such as the Jedwabne pogrom and similar pogroms in 22 other Polish towns,^[10] through cases of blackmail^[11] (szmalcownik) of Jews hiding from German persecution (condemned by the Polish Underground State^[12] and punished by death), indifference to the plight of the Jews or unwillingness to help due to fear for ones own life, to active assistance (Zegota) in evading and resisting the Germans such as Irena Sendler, who saved about 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto.^[13] Those non-Jews who worked at great risk to their personal safety to save Jews became known as the Righteous Among the Nations (or sometimes Righteous Gentiles). 6,066 Poles have received the honor of being named Righteous Among the Nations,^[14] the highest number of any other nation. Polish Righteous came from all classes and their success demonstrates that there would have been far more survivors if readiness to help had been more widespread among Polish Christian population. Poland however, along with territories of today's Belarus and Ukraine included in the General Government, was the only occupied country in Europe in which anyone caught aiding a Jew was automatically subject to the death penalty,^[15]^[16] along with all family members of the same residence and often neighbors as well.[2]

Many Holocaust survivors however have rather negative attitudes toward the Poles based on their experiences before, during and shortly after the war. Most claim that vast majority of Christian Poles were passive witness, sometimes even glad that the Jews were being removed and did nothing to aid their neighbours. It is hard to know how many Poles, themselves victims of German barbarity, had sympathy for their Jewish neighbours but were paralyzed into inaction by fear.

In the postwar period, many of the approximately 200,000 survivors chose to emigrate from the communist People's Republic of Poland to the nascent State of Israel, United States and South America, their departure hastened by the destruction of most Jewish institutions, post-war pogroms, and the hostility of the communist party to both religion and to private enterprise. Most of the remaining Jews left Poland in the late 1960s as the result of the Soviet state-sponsored anti-Semitic anti-Zionist campaign. After the fall of the communist regime in Poland in 1989, the situation of Polish Jews became normalized and Jews who were Polish citizens before World War II were allowed to get new Polish citizenship. Religious institutions were revived, largely through the activities of Jewish foundations from the United States including the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. The contemporary Polish Jewish community is generally estimated to have approximately 8,000 to 12,000 members, though the actual number of Jews, including those who are not actively connected to Judaism or Jewish culture, may be several times larger.

Early history to Golden Age: 966–1572

Early history: 966–1385

The first Jews arrived in the territory of modern Poland in the tenth century. Travelling along the trade routes leading eastwards to Kiev and Bukhara, the Jewish merchants (known as Radhanites) also crossed the areas of Silesia. One of them, a diplomat and merchant from the Moorish town of Tortosa in Spanish Al-Andalus, known under his Arabic name of Ibrahim ibn Jakub, was the first chronicler to mention the Polish state under the rule of prince Mieszko I. The first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the eleventh century. It appears that Jews were then living in Gniezno, at that time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty. The first permanent Jewish community is mentioned in 1085 by a Jewish scholar Jehuda ha-Kohen in the city of Przemyśl (nevertheless it was Ruthenian town in this time).

Early medieval Polish coins with Hebrew inscriptions

The first extensive Jewish emigration from Western Europe to Poland occurred at the time of the First Crusade in 1098. Under Boleslaus III (1102–1139), the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant régime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border into Lithuanian territory as far as Kiev. At the same time Poland saw immigration of Khazars, a Turkic tribe that had converted to Judaism. Boleslaus III on his part recognised the utility of the Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country. The Jews came to form the backbone of the Polish economy and the coins minted by Mieszko III even bear Hebraic markings. Jews enjoyed undisturbed peace and prosperity in the many principalities into which the country was then divided; they formed the middle class in a country where the general population consisted of landlords (developing into szlachta, the unique Polish nobility) and peasants, and they were instrumental in promoting the commercial interests of the land.

The tolerant situation was gradually altered by the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand, and by the neighbouring German states on the other. There were, however, among the reigning princes some determined protectors of the Jewish inhabitants, who considered the presence of the latter most desirable insofar as the economic development of the country was concerned. Prominent among such rulers was Boleslaus the Pious of Kalisz, Prince of Great Poland. With the consent of the class representatives and higher officials, in 1264 he issued a General Charter of Jewish Liberties, the Statute of Kalisz, which granted all Jews the freedom of worship, trade and travel. During the next hundred years, the Church pushed for the persecution of the Jews while the rulers of Poland usually protected them.

In 1334, Casimir III the Great (1303–1370) amplified and expanded Bolesław's old charter with the Wiślicki Statute. Casimir was especially friendly to the Jews, and his reign is regarded as an era of great prosperity for Polish Jewry, and was surnamed by his contemporaries "King of the serfs and Jews." Nevertheless, while for the greater part of Casimir’s reign the Jews of Poland enjoyed tranquillity, toward its close they were subjected to persecution on account of the Black Death. In 1347 the first blood libel accusation against Jews in Poland recorded, and in 1367 the first pogrom, in Poznań.^[17] Later the massacres occurred at Kalisz, Kraków, Głogów, and other Polish cities along the German frontier, and it is estimated that 10,000 Jews were killed. Compared with the pitiless destruction of their co-religionists in Western Europe, however, the Polish Jews did not fare badly; and the Jewish masses of Germany fled to the more hospitable lands of Poland.

File:FirstCrusade.jpg

While Jews (identifiable by their distinctive hats in this 1250 French Bible illustration) were being killed by Crusaders in Germany, Bolesław III invited them to the safety of Poland.

The early Jagiellon era: 1385–1505

As a result of the marriage of Wladislaus II to Jadwiga, daughter of Louis I of Hungary, Lithuania was united with the kingdom of Poland. Although, in 1388, rights were extended to Lithuanian Jews as well, it was under the rule of Wladislaus II and those of his successors that the first extensive persecutions of the Jews in Poland commenced, and the king did not act to stop these events. There were a number of blood libels and riots against the Jews, and official persecution gradually increased, especially as the clergy pushed for less tolerance. Hysteria caused by Black Death led to additional fourteenth-century outbreaks of violence against the Jews. Traders and artisans fearing Jewish rivalry supported the harassment. I

The decline in the status of the Jews was briefly checked by Casimir IV the Jagiellonian (1447–1492), but to increase his power he soon issued the Statute of Nieszawa.^[18] Among other things it abolished the ancient privileges of the Jews "as contrary to divine right and the law of the land." The policy of the government toward the Jews of Poland was not more tolerant under Casimir's sons and successors, John I Olbracht (1492–1501) and Alexander the Jagiellonian (1501–1506), who expelled the Jews from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1495.

Center of the Jewish world: 1505–72

Alexander reversed his position in 1503, just as the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, as well as from Austria, Bohemia and Germany, thus stimulating the Jewish emigration to much more tolerant Poland. Indeed, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Poland became the recognized haven for exiles from western Europe; and the resulting accession to the ranks of Polish Jewry made it the cultural and spiritual center of the Jewish people.

The most prosperous period for Polish Jews began following this new influx of Jews with the reign of Zygmunt I (1506–1548), who protected the Jews in his realm. His son, Zygmunt II August (1548–1572), mainly followed in the tolerant policy of his father and also granted autonomy to the Jews in the matter of communal administration and laid the foundation for the power of the Kahal, or autonomous Jewish community. This period led to the creation of a proverb about Poland being a "heaven for the Jews". By the mid-16th century, eighty percent of the world’s Jews lived in Poland. Jewish religious life thrived in many Polish communities. In 1503, the Polish monarchy appointed Rabbi Jacob Polak, the official Rabbi of Poland, marking the emergence of the Chief Rabbinate. By 1551, Jews were given permission to choose their own Chief Rabbi. The Chief Rabbinate held power over law and finance, appointing judges and other officials. Some power was shared with local councils. The Polish government permitted the Rabbinate to grow in power, to use it for tax collection purposes. Only thirty percent of the money raised by the Rabbinate served Jewish causes, the rest went to the Crown for protection. In this period Poland-Lithuania became the main center for Ashkenazi Jewry and its yeshivot achieved fame from the early 1500s.

One the great talmudic scholars of the 1500s was Moses ben Israel Isserles (1525-1572). He founded a religious academy in Cracow. Beyond Talmudic study, he was also familiar with many of the Greek philosophers and was one of the forerunners of the Jewish enlightenment.

Additionally, some Polish words may reveal that the exiled Jews coming from Spain brought with them onions (and possibly more then-exotic plants or foods), as onions are called "Cebula" in Polish ("Cebolla" in Spanish).

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: 1572–1795

The Warsaw Confederation

Following the childless death of Zygmunt II, the last king of the Jagiellon dynasty, Polish and Lithuanian nobles (szlachta) gathered at Warsaw in 1573 and signed a document of limited toleration in which representatives of all the major religions pledged each other mutual support and tolerance. The edict did not include the Polish Brethren, an anti-Trinitarian that would later become known as Socinians, who formed roots for the modern Unitarian church in the US.

