How common is it for other people of Polish origin to discover they are actually Jewish?

The criteria for becoming an Israeli citizen are not the same as the religious definition of Jewishness according to Jewish law.
According to Jewish law, a person who is born to a Jewish mother is a Jew (whether they keep the religion or not). A non-Jew who converts to the Jewish religion officially before a Jewish religious court becomes a Jew. If she's a woman, her children born after that will automatically be Jews.

Israeli civil law has its own rules of citizenship: A person born to a Jewish mother or father, or someone whose spouse is a Jew can become an Israeli citizen. That doesn't mean this person is recognized as a Jew, just that they have Israeli citizenship (there are many non-Jews who have Israeli citizenship). If a person converted to Judaism before coming to Israel, the Interior ministry checks if the conversion was valid according to their rules and if it is, they can become a citizen just like any other Jew. I never heard of DNA tests being involved in any way.

that is very racist law.

and that is 'racist' how????
It's always struck me as very sensible, after all you can be far surer of who your mother is than your father.

( yehudi)A non-Jew who converts to the Jewish religion officially before a Jewish religious court becomes a Jew. If she's a woman, her children born after that will automatically be Jews.

Unless they wish to attend the Jewish Free School in North London that is..:)

blood ? very tribal !
one country one tribe ?
Should I continue ?

The racist state of Israel will accept Jewish converts as citizens but the non-Jews whose families lived on its land for centuries languish in refugee camps denied both citizenship and the right of return. That is an affront to human decency.

If you've ever been to Israel, you'd see more of them languishing in shopping malls than in refugee camps. All Arabs living in Israel proper are either citizens or they rejected citizenship for political/ideological reasons. Perpetuating a refugee problem is the intentional policy of Arabs who benefit politically from this situation. In the years that Jordan and Egypt controlled the West Bank and Gaza, the refugee camps were not dismantled. Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria are not allowed to live outside the refugee camps. Palestinians in Lebanon and Syria are not given the right to work in certain professions and their ownership of land is limited.

The refugee problem was caused by the Zionists who expelled almost one million Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Blaming neighboring Arab states for their status as refugees is a disgusting subterfuge on your part Yehudi. You and your racist state are contemptable. We in the West believe in equal rights for all people regardless of their religion. Your "Jewish state" is an anachronism that is doomed to be thrown into the dustbin of history.

Turns out you Poles didn't really want the Jews back, my great-grandfather was a medic in the Polish army in the mid 30s and they used to beat him every night in a sack shouthing 'filhy zyd!.My grandfather's brother died fighting for Poland in '39, and when his famaily came back to ostrolenka after escaping to Russia during the war they were treated with nothing but contempt.

Maybe my grandpraents should have come back from being refugeess in Siberia to this? A nice warm welcome.



PS Jews were just sick and tired of being treated like crap,tossed from place to place at the whim of repressive anti semetic governments,tsars and kings, Zionism did not start becuase of the holocoust, it began in the 1880s.


Britain was opposed to the creation of the state of Israel, after the Arab rebellion of 1936-39 they became pro arab, the Jews did it with their own toil and sweat. British officers were leading the Arab Jordanian Legion in the war of 1948 and refused to regonise Israel until 1951.

Well, I don't know you but I will treat you with contempt because of rubbish you spread here !poor victims eh...

What a bunch of lies. You people really need to be consitent when it comes to those "bad Poles" stories. I thought poor Jews were not allowed to get such high profile jobs in the Polish army... Also heard that bad Poles refused to give them weapons in 1939...

Those Jews that came back from Russia, yes, surely they were treated with contempt, for running the whole oppression apparatus for uncle Stalin.

so you know what I think do you???
weird
Somerset I have no intention of dissing your immediate ancestors, but you are obviously British, so either your grandparents or parents must have left Israel, probably with a very good reason.

YOu should be grateful to them for this., and stop moaning about what the British government did or didn't do up to a hundred years ago. Meanwhile you have had an easy and comfortable life in........Britain. You know what I am saying??

My wife's grandfathers name was Ziemski(Is this a Jewish name?) and he lived in Poland near Austrian border.When he left Poland(1907) he changed the name to Neumann in order to cover up his Polish past.

Why? My wife is Lutheran and yet many people(Jews and Christians) upon meeting her for the first time assume she is Jewish.Her father has a pronounced hawk nose,and is somewhat "olive" in complexion.With approx 3MM Jews living in Pre war Poland there must have been a lot of fence hopping between Polish and Jews,maybe not as much as Pre war Germany(with its Protestant population) but more than I thought previously.