Increasing isolation: The traditional view and recent scholarly challenges

The simplistic earlier narrative of Jewish life in Poland emphasized the rise of anti-Jewish sentiments (sometimes anachronistically labelled "anti-Semitic") by focusing on the rise of anti-Jewish libels (host desecration and ritual murder accusations). That narrative tended to highlight persecution, and Jewish isolation and autonomy. Yet, recent scholarly works (Fram, Hundert, Rosman, Teller, and Teter) have shown that Jews were not isolated from their Christian neighbours. For example, Jews spoke local languages (although they did retain Yiddish), shared sense of fashion (for example Christian borrowed clothes from Jews to go to church, see a responsum no. 86 by Benjamin Slonik), they shared spaces too (rabbis and the clergy were increasingly worried that Jews and Christians lived together under the same roof). Contrary to the common view of total Jewish autonomy and isolation, historical evidence shows that Jews often used gentile courts against other Jews, and frequently summoned Christians both to lay and Church courts (see works by Judith Kalik, Adam Teller, and Magda Teter). The existence of the Council of Four Lands has often been cited as a pinnacle of Jewish autonomy and self-government in Poland. Yet both the creation and the dissolution of the council are linked to the fiscal transformations of the Polish state. Similarly, while traditional scholarship has promoted an idealized view of Jewish rabbinic culture and self-government, focusing on rabbinic sources, recent works by scholars have shown that this was also a period of transformation if not outright decline of rabbinic authority (see for instance books and articles by Adam Teller). In short, scholars in recent decades have created a much more textured picture of Jewish life in premodern Poland-Lithuania that has gone far away from the view of isolation and persecution. Since late XIV century native Polish merchants became powerful enough to compete with Jewish businessmen, and in the XVI century Jews were barred from the guilds, and large Polish towns limited Jewish entrepreneurship.

The Cossack uprising and the Deluge

In 1648 the Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its populations (over three million people), and Jewish losses were counted in hundreds of thousands. First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). It is recorded that Chmielnicki told the people that the Poles had sold them as slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews". The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that 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 Cossack uprising which had been directed primarily against the Polish nobility. The Jews, perceived as allies of the nobles, were also victims of the revolt, during which about twenty per cent of them were killed. Then the incompetent politics of the elected kings of the House of Vasa brought the weakened state to its knees, as it was invaded by the Swedish Empire in what became known as The Deluge. The kingdom of Poland proper, which had hitherto suffered but little either from the Chmielnicki Uprising or from the recurring invasion of the Russians, Crimean Tatars and Ottomans, now became the scene of terrible disturbances (1655–1658). Charles X of Sweden, at the head of his victorious army, overran Poland; and soon the whole country, including the cities of Kraków and Warsaw, was in his hands. The Jews of Great and Little Poland found themselves torn between two sides: those of them who were spared by the Swedes were attacked by the Poles, who accused them of aiding the enemy. The Polish general Stefan Czarniecki, in his flight from the Swedes, devastated the whole country through which he passed and treated the Jews without mercy. The Polish partisan detachments treated the non-Polish inhabitants with equal severity. Moreover, the horrors of the war were aggravated by pestilence, and the Jews and townsfolk of the districts of Kalisz, Kraków, Poznań, Piotrków, and Lublin perished en masse by the sword of the besieging armies and the plague.

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 and become impoverished, it still was more numerous than that of the Jewish colonies in Western Europe; and Poland remained as the spiritual center of Judaism, and through 1698, the Polish kings generally remained supportive of the Jews, despite a hostile clergy and nobility. It also should be noted that while Jewish losses in those events were high, estimated by some historians to be close to 500,000, the Commonwealth lost one third of its population — approximately three million of its citizens.

Decline under the Saxon dynasty

With the accession to the throne of the Saxon dynasty the Jews completely lost the support of the government. The szlachta and the townsfolk were increasingly hostile to the Jews, as the religious tolerance that dominated the mentality of the previous generations of Commonwealth citizens was slowly forgotten. In their intolerance, the citizens of the Commonwealth now approached the "standards" that dominated most of the contemporary European countries, and many Jews felt betrayed by the country they once viewed as their haven. In the larger cities, like Poznań and Kraków, quarrels between the Satins and the Jewish inhabitants were of frequent occurrence. Attacks on the Jews by students, the so-called Schüler-Gelauf, became everyday occurrences in the large cities, the police regarding such scholastic riots with indifference. In the XVI and XVII centuries Jews were expelled from the number of Polish towns, and victimized by pogroms usually organized by local merchants and artisans.^[19]

The partitions

There were three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and in 1795. Poland was divided among Russia, Prussia and Austria; Poland-Lithuania no longer existed. The majority of Poland’s one-million Jews became part of the Russian empire. Poland became a mere client state of the Russian empire. In 1772, Catherine II, empress of Russia; discriminated against the Jews by forcing them to stay in their shtetls and barring their return to the towns they occupied before the partition. Disorder and anarchy reigned supreme in Poland during the second half of the eighteenth century, from the accession to the throne of its last king, Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski (1764–1795). In 1772, in the aftermath of the Confederation of Bar, the outlying provinces of Poland were divided among the three neighboring nations, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Jews were most numerous in the territories that fell to the lot of Austria and Russia.

Drawings of Jewish dress in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (top) and (bottom) the eighteenth century.

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 Komisja Edukacji Narodowej ("Commission of National Education"), the first ministry of education in the world, was established in 1773 and founded numerous new schools and remodeled the old ones. One of the members of the commission, kanclerz Andrzej Zamoyski, along with others, demanded that the inviolability of their persons and property should be guaranteed and that religious toleration should be to a certain extent granted them; but he insisted that Jews living in the cities should be separated from the Christians, that those of them having no definite occupation should be banished from the kingdom, and that even those engaged in agriculture should not be allowed to possess land. On the other hand, some szlachta and intellectuals proposed a national system of government, of the civil and political equality of the Jews. This was the only example in modern Europe before the French Revolution of tolerance and broadmindedness in dealing with the Jewish question. But all these reforms were too late: a Russian army soon invaded Poland, and soon after a Prussian one followed.

A second partition of Poland was made on July 17, 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 great bulk of the Jewish population was transferred to Russia, and thus became subjects of that empire, although in the first half of the nineteenth century some semblance of a vastly smaller Polish state was preserved, especially in the form of the Congress Poland (1815–1831).

Jews were represented in the November Insurrection (1830 - 1831), the January Insurrection (1863), as well as in the revolutionary movement of 1905. Many Polish Jews were enlisted in the Legions, commanded by , which fought for the Polish independence finally achieved in 1918.

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 until the Nazi Holocaust, Poland would be at the center of Jewish religious life.

Jewish learning

Yeshivot were established, under the direction of the rabbis, in the more prominent communities. Such schools were officially known as gymnasiums, 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 sixteenth century. In 1530 a Hebrew Pentateuch (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.

File:Zabludlow syn.jpg

Synagogue in Zabłudłów (late 1600s).

In the first half of the sixteenth century the seeds of Talmudic learning had been transplanted to Poland from Bohemia, particularly from the school of Jacob Pollak, the creator of Pilpul ("sharp reasoning"). Shalom Shachna (ca. 1500–1558), a pupil of Pollak, is counted among the pioneers of Talmudic learning in Poland. He lived and died in Lublin, where he was the head of the yeshivah which produced the rabbinical celebrities of the following century. Shachna's son Israel became rabbi of Lublin on the death of his father, and Shachna's pupil Moses Isserles (known as the ReMA) (1520–1572) achieved an international reputation among the Jews as the co-author of the Shulkhan Arukh, (the "Code of Jewish Law"). His contemporary and correspondent Solomon Luria (1510–1573) of Lublin also enjoyed a wide reputation among his co-religionists; and the authority of both was recognized by the Jews throughout Europe. Heated religious disputations were common, and Jewish scholars participated in them. At the same time, the Kabbalah had become entrenched under the protection of Rabbinism; and such scholars as Mordecai Jaffe and Yoel Sirkis devoted themselves to its study. This period of great Rabbinical scholarship was interrupted by the Chmielnicki Uprising and The Deluge.

Israel ben Eliezer, founder of Hasidism.

The rise of Hasidism

The decade from the Cossacks' uprising until after the Swedish war (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.

In this time of mysticism and overly formal rabbinism came the teachings of Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, or BeShT, (1698–1760), which had a profound effect on the Jews of Eastern Europe and Poland in particular. His disciples taught and encouraged the new fervent brand of Orthodox Judaism based on Kabbalah known as Hasidism. The rise of Hasidic Judaism within Poland's borders and beyond had a great influence on the rise of Haredi Judaism all over the world, with a continuous influence through its many Hasidic dynasties including those of Chabad-Lubavitch, Aleksander, Bobov, Ger, Nadvorna, among others. More recent rebbes of Polish origin include Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn (1880–1950), the sixth head of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement, who lived in Warsaw until 1940 when he moved Lubavitch from Warsaw to the United States. See also: List of Polish Rabbis

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 1800s, over four million Jews would live in the Pale.

Initially, Russian policy towards the Jews of Poland was confused, alternating between harsh rules and somewhat more enlightened policies. In 1802, the Tsar established the Committee on the Improvement of the Jews in an attempt to develop a coherent approach to the Empire's new Jewish population. The Committee in 1804 suggested a number of steps that were designed to encourage Jews to assimilate, though it did not force them to do so. It proposed that Jews be allowed to attend school and even to own land, but it restricted them from entering Russia, banned them from the brewing industry, and included a number of other prohibitions. The more enlightened parts of this policy were never fully implemented, and the conditions of the Jews in the Pale gradually worsened. In the 1820s, the Cantonist Laws passed by Tsar Nicolas kept the traditional double taxation on Jews in lieu of army service, while actually requiring all Jewish communities to produce boys to serve in the military, where they were often forced to convert. Though the Jews were accorded slightly more rights with the emancipation reform of 1861, they were still restricted to the Pale of Settlement and subject to restrictions on ownership and profession. The status quo was however shattered with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an act falsely blamed upon the Jews.

Pogroms

The assassination prompted a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots, called pogroms, throughout 1881–1884. In the 1881 outbreak, pogroms were primarily limited to Russia, although in a riot in Warsaw twelve Jews were killed, many others were wounded, women were raped and over two million rubles worth of property was destroyed. The new czar, Alexander III, blamed the Jews for the riots and issued a series of harsh restrictions on Jewish movements. Pogroms continued in large numbers until 1884, with at least tacit government approval. They proved a turning point in the history of the Jews in Poland and throughout the world. The pogroms prompted a great flood of Jewish immigration to the United States, with almost two million Jews leaving the Pale by the late 1920s, and the pogroms set the stage for Zionism.

An even bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, and at least some of the pogroms are believed to have been organized or supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police, the Okhranka. Some of the worst of these occurred on Polish territory, where the majority of Russian Jews lived then, and included the Białystok pogrom of 1906, in which up to a hundred Jews were killed and many more wounded.

Haskalah and Halakha

The Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah, began to take hold in Poland during the 1800s, stressing secular ideas and values. Champions of Haskalah, the Maskilim, pushed for assimilation and integration into Russian culture. At the same time, there was another school of Jewish thought that emphasized traditional study and a Jewish response to the ethical problems of anti-Semitism and persecution, one form of which was the Mussar movement. Polish Jews generally were less influenced by Haskalah, rather focusing on a strong continuation of their religious lives based on Halakha ("rabbis's law") following primarily Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, and also adapting to the new Religious Zionism of the Mizrachi movement later in the 1800s.

Politics in Polish territory

By the late 1800s, 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 Poale Zion socialist party as well as the religious Polish Mizrahi, and the increasingly popular General Zionists. Jews also took up socialism, forming the Bund labor union which supported assimilation and the rights of labor. The Folkspartei (People’s Party) advocated for its part cultural autonomy and resistance to assimilation. In 1912, Agudat Israel, a religious party, came into existence.

Since Jews were treated badly by the Russians, many decided to become in involved in the Polish insurrections. Jews participated in a number of Polish insurrections against the Russians, including the Kościuszko Insurrection (above), and the January Insurrection (1863) as well as the Revolutionary Movement of 1905.

In 1897, fourteen percent of Polish citizens were Jewish. Jews were represented in government with seats in the Sejm, municipals councils and in Jewish religious communities. Jews developed many political parties and associations, ranging in ideologies from Zionist to socialist to Anti-Zionist. The Bund, a socialist party, spread throughout Poland in the early 20th century. Many Jewish workers in Warsaw and Lodz joined the Bund.

In 1914 German Zionist have founded German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, which main goal was establishment of 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 and hence to make impossible resurrection of independent Poland.^[20]

Zionism also became popular among Polish Jews, who formed the Poale Zion. Another group, the Folksists (People’s Party) supported assimilation and trade unions. The Polish Mizrahi, a Zionist orthodox political party, had a large following. General Zionists became popular in the inter-war period. In the 1919 election of the Sejm, the General Zionists received 50 percent of the votes for Jewish parties.

Interwar period 1918–39

Independence and Polish Jews

Jews also played a role in the fight for independence in 1918, some joining Józef Piłsudski, while many other communities decided to remain neutral in the fight for a Polish state. In the wake of World War I and the ensuing conflicts that engulfed Eastern Europe — the Russian Civil War, Polish-Ukrainian War, and Polish-Soviet War — many pogroms were launched against the Jews by all sides. As a substantial 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 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sent an official commission to investigate the matter. The commission, led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., announced in its report that the reports of pogroms were exaggerated, and in some cases may even have been fabricated (Morgenthau Report). It identified eight major incidents in the 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 Pińsk a Polish officer accused a group of Jewish civilians of plotting against the Poles and shot thirty-five of them (Pinsk massacre). In Lviv (then Lwów) in 1918, after the Polish Army captured the city, hundreds of people were killed in the chaos, including some seventy-two Jews. In Warsaw, soldiers of Blue Army assaulted Jews in the streets, but were punished by military authorities. Many other events in Poland were later found to have been exaggerated, especially by contemporary newspapers such as The New York Times, although serious abuses against the Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in Ukraine.^[21] The result of the concern over the fate of Poland's Jews was a series of explicit clauses in the Versailles Treaty protecting the rights of minorities in Poland. In 1921, Poland's March Constitution gave the Jews the same legal rights as other citizens and guaranteed them religious tolerance.

File:PolishHasidicBoys.jpg

Hasidic schoolchildren in Łódź, circa 1910s.

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 but most Polish Jews had a cultural and ethnic identity totally different from that of Polish Catholics. 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. In 1939 there were 375,000 Jews in Warsaw[3] or one third of the city's population.[4] Only New York City had more Jewish residents than Warsaw.

The overwhelming majority of Polish Jews at that time worked in commerce industry. In some areas the Jews constituted a majority of shopkeeppers and merchants. Tailoring and shoemaking were also typical Jewish occupations. At the same time 56 per cent of all doctors, 43 per cent of teachers, 33 per cent of lawyers, and 22 per cent of journalists were Jewish.

Jewish youth and religious groups, diverse political parties and Zionist organizations, newspapers and theatre flourished. In addition to small businesses, Jews owned real estate and export and manufacturing enterprises. Religious practices ranged from Hasidism to modern “Progressive” Judaism. Most Warsaw Jews spoke Yiddish, but Polish was increasingly used by the young who have not had a problem in identifying themselves fully as Jews, Warsavians and Poles. Polish Jews were entering the mainstream of Polish society, though many thought of themselves as a separate nationality within Poland. It has been estimated that more than 80 percent of Polish Jews were easily recognizable, while 20 percent could be considered assimilated. More than half the Jewish children attended special Jewish schools. Enrollment in religious school, in turn, discouraged mastery of the Polish language. Thus, in answer to a 1931 census inquiry, the overwhelming majority of Jews mentioned Yiddish as their native tongue (79 per cent) and only 12 percent gave Polish as their first language. The rest chose Hebrew. During the school year of 1937–1938 there were 226 elementary schools[5] and twelve high schools as well as fourteen vocational schools with either Yiddish or Hebrew as the instructional language. The YIVO (Jidiszer Wissenszaftlecher Institute) Scientific Institute was based in Wilno before transferring to New York during the war. Jewish political parties, both the Socialist General Jewish Labor Union (The Bund)[6], 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.

File:Leale.jpg

Hanna Rovina as Leah'le in The Dybbuk.

The Jewish cultural scene[7] was particularly vibrant and blossomed in pre-World War II Poland. 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 Singer's case, win the 1978 Nobel Prize. Other Jewish authors of the period, like Janusz Korczak, Bruno Schulz, Julian Tuwim, Jan Brzechwa (a favorite poet of Polish children) and Bolesław Leśmian were less well-known internationally, but made important contributions to Polish literature. Singer Jan Kiepura was one of the most popular artist of that era and pre-war songs of Jewish composers like Henryk Wars or Jerzy Petersburski are still widely known in Poland today. Scientist Leopold Infeld, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam or professor Adam Ulam contributed to the world of science. Others are Moses Schorr, Ludwik Zamenhof - the creator of Esperanto, Georges Charpak, Samuel Eilenberg, Emanuel Ringelblum, Arthur Rubinstein just to name a few from the long list of Polish Jews who are known internationally. The term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar. Leonid Hurwicz was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics. The Main Judaic Library and the Institute of Judaic Studies were located in Warsaw, religious centers had at their disposal Talmudic Schools (Jeszybots), as well as synagogues, many of which were architecturally outstanding. Yiddish theatre also flourished; Poland had fifteen 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.

Some future Israeli leaders studied at University of Warsaw - Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir.

Growing anti-Semitism

Antisemitism in Poland had reached high proportions in the immediate years before the Second World War, although Jews enjoyed unprecedented liberties during the Middle Ages, at a time when their brethren suffered persecution in the rest of Europe. Jews were often not identified as true Poles; a problem caused by both Polish nationalism, supported by the Endecja 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^{[citation needed]}. The matters improved for a time under the rule of Józef Piłsudski (1926–1935), who opposed anti-Semitism. Piłsudski replaced Endecja's 'ethnic assimilation' with the 'state assimilation' policy: citizens were judged by their loyalty to the state, not by their nationality.^[22] The years 1926–1935 were favourably viewed by many Polish Jews, whose situation improved especially under the cabinet of Pilsudski’s appointee Kazimierz Bartel.^[23] However a combination of various reasons, including the Great Depression,^[22] meant that the situation of Jewish Poles was never too satisfactory, and it deteriorated again after Piłsudski's death in May 1935, which many Jews regarded as a tragedy.^[24]

With Endecja party influence growing, although they never held office, antisemitism gathered new momentum in Poland and was most felt in smaller towns and spheres in which Jews came into direct contact with Poles, such as in Polish schools or on the sports field. Verbal abuse of Jewish children in Polish schools was commonplace. Polish high-school students, influenced by the Endeks, forced their Jewish comrades to stand during lessons; the teachers, even those who were not antisemites, were usually afraid to intervene. Jewish children often fell victim to antisemitic incidents on their way to or from school. On the way to the soccer stadium, Jews were set upon and beaten, and a victory by the Jewish side was sufficient reason for renewed attacks. Further academic harassment like ghetto benches, anti-Jewish riots, and semi-official or unofficial quotas (Numerus clausus) introduced in 1937 in some universities halved the number of Jews in Polish universities between independence and the late 1930s. The restrictions were so inclusive that while in 1921 Jews made up 24.6% of the student population by 1938 their share was down to only 8%. Right-wing students sometimes even assaulted their Jewish associates with canes or razors. In 1937 the Catholic 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: in the years between 1935 and 1937 seventy-nine Jews were killed and 500 injured in anti-Jewish incidents, there were also victims among anti-semites.^[25] The Endecja party promoted a national boycott of Jewish merchants. Under the guise of animal rights there was a national movement to forbid the Jewish ritual slaughter or koshering of animals. 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 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. Poland was also a strict Catholic country and the Poles were passionately devoted to the Catholic religion which at that time taught them that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. On the eve of World War II, many typical Polish Christians believed that there were far too many Jews in the country.

File:Poland Bekanntmachung.jpg

NOTICE
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

World War II and the destruction of Polish Jewry (1939–45)

The Polish September campaign

The number of Jews in Poland on September 1st 1939 amounted to about 3,474,000 people.[8] One hundred thirty thousand soldiers of Jewish descent served in Polish Army at the outbreak of the Second World War, thus being among the first to launch armed resistance against the Nazi Germany.[9] It is estimated that during the entirety of World War II as many as 32,216 Jewish soldiers and officers died and 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans; the majority did not survive. [10] The soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were released ultimately found themselves in the ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians.

For the duration of the war, many Jews were in the Polish Armed Forces in the West, in the Polish People's Army formed in the Soviet Union, as well as in civilian resistance movements and guerilla detachments. Many lost their lives or were wounded; very many received the highest combat distinctions.

Territories annexed by the USSR

The relations between the Jews and the local Gentile population of then Eastern Poland which contained Byelorussians, Ukrainians and mostly Poles, had been in general very good until the outbreak of the war in September 1939. On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany entered into a Nonaggression Pact, so-called Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with a secret protocol providing the partition of Poland. Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939 and the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939.[11] In newly partitioned Poland, according to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, (according to 1931 census) 61.2% of Polish Jews found themselves under German occupation while 38.8% were in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. 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 the 1931 census. The Soviet annexation was accompanied by the widespread arrests of government officials, police and military personnel, teachers, priests, judges, border guards, etc., followed by executions and massive deportation to Soviet interior and forced labour camps were many perished as a result of harsh conditions. The largest group of all those arrested or deported were ethnic Poles but Jews accounted for significant percentage of all the prisoners. Jewish refugees from Western Poland who registered for repatriation back to the German zone (people in the Soviet occupation zone had little knowledge of what was going on in the German occupation zone since the Soviet media did not report on their Nazi ally's misdeeds), wealthy Jewish capitalists, prewar political and social activists were labelled "class enemies" and deported for that reason. Jews caught for illegal border crossings or engaged in illicit trade and other "illegal" activities were also arrested and deported. Several thousand, mostly captured Polish soldiers were executed on the spot, some of them were Jewish. Private property, land, banks, factories, businesses, shops, and large workshops were nationalized. Political activity ceased and political prisoners filled the jails, many of whom were later executed. Zionism was designated as counter-revolutionary and forbidden. All Jewish and Polish newspapers were shut down within a day of the entry of the Soviet forces and anti-religious propaganda was conducted mainly through the new Soviet press which attacked religion in general and the Jewish faith in particular. Although the synagogues and churches were not shut down, they were heavily taxed. Sovietization of the economy affected the entire population. However, the Jewish communities were more vulnerable because of their distinctive social and economic structure. Red Army also brought with them new and different economic norms expressed in low wages, shortages in materials, rising prices, and a declining living standard. The Soviets also implemented a new employment policy that enabled many Jews to find jobs as civil servants while Poles were denied access to them and former Polish senior officials and leading personalities were arrested and exiled to remote regions of Russia together with their families.[12]

Compared to Poles who had strong anti-Soviet and anti-communist sentiments, a significant portion of the Jewish population, with the passive acquiescence of the vast majority, had initially welcomed Russian forces and openly embraced Soviet rule. Enthusiastic greeting of Soviet troops by Jewish residents, with flowers, kisses and pro-Soviet speeches was a common occurrence in almost every Polish town and village.[13] Some Polish Jews, especially young men and women with communist sympathies, wearing red armbands and often armed with rifles, cooperated with the Soviet security forces and served in the Red Militia or Revolutionary Committees actively assisting NKVD in the destruction of Polish State. Polish soldiers (especially officers) and policemen were disarmed, abused verbally and physically, and delivered by the Red Militia to the NKVD, sometimes even killed (see: Massacre of Brzostowica Mala). Although these pro-communist Jews made up a minority of the total Jewish population, they were very highly visible. While most Polish Catholics saw Soviets as invaders, many ordinary Polish Jews, even those who did not sympathize with Russian communism, saw them for what they claimed to be - protectors from the Nazis, even though Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allies at that time. That led to growing tensions between Polish and Jewish communities in those regions[14], made a strong impression in the rest of Poland and left an indelible mark that was to take its toll on relations between Poles and Jews throughout the war, creating until this day, an impasse to Polish-Jewish rapprochement.^[26]

Only a small percentage of the Jewish community had been members of the Communist Party of Poland during the inter-war era, though they had occupied an influential and conspicuous place in the party's leadership and in the rank and file in major centres, such as Warsaw, Lodz and Lwow. Far greater number of younger Jews, often through the pro-Marxist Bund (General Jewish Workers' Union) or some Zionist groups, had possessed an underlying sympathy for Communism and an affinity with Soviet Russia, both of which had been, of course, prime enemies of the Polish Second Republic. For these Jews, Communism had an almost messianic appeal, while the Soviet Union was regarded as their natural homeland. As a result of these ideological, political and anti-Polish factors they found it easy after 1939 to join the Soviet bandwagon in Eastern Poland, and soon occupied prominent positions in industry, schools, local government, police and other Soviet-installed institutions (Żydokomuna).

There were also many Jews, who regardless of some negative Jewish experiences in the prewar years, considered themselves both good Poles and good Jews and demonstrated loyalty toward Poland, assisting Poles during brutal Soviet occupation. Among Polish officers killed by the NKVD in 1940 in the Katyń massacre there were 500–600 Jews. From 1939 to 1941 between 100,000 and 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 Gulag. Small numbers of Polish Jews (about 6,000) were able to leave the Soviet Union in 1942 with the Władysław 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. General Anders decided not to prosecute the deserters.

The cemetery of Polish soldiers who died during the Battle of Monte Cassino contain also headstones bearing a Star of David.

The Holocaust: German-occupied Poland

The Polish Jewish community suffered the most in the Holocaust. About six million Polish citizens perished during the war[15], half of them (three million) Polish Jews - all but about 300,000 of the Jewish population - who were killed at the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibór, Chełmno or died of starvation in ghettos.^[27] Poland became the largest site of the Nazi extermination program, since this was where most of the intended victims lived. In 1939 several hundred synagogues were blown up or burnt by the Germans who sometimes forced the Jews to do it themselves. In many cases Germans turned the synagogues into factories, places of entertainment, swimming-pools or prisons. Jewish rabbis were ordered to dance and sing in public with their beards cut or torn. Some rabbis were set on fire or hang.

Within a few days, Germans ordered all Jews to register with them and the word “Jude” was stamped on their identity cards. Jews were placed outside the law and their lives were regulated by German orders or edicts. Series of restrictions and prohibitions were introduced and brutally enforced. Jews were forbidden to walk on the sidewalks, use public transport, enter places of leisure, sports arenas, theaters, museums and libraries. On the street, Jews had to lift their hat to passing Germans and contact between Jews and non-Jews was banned. 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.[16] The German-controlled Polish language press ran anti-Jewish articles that urged people to adopt an attitude of indifference towards the Jews.

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 of Poles themselves: for example, the massacre in Jedwabne, in which between 300 (Institute of National Remembrance's Final Findings^[28]) and 1,600 Jews (Jan T. Gross) 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, in part due to Jewish leaders refusing 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.^[29] The reasons for these massacres are still debated, but they included anti-Semitism, 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 (although the majority of Polish Jews prior to the war constituted some of Poland's poorest citizens), and of course coercion by the Nazis to participate in such massacres.[17]

By the spring of 1942, the German Nazis had established six killing centers (death camps) in Poland: Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidanek and Auschwitz. All were located near railway lines so that Jews could be easily transported daily. A vast system of camps, called Lagersystem, supported the death camps. The purpose of these camps varied: some were slave labor camps, some transit camps, others concentration camps and their subcamps, and still others the notorious death camps. Some camps combined all of these functions or only a few of them. All the camps were intolerably brutal. Many healthy, young strong Jews were not killed immediately. The Germans war effort and the “Final Solution” required a great deal of manpower, so the Germans reserved large pools of Jews for slave labor. These people, imprisoned in concentration and labor camps, were forced to work in German munitions and other factories, such as I.G. Farben and Krupps, and wherever the Nazis needed laborers. They were worked from dawn until dark without adequate food and shelter. Thousands perished, literally worked to death by the Germans and their collaborators. The German concentration camps depended on the cooperation of trustee inmates who supervised the prisoners. Known as Kapos, these trustees carried out the will of the Nazi camp commandants and guards, and were often as brutal as their SS counterparts. Some of these Kapos were Jewish, and even they inflicted harsh treatment on their fellow prisoners. After the war, the prosecution of Kapos as war criminals, particularly those who were Jewish, created an ethical dilemma which continues to this day.

The Germans also established a number of ghettos in which Jews were confined, slowly starved and cruelly offered hopes of survival but eventually ended up being killed.

In some ghettos, Jews had the ability to leave in and out while other ghettos were hermetically sealed, letting no one in or out, subjecting the Jews to starvation and epidemics. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000. Other Polish cities with large Jewish ghettos included Białystok, Częstochowa, Kielce, Kraków, Lublin, Lwów, and Radom. Ghettos were also established in smaller settlements.

Living conditions in the Ghettos were terrible. Overcrowding, dirt and lice resulted in lethal epidemics such as typhoid many Jews died from. Hunger was also a permanent fixture and resulted in countless deaths. The streets were filled with corpses. People still had to pay for burial, and if they couldn't afford it, the bodies were left unburied. Jews who tried to escape were shot to death with their bullet-riddled bodies to be left in public view until dusk as a warning. Many of those who fled to the Aryan side without connections with Christian Poles willing to risked their lives in order to help, returned to the ghettos when they were unable to find a place to hide. Since Nazi terror reigned throughout the Aryan districts, the chances of remaining successfully hidden undoubtedly depended on a fluent knowledge of the language and on having close ties with the community. Generally Poles were not willing to hide Jews who might have escaped ghettoes or who might have been in hiding due to fear for ones own life. The murder of Polish inhabitants by the Nazis was common even for lesser infractions, let alone for rendering assistance to Jews. The criminal ruthlessness of the Germans towards the Jews, regardless of sex or age, was accompanied by the very same ruthlessness towards the Poles who helped them, no matter for what reasons. In any apartment block or area where Jews were found to be harboured, everybody in the house was immediately shot by the Germans. Hundreds of Polish families died as a result of helping the Jews.[18][[19]]

For Jews to hide in Christian society was a daunting task. A new identity required being familiar with Christian religious customs of which Jews had no knowledge. Jews with the physical characteristics of curly black hair, dark eyes, dark complexion, a long nose were in special jeopardy and most Jews spoke Polish with an accent or used expressions derived from Yiddish which gave them away. Money or items of value were needed to pay those rescuers who required payment, to purchase food on the black market (hidden Jews did not have ration books), to purchase counterfeit documents, and to pay bribes to blackmailers. Some individuals took advantage of a hiding people desperation by collecting money, then reneging on their promise of aid—or worse, turning them over to the Germans for an additional reward. The Gestapo routinely offered a bounty for those who turned in Jews who were hiding. This bounty consisted of a quart of liquor, four pounds of sugar, a carton of cigarettes, or, at times, small cash payments. Many Jews were robbed and handed over to the Germans by "szmalcownik" Poles (from the Polish word "smalec" which means "fat") many of whom practiced blackmail as an "occupation". The fight against these informers was organized by Armia Krajowa, with the death sentence being meted out on a scale unknown in the occupied countries of Western Europe.

Hidden Jewish children were kept in cellars and attics, where they had to keep quiet, even motionless, for hours on end.[20] In rural areas, hidden children lived in barns, chicken coops, and forest huts. Any noise—conversation, footsteps—could arouse neighbors suspicion and perhaps even prompt a Gestapo raid. During bombings, Jewish children had to remain hidden, unable to flee to the safety of shelters. Under these conditions, the children often suffered from a lack of human interaction and endured boredom and fear.

Children also became couriers and smugglers. Hundreds of four to five year old Jewish children from Ghettos went across en masse to the Aryan side, sometimes several times a day, smuggling food into the ghettos, returning with goods that often weighed more than they did. Smuggling was sometimes the only source of subsistence for these children and their parents, who would otherwise have died of starvation.

Shooting of Jews who were caught trying to smuggle in food became routine. People were shot to death for bringing in a chicken or a liter of milk. Poles from the Aryan side who were found assisting Jews in obtaining food were subject to the death penalty.^[15]^[16]

Unemployment was a major problem in the ghetto. Illegal workshops were created to manufacture goods to be sold illegally on the outside and raw goods were smuggled in. Despite the grave hardships, life in the Warsaw Ghetto was rich with educational and cultural activities, conducted by its underground organizations. Hospitals, public soup kitchens, orphanages, refugee centers and recreation facilities were formed, as well as a school system. Some schools were illegal and operated under the guise of a soup kitchen. There were secret libraries, classes for the children and even a symphony orchestra.

Some religious Jews believed that their suffering was preordained and would bring about the Messiah. There were also many religious Jews involved in heroic acts. One famous leader was Janusz Korczak, the director of the Jewish orphanage, who chose to accompany the children he cared for when they were deported.

Poland was the only occupied country during World War II where the Nazis formally imposed the death penalty [21] for anybody found sheltering and helping Jews.^[15]^[16] This penalty was widely announced by the occupying authorities. What is more, this punishment was quite often imposed not only on the rescuer, but also on his/her family, often on neighbors, and on whole towns or villages. Failure to inform on a neighbor hiding Jews was punished by deportation to a concentration camp. The Germans believed in collective responsibility making Poles the most terrorized populations after the Jews and the Gypsies. Food rations for Poles were very small (669 kcal per day in 1941) and black market prices of food were high, factors which made it difficult to hide people and almost impossible to hide entire families, especially in the cities. Despite these draconian measures imposed by the Nazis, Poland has the highest number of Righteous Among The Nations awards at the Yad Vashem Museum.

The Warsaw Ghetto[22] was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. Around 138,000 Jews were forced into the ghetto from various districts around the city of Warsaw, whilst 113,000 Poles were forced to leave the area and were assigned quarters in so-called 'Aryan' districts. The German authorities allowed a Jewish Council (Judenrat) of 24 men, led by Adam Czerniaków,[23][24] to form its own police to maintain order in the ghetto. Some Jewish policemen distinguished themselves with their fearful corruption and immorality. Judenrat was also responsible for organizing the labour battalions demanded by the Germans. At the beginning the Judenrat served as a representative of the Jewish community, trying with bribes and submission to soften the Nazi blows. With the passage of time the Germans imposed new and more brutal demands on the Judenrat. The slightest sign of insubordination by the Judenrat was punished by death. In many towns the Judenrat refused cooperation and were subsequently executed with another group taking their place. The President of Warsaw Judenrat Adam Czerniakow, cooperated with the German authorities until he was ordered to compile daily lists of Jews destined for "resettlement". Knowing what resettlement meant, he refused and committed suicide.

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 kept the inhabitants at about the same number. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 253 kcal and 669 kcal for Poles as opposed to 2,613 kcal for Germans. On July 22, 1942, the mass deportation of the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; during the next fifty-two days (until September 12, 1942) about 300,000 people were transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp. The deportations were carried out by fifty German SS soldiers, 200 soldiers of the Latvian Schutzmannschaften Battalions, 200 Ukrainian Police[25], and 2,500 Jewish Ghetto Police. Employees of the Judenrat, including the Ghetto Police[26], along with their families and relatives, were given immunity from deportations in return for their cooperation. Additionally, in August 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 ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, Jewish Combat Organisation), resisted, often with arms, German attempts for additional deportations to Treblinka.

The first ghetto uprising is believed to have occurred in 1942 in the small town of Łachwa in the Polesie Voivodship.

The final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto came four months later after the crushing of one of the most heroic and tragic battles of the war, the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising led by Mordechaj Anielewicz. He recruited more than 750 fighters, but amassed only 9 rifles, 59 pistols and a couple of grenades. A developed network of bunkers and fortifications were formed. The Jewish fighters also received support from the Polish Underground (Armia Krajowa). The Germans assembled a force of 2,842 men to enter the ghetto and brought 7,000 security forces into Warsaw. Their greatest fear was that the rebellion would spread to the Polish side of the city. Germans were unable to defeat the Jews in open street combat. After several days, the Germans switched tactics and began burning down houses. The ZOB headquarters on 18 Mila Street fell on May 8, 1943; at this time Mordechai Anielewicz died fighting. The battle raged for 27 days, when it was over German general Jürgen Stroop claimed to have destroyed 6,065 Jews. As a "celebration" Heinrich Himmler ordered the Great Synagogue on Tlomacka Street (which was outside the ghetto) blown up as a symbol of the fact that "the Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists." 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. There were still hundreds of Jews living in the ruins of the ghetto after May 16, 1943. Many succeeded in making contact with Poles in other parts of the city. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising empowered Jews throughout Poland. After the ghetto was liquidated, Jewish leaders continued to work underground on the "Aryan" side by hiding Jews and issuing forged documents. Many Jews became active in the Polish underground of Greater Warsaw.

1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was reverberated throughout Poland and the rest of the world as an example of courage and defiance, was followed by other failed Ghetto uprisings in Nazi occupied Poland. As late as the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, when the Poles rose up against the Germans in anticipation of the entry of the Soviet Army, there were still a few Jews eking out an existence in the ruins of the former ghetto. Some of the survivors of 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, still held in camps at or near Warsaw were freed during 1944 Warsaw Uprising, led by Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa and immediately joined Polish fighters. Only few of them survived. Polish commander of one Jewish unit, Waclaw Micuta, described them as one of the best fighters, always at the front line. It is estimated that over 2000 Polish Jews, some as well known as Marek Edelman or Icchak Cukierman, and several dozen Greek[27], Hungarian or even German Jews freed by Armia Krajowa from Gesiowka concentration camp in Warsaw, men and woman, took part in combat against Nazis during 1944 Warsaw Uprising. As many as 17,000 Polish Jews lost their lives during 1944 Warsaw Uprising, who either fought with the AK units (Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński) or had been discovered in hiding. After the failed 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the city of Warsaw was razed to the ground by the Germans and more than 150,000 Poles were sent to labor or concentration camps. On January 17, 1945, the Soviet Army entered destroyed and inhabited Warsaw. Some 300 Jews were found hiding in the ruins on the Polish part of the city (Wladyslaw Szpilman).

The fate of the Warsaw Ghetto was similar to that of the other ghettos in which Jews were concentrated. With the decision of Nazi Germany to begin the Final Solution, the destruction of the Jews of Europe, Aktion Reinhard began in 1942, with the opening of the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, followed by Auschwitz-Birkenau where people were killed in gas chambers and mass executions (death wall). Many died from hunger, starvation, disease, torture or by pseudo-medical experiments. The mass deportation of Jews from ghettos to these camps, such as happened at the Warsaw Ghetto, soon followed, and more than 1.7 million Jews were killed at the Aktion Reinhard camps by October 1943 alone.

The Polish Government in Exile was the first (in November 1942) to reveal the existence of Nazi-run concentration camps and the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, through its courier Jan Karski [28] and through the activities of Witold Pilecki, member of Armia Krajowa who was the only person to volunteer for imprisonment in Auschwitz and who organized a resistance movement inside the camp itself.^[30] One of the Jewish members of the National Council of the Polish government in exile, Szmul Zygielbojm, committed suicide to protest the indifference of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust in Poland. The Polish government in exile was also the only government to set up an organization (Żegota) specifically aimed at helping the Jews in Poland.

Communist rule: 1945–89

Postwar

Between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust in Poland by hiding or by joining the Polish or Soviet 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 postwar peak, there were 180,000–240,000 Jews in Poland settled mostly in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Wrocław and Lower Silesia, e.g., Legnica, Dzierżoniów and Bielawa.

The character of Poland was changed however. Poland was left with a government-in-exile that had failed to negotiate a plan for postwar liberation and reconstruction, nor a coherent policy towards the encroaching Soviet Union. In spite of major Polish contribution to World War II, Poland was placed under direct Soviet control due to British and the US dependence on the Soviet military commitment to the defeat of Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt's unwillingness to confront Stalin over his future plans for Poland. The Soviet style Communism was established and the boundaries of Poland were moved west. The Soviet Union swallowed the eastern regions, which had many ethnic minorities including Jewish shtetl communities.

For the survivors, returning to life as it had been before the Holocaust was impossible. Jewish communities no longer existed in Poland. When people tried to return to their homes from camps or hiding places, they found that, in many cases, their homes had been looted or taken over by others who were not happy to see survivors return.

Soon after the end of the Second World War, Jews began to flee Poland. The exodus took place in stages. After the war, the vast majority of survivors left for several reasons, often more than one. Many left simply because they did not want to live in a communist country. Some left because the refusal of the Communist regime to return prewar property. Others did not wish to rebuild their lives in the places where their families were murdered. Yet others wanted to go to British Mandate of Palestine, which soon became Israel. Some of the survivors had relatives abroad. The dominant factor, however, was the country's major anti-Semitism fuelled by fact that Poland's postwar Communist government was Jewish-dominated. Two out of three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956 (Jakub Berman and Hilary Minc) were of Jewish origin.

The attitude of Christian Poles toward Jews hardened significantly, since many Poles believed that all Jews were Communists, the new oppressors of the Polish state.

Postwar Poland was also a chaotic country in which Communists and post Home Army anti-Communist formations fought each other. High proportion of Jews among the Communist leadership and Communist Secret Service (UB) fanned prejudices and many Christian Poles viewed Jews with deep hostility. Ordinary Polish Jews sometimes incurred lethal risks. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in several Polish cities and hundreds of Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish violence (see: Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944-1946) [29]. The best-known case is the Kielce pogrom of 1946[30], in which thirty seven Jews were brutally murdered. The massacre at Kielce was a turning point in the attempt to rebuild a Jewish community and convinced most survivors that they had no future in Poland. The Kielce tragedy has been variously described as an event stage-managed by the Communists and the outcome of old religious hostilities exacerbated by the war and the participation of Jews in the postwar Communist-dominated administration.

The Communist government's response to the pogrom was initially decisive. Special investigators were despatched to the town on the same day and military tribunals assumed responsibility for the prosecutions that followed. Under investigation were not only those who had directly participated in the pogrom. The local administration as well as the responses of the Milicja Obywatelska and the Ministry of Public Security of Poland were scrutinized. The heads of the MO and the UB were both arrested and questioned. Nine participants in the pogrom were sentenced to death; three were given lengthy prison sentences.[31] Until today the debate in Poland continues whether the murderers were leftists or rightists and who inspired the killings.

Between 1945 and 1948, 100,000–120,000 Jews left Poland . Their departure was largely organized by the Zionist activists in Poland such as Adolf Berman and Icchak Cukierman under the umbrella of a semi-clandestine organization Berihah ("Flight").[32] 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 and 1959. The last mass migration of Jews from Poland took place in 1968-69, after Israel’s 1967 War, because of the anti-Jewish policy adopted by Polish communist party, which closed down Jewish youth camps, schools and clubs. One might call this event as an expulsion of Jews of 1968. Thereafter almost all Jews who decided to stay in Poland "stopped" being Jewish.

The Bund took part in the post-war elections of 1947 on a common ticket with the (non-communist) Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and gained its first and only parliamentary seat in its Polish history, plus several seats in municipal councils. Under pressure from Soviet-installed Communist authorities, the Bund's leaders 'voluntarily' disbanded the party in 1948–1949 against the opposition of many activists. The Soviet Union’s secret police essentially governed Poland and Stalin’s anti-Semitic regime stifled Jewish cultural and religious activities. Jewish schools were nationalized in 1948-49 and Yiddish was no longer used as the language of instruction.

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 Żydów Polskich, CKŻP) which provided legal, educational, social care, cultural, and propaganda services. A countrywide Jewish Religious Community, led by Dawid Kahane, who served as chief rabbi of the Polish Armed Forces, functioned 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 1949–50. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and ORT opened schools and hospitals for the Jewish communities in Poland. Some Jewish cultural institutions were established including the Yiddish State Theater founded in 1950 and directed by Ida Kaminska, the Jewish Historical Institute, an academic institution specializing in the research of the history and culture of the Jews in Poland, and the Yiddish newspaper Folks-Shtime ("People's Voice").

Stalin’s death in 1953 eased the situation for the Jews, who then were allowed to reestablish connections with Jewish organizations abroad and began producing Jewish literature. In this 1958-59 period, 50,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, which was the only country Jews were able to immigrate to under Polish law.

A number of Polish Jews participated in the establishment of the Communist regime in the People's Republic of Poland between 1944 and 1956 and played an important role in the apparatus of oppression, 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 Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB) and in diplomacy/intelligence. After 1956, during the process of destalinisation in Poland under Władysław Gomułka's regime, some Urząd Bezpieczeństwa officials including Roman Romkowski (born Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel), Jacek Różański (born Jozef Goldberg), and Anatol Fejgin were prosecuted for "power abuses" including the torture of Polish anticommunists (among them, Witold Pilecki), and sentenced to long prison terms. A UB official, Józef Światło, (born Izaak 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. Solomon Morel a member of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland and commandant of the Stalinist era Zgoda labour camp, fled Poland for Israel to escape prosecution for genocide. Helena Wolińska-Brus, a former Stalinist prosecutor, now a British citizen living in Oxford, is fighting being extradited to Poland on charges related to the execution of a Second World War resistance hero August Fieldorf.

1967–1989

In 1967, following the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states, communist Poland broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. The Israeli victory over the Soviet backed Arab states in 1967 was greeted by Poles with glee; "Our Jews have given the Soviet Arabs a drumming!" By 1968 most of Poland's 40,000 remaining Jews were assimilated into Polish society, but over the next year they became the center of a Soviet backed, centrally organized campaign, equating Jewish origins with Zionist sympathies and thus disloyalty to Poland.

In March 1968 student-led demonstrations in Warsaw (see Polish 1968 political crisis) gave Gomułka's government an excuse to channel public anti-government sentiment into another avenue. Thus his security chief, Mieczysław Moczar, used the situation as a pretext to launch an anti-Semitic press campaign (although the expression "Zionist" was officially used). The state-sponsored "anti-Zionist" campaign resulted in the removal of Jews from the Polish United Worker's Party and from teaching positions in schools and universities. Due to economic, political and police pressure, 25,000 Jews were forced to emigrate during 1968–1970. The campaign, though ostensibly directed at Jews who had held office in the Stalinist era and at 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 U.S. 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 organizations which encouraged anticommunist opposition inside Poland.

In 1977, communist Poland began to try to improve its image regarding Jewish matters. Partial diplmatic relations were restored in 1986 — the first of the communist bloc countries to take this step — full diplomatic relations were not restored until 1990, a year after Poland ended its communist rule

During the late 1970s some Jewish activists were engaged in the anticommunist 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.

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 Massacre in Jedwabne, the Koniuchy Massacre, the Kielce pogrom, the Auschwitz cross, and Polish-Jewish wartime relations in general).

According to the Coordination Forum of Countering Antisemitism there were eighteen anti-Semitic incidents in Poland in the period from January 2001 to November 2005. Half of them was propaganda, eight were violent incidents such as vandalism or desecration (the last of them took place in 2003), and one was verbal abuse. There were no anti-Semitic attacks by means of weapons in Poland [33]. However, according to a 2005 survey, the portion of the population holding anti-Semitic views is somewhat higher than in some European countries [34]. According to a survey carried out by CBOS and published in January, 2005, in which Poles were asked to assess their attitudes toward other nations, 45% claimed to feel antipathy towards Jews, 18% to feel sympathy, while 29% felt indifferent and 8% were undecided. Those surveyed were asked to express their feeling on the scale from -3 (strong antipathy) to +3 (strong sympathy), with 0 taken to indicate indifference. The average score for attitude towards Jews was -0.67. Another contemporary nationwide survey indicated that as of January 2004 40 percent of Poles believed that their country with the Jewish population of less that 20,000 out of 39 million populations is still "being governed by Jews".^[31] "Cultural Anti-Semitism" is still in existence in Poland today^{[citation needed]}. It is exemplified in the saying "Don't be a Jew". Even the word "Zyd" ("Jew" in Polish) has a pejorative connotation^{[citation needed]}.

Football stadiums are a recruiting ground for extremist organizations, and neo-fascist symbols are a common sight there and often seen as graffiti in major Polish cities. A recrudescence of stereotypical anti-Semitism, particularly so given its setting, occurred during a church service on February 12, 2008 in Krakow at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was heralded by posters saying "The kikes will not continue to spit on us."^[32] The event was organized in part by Radio Maryja; the sermon was given by the Bishop of the church, Albin Malysiak, who, ironically, has been recognized as a Righteous among the Nations himself for the rescue of Jews in WWII.^[33] ^[34]

Nonetheless, Poland has many legal provisions to combat antisemitism, neo-fascism, and extremism, and has ratified all the major international conventions pertaining to human rights protection and anti-discrimination. In the meantime Jewish religious life has been revived with the help of the Ronald Lauder Foundation, the Polish Jewish community employs two rabbis, operated a small network of Jewish schools and summer camps, and sustains several Jewish periodicals and book series events. In 1993 the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland was established with the aim of organizing the religious and cultural life of the members of the communities in Poland.

Synagogues can be found in Warsaw, Cracow, Zamosc, Tykocin, Lesko, Lanco, Rzeszow, Kielce and Gora Kalwaria, but not all are functioning today. The oldest synagogue in Poland, Stara Synagoga, built in the early 15th century, can be found in Cracow. Today, it hosts a Jewish museum. The Yeshiva Chachmei Lublin was reopened in Lublin in 2007, the first synagogue to be renovated and dedicated in Poland since World War II solely through funding from Polish Jewry, without government or charitable support. Prior to World War II, the yeshiva was Europe's largest.

The leading Jewish publications are the monthly Midrasz, Dos Jidische Wort, Jidele for youth and Sztendlach for primary school children. All of these publications are printed in Polish except for Dos Jidische Wort, which is published in a bi-lingual Yiddish-Polish edition. Jewish Institutions include the Jewish Historical Institute, the E.R. Kaminska State Yiddish Theater in Warsaw, and the Jewish Cultural Center in Cracow.

Academic Jewish studies programs were established at Warsaw University and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Kraków became home to the Judaica Foundation, which has sponsored a wide range of cultural and educational programs on Jewish themes for a predominantly Polish audience. The building of the new Museum of the History of Polish Jewry in Warsaw will be based on a design of a Finnish architect, Rainer Mahlamaecki. The plot of land for the museum and an additional $13 million were donated by the city of Warsaw and additional $13 million were donated by the Polish government.

Of the Communist Bloc countries that interrupted diplomatic relations with Israel in 1967 (i.e. all communist countries less Romania), Poland was the first to restart them again in 1986, and to fully restore them in 1990. Government relations between Poland and Israel are steadily improving, resulting in the mutual visits of the presidents and the ministers of foreign affairs.

It is also possible to visit the extermination camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka. Auschwitz currently houses the Oswiecim State Museum, exhibiting documents from Nazi crimes. Block Number 27 is set aside for martyrology of the Jews and the millions who were killed there. All that remains of Treblinka is a mausoluem and monument consisting of thousands of shards of broken stone. At Majdanek, there is a museum and a monument, which incorporates a mound of human ashes commemorating the 350,000 people who were murdered there.

Besides the camps, Poland also has the largest Jewish burial ground in Europe, which is found in Lodz. Historic grave sites can be found in Gora Kalwaria (the Ger) and Lesajsk (Lezensk).

In June 2004, during an excavation of the site of the Great Synagogue in Oswiecim, archeologists uncovered a unique collection of Jewish treasures. Oswiecim's population was 70 percent Jewish, but was wiped out after the German invasion of Poland. It is also where the Auschwitz death camp was built. In this project initiated by a young Israeli named Yariv Nornberg, archaeologists dug at the site based on the testimony of Holocaust survivor Yishayahu Yarod, who remembered the relics being hidden by the Jews before the Nazis razed the synagogue. Many Jewish ritual objects were found at the site, including three bronze candelabras, a bronze menorah, ten chandeliers and a ner tamid. Tiles, marble plaques and charred wood from the synagogue were also discovered. The objects will most likely go through a year-long restoration process and then be displayed in the Auschwitz Jewish Center.

The Memorial of the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto is located on a square which was once the site of one the main bunkers of the Jewish Combat Organization. This monument is the work of Natan Rappaport; it is made of the bronze and granite (labradorite) ordered by Hitler from Sweden in 1942 for a monument "honoring the victory of Germany." The Warsaw Ghetto Memorial was unveiled on April 19th, 1948 - the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw ghetto Uprising.

On July 4, 2006, a memorial to Holocaust survivors killed and wounded in Kielce, Poland after World War II will was unveiled. The city of Kielce and the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad financed the memorial. On that day in 1946, residents killed more than 40 Jews who had returned to the town after the war to reclaim their property. The massacre consolidated the perception among survivors that they couldn’t return to Poland.

Today there is greater awareness of Poland's rich Jewish past as well as of the tragedies of the Holocaust. Zaglada, a journal devoted to the Holocaust, was first published in 2005 by a special division of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Other publications have also been published recently dealing with the subject, most notably from the Institute of National Remembrance.

There have been a number of Holocaust remembrance activities in Poland in recent years. In September 2000, dignitaries from Poland, Israel, the United States, and other countries (including Prince Hassan of Jordan) gathered in the city of Oświęcim (the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp) to commemorate the opening of the refurbished Chevra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue and the 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. Additionally, in April of each year, the March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau to honor victims of the Holocaust, draws young people from Israel and elsewhere, as well as Poles, as marchers to mark two of the most significant dates: Holocaust Remembrance Day and Israel Independence Day. The purpose of this trip is to give students a first hand look at history and the evils of mankind. There are also more general activities, like the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków.

In 2000, Poland's Jewish population is generally estimated to have risen to somewhere between 8,000 and 12,000 — 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. The Centre estimates that there are approximately 100,000 Jews in Poland, of which 30,000 to 40,000 have some sort of direct connection to the Jewish community, either religiously or culturally.

Poland will ease the way for Jews to reclaim citizenship 40 years after the start of massive expulsions. In a letter released March 3, 2008, Polish Interior Minister Grzegorz Schetyna said he would "order the implementation of the appropriate procedures today." Piotr Kadlcik, the president of the Union of Religious Jewish Communities in Poland, told JTA he had already received verbal confirmation that Schetyna endorsed the plan to re-naturalize Jews who fled between 1968 and 1970. Some 15,000 Polish Jews were deprived of their citizenship.[35]

Notes

^ polishjews.org
^ Poland, at that time, was the most tolerant country in Europe "From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution" by Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper University of Chicago Press 1992, page 51
^ 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).
^ Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland. A Social Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972 r., p. 166
^ 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.
^ Paulsson, Gunnar S (2002). Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. p. 245. 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 antisemitism in Poland than in many other countries, there was also less collaboration.... The Nazis generally preferred not to count on outbursts of 'emotional antisemitism', when what was needed to realize their plans was 'rational antisemitism', as Hitler himself put it. For that, they neither wanted nor received significant help from the Poles. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
^ Unveiling the Secret City H-Net Review: John Radzilowski
^ Poland's Jewish Secret Unearthed DW-World.de
^ "I know this Jew!" Blackmailing of the Jews in Warsaw 1939-1945. Polish Center for Holocaust Research
^ The Polish Undergroud State and Home Army
^ Polish Righteous, Those Who Risked Their Lives
^ Poland, Members of the Malkiewicz Family, Who Were Awarded the Title of Righteous Gentiles After the War (image)
^ ^a ^b ^c Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, ISBN 0231112009, Google Print, p.114
^ ^a ^b ^c Antony Polonsky, 'My Brother's Keeper?': Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, Routledge, 1990, ISBN 0415042321, Google Print, p.149
^ 1367 pogrom Poznan. Google Books
^ The Encyclopedia of World History 1447-92. 2001
^ Frederic Cople Jaher A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-semitism in America, Harvard University Press, 1994, p.79–80
^ Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski Jews in Poland - New York 1998, p. 297.
^ Andrzej Kapiszewski's article on the reports of the situation of the Jews (pdf)
^ ^a ^b Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-10586-XGoogle Books, p.144
^ Feigue Cieplinski, Poles and Jews: The Quest For Self-Determination 1919–1934, Binghamton Journal of History, Fall 2002, Last accessed on 2 June 2006.
^ DavidGorodok - Section IV - a
^ The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, pp.21. Relevant page viewable via Google book search
^ Template:En icon Tadeusz Piotrowski (1997). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide... McFarland & Company. pp. p. 49-65. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help)
^ Death tolls in the Holocaust, from the US Holocaust Museum
^ Summary of IPN's final findings on Jedwabne (English)
^ Discussion of IPN findings
^ Note of December 10 1942, addressed by the Polish Government to the Governments of the united nations concerning the mass extermination of Jews
^ Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, Random House, 2006, ISBN 0-375-50924-0.
^ "Krakow church holds service against 'kikes who spit on us'" Haaretz, 02/12/08 (accessed 02/14/08)
^ Vincentian Enclopedia: Albin Małysiak CM
^ Poland Honors Those Who Rescued Jews

References

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Singer, Isidore; et al., eds. (1901–1906). The Jewish Encyclopedia. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, After the Holocaust, East European Monographs, 2003, ISBN 0-88033-511-4.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Between Nazis and Soviets: Occupation Politics in Poland, 1939–1947, Lexington Books, 2004, ISBN 0-7391-0484-5.
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.
Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity, University of California Press, 2004, ISBN 0-520-23844-3 Google Print
Antony Polonsky and Joanna B. Michlic. The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland, Princeton University Press, 2003 ISBN 0-691-11306-8. (The introduction is online)
Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland. A Documentary History, Hippocrene Books, Inc., 1998, 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 0814329063
Magda Teter, Jews and Heretics in Premodern Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0521856736

Notes

See also Stanisław Krajewski, Poland and the Jews: Reflections of a Polish Polish Jew (Kraków: Austeria P, 2005).

Glenn Dynner, "Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society" (NY: Oxford University Press, 2006)

External links

Contemporary Polish-Jewish life and organizations

[1] shjews.org

[Hugh-2] Poland, at that time, was the most tolerant country in Europe "From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution" by Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper University of Chicago Press 1992, page 51

[Central-3] 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

[Note-4] 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).

[5] Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland. A Social Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800, Philadelphia, The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972 r., p. 166

[6] Beyond the Pale Online exposition

[7] 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.

[8] Paulsson, Gunnar S (2002). Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945. New Haven: Yale University Press. pp. p. 245. 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 antisemitism in Poland than in many other countries, there was also less collaboration.... The Nazis generally preferred not to count on outbursts of 'emotional antisemitism', when what was needed to realize their plans was 'rational antisemitism', as Hitler himself put it. For that, they neither wanted nor received significant help from the Poles. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

[9] Unveiling the Secret City H-Net Review: John Radzilowski

[10] Poland's Jewish Secret Unearthed DW-World.de

[11] "I know this Jew!" Blackmailing of the Jews in Warsaw 1939-1945. Polish Center for Holocaust Research

[12] The Polish Undergroud State and Home Army

[13] Polish Righteous, Those Who Risked Their Lives

[14] Poland, Members of the Malkiewicz Family, Who Were Awarded the Title of Righteous Gentiles After the War (image)

[Nie-Nic-15] Donald L. Niewyk, Francis R. Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2000, ISBN 0231112009, Google Print, p.114

[Polonsky-16] Antony Polonsky, 'My Brother's Keeper?': Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, Routledge, 1990, ISBN 0415042321, Google Print, p.149

[17] 1367 pogrom Poznan. Google Books

[18] The Encyclopedia of World History 1447-92. 2001

[19] Frederic Cople Jaher A Scapegoat in the New Wilderness: The Origins and Rise of Anti-semitism in America, Harvard University Press, 1994, p.79–80

[20] Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski Jews in Poland - New York 1998, p. 297.

[21] Andrzej Kapiszewski's article on the reports of the situation of the Jews (pdf)

[Snyder-22] Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-10586-XGoogle Books, p.144

[Cieplinski-23] Feigue Cieplinski, Poles and Jews: The Quest For Self-Determination 1919–1934, Binghamton Journal of History, Fall 2002, Last accessed on 2 June 2006.

[24] DavidGorodok - Section IV - a

[25] The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust by Martin Gilbert, pp.21. Relevant page viewable via Google book search

[Piotrowski-49-65-26] Template:En icon Tadeusz Piotrowski (1997). Poland's Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide... McFarland & Company. pp. p. 49-65. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help)

[27] Death tolls in the Holocaust, from the US Holocaust Museum

[28] Summary of IPN's final findings on Jedwabne (English)

[29] Discussion of IPN findings

[30] Note of December 10 1942, addressed by the Polish Government to the Governments of the united nations concerning the mass extermination of Jews

[GrossFear-31] Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz, Random House, 2006, ISBN 0-375-50924-0.

[32] "Krakow church holds service against 'kikes who spit on us'" Haaretz, 02/12/08 (accessed 02/14/08)

[33] Vincentian Enclopedia: Albin Małysiak CM

[34] Poland Honors Those Who Rescued Jews

[1]

[2]

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v t e History of the Jews in Europe
Sovereign states	Albania Andorra Armenia Austria Azerbaijan Belarus Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kazakhstan Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Moldova Monaco Montenegro Netherlands North Macedonia Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales
States with limited recognition	Abkhazia Kosovo Northern Cyprus South Ossetia Transnistria
Dependencies and other entities	Åland Faroe Islands Gibraltar Guernsey Isle of Man Jersey Svalbard

Summary

Early history to Golden Age: 966–1572

Early history: 966–1385

The early Jagiellon era: 1385–1505

Center of the Jewish world: 1505–72

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: 1572–1795

The Warsaw Confederation

Increasing isolation: The traditional view and recent scholarly challenges

The Cossack uprising and the Deluge

Decline under the Saxon dynasty

The partitions

The development of Judaism in Poland and the Commonwealth

Jewish learning

The rise of Hasidism

Jews of Poland within the Russian Empire (1795–1918)

Pogroms

Haskalah and Halakha

Politics in Polish territory

Interwar period 1918–39

Independence and Polish Jews

Jewish and Polish culture

Growing anti-Semitism

World War II and the destruction of Polish Jewry (1939–45)

The Polish September campaign

Territories annexed by the USSR

The Holocaust: German-occupied Poland

Communist rule: 1945–89

Postwar

1967–1989

Since 1989

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

Notes

External links

Maps

History of Polish Jews

World War II and the Holocaust

Contemporary Polish-Jewish life and organizations