If you had to guess,what percentage of Polish population are mischling?

I have jewish surname, very little people in Poland have the same surname as I do (100 people maybe). I checked that most of people with my surname live in Israeli and USA...quite strange to the fact that it exist only few in Poland, and then zero,nothing,zilch, and then Israeli and USA. I don't know my gradfather's father, we never talk about him at home, I just knew my grandgrandma was a widow. I never asked and I will not. It's possible my grandgrandpa was a polish jew, especially that he was born in a town wich had 70-80 % of jews. Well, my close friend from the same town told me once that it's jew surname (but I already knew) and added that his is also jew :). But first time I heard I have jew surname from my polish language teacher in highschool...till that time I thouhgt it was more german. I'm Polish and I'm proud :)..just sometimes I'm pis.ed off because of politics :D

ReservoirDog-Thank you for your answer to my question."I never asked,and I will not" is an interesting response.The first time I mentioned the possibility of jewish ancestors to my in-laws they

seemed VERY UNCOMFORTABLE with the possibility. I dropped the subject and never mentioned it again.You are absolutely correct about politics its used to create divisions among people,so that

a select few can gain adavantage.

Why to ask?? It will not change a thing. And my friends know who I am, certainly not a Pole or Jew for them. I know one Neuman (with one "n" like my own surname) from South Poland, quite nice guy, he works in aerospace industry (engines or sth :) ). These surnames are very rare in Poland, especially in North Poland and Central - where I live. For all my friends and people I have met my surname sound exotic and they love it :D, I never had any, even litle problem with my surname, even microscopically small...except the public offices where I have to always spell it :).

ReservoirDog- You are lucky,I wish I could say that my surname has never given me a problem,but unfortunately that is not the case.I have a very unusual surname perhaps 30-40 people in the entire world have it.My grandparents lived in a small town in Russia,about 20km from the Polish border.My grandfather his wife and 3 brothers left the area(and Europe) about 1909.No connection to Tsar,Boleshiviks,Communists or Stalin.And yet even today 2011,many people insist on making me feel uncomfortable about my name.What kind of name is that?Where is it from?What is your religion etc etc ad nauseum,and I'M sick of it.Unfortunatley,as evidenced by the many posts in this forum, too many morons are hung up on ethnicity,and religion.

Ziemski is a typical Polish surname, ending on -ski and ziemia = soil, earth so it has a really nice meaning "man of the earth", "man from the soil", so you aren't UFO you are from Ziemia!(Earth) :-)

and google told me:
here moikrewni.pl/mapa/kompletny/ziemski.html where live people with your surname
and there are 739 people with that surname in Poland

your wife is also Ziemski? or Ziemska? If Ziemski, it sounds funny, correct version is Ziemska ;-)

Jews for many centuries mostly kept to themselves.
Mixing increased with time.
Today in the US half the Jews marry with Gentiles while the other half obviously with Jews.

There were several larger cities in preWWII Poland with larger Jewish populations.
But quite sure the mixing marriage rate in that time was much lower than 50 percent.

Yes, but mathematically-speaking, even if the intermarriage rate was low, many of today's Polish Catholics could still have Jewish ancestry because of the huge Jewish population Poland once had and the amount of centuries they've lived there.

Europe doesn't use one drop (of blood) rule.
What prevails matters and is used for identification.

So if someone is 3/4 Irish, 1/4 Scottish he will identify with Irish and forget about one grandma part ;)

It was one of the ways to keep the national corpuses large and intact.

Germans mixed with French, Scandinavians, Poles but you will hardly hear some of them being proud about some 12,5 % of Polish blood. It is assimilated. Resistance is futile :)))

Maybe not, but the fact remains that Poles are not 100% Slavic. Other things came to the mix, including ethnic Jewish ancestry.

Poles are Sarmatians!

I know there are remains from ancient Sarmatians. Have there been any genetic studies done on comparing them with modern Poles? Just like there's been a genetic study showing that Copernicus had Germanic roots, not Slavic roots.

yep, there is thread on PF!

Do you mean this thread? Slavs are descendants of Sarmatians?

No genetic studies there.

That's true. They wouldn't be letting them into the armed forces if they didn't want them to be Israelis.

That's interesting. How did they get Copernicus genes? It has must been a very serious study, lol.

It is not certain that they got his genes but they did dig up what may be his skeleton from the parish in which he was a priest and they did recover hairs from between the pages of one of his books which had been looted by Swedes during the Deluge. The genetic analysis of these remains did not however prove EM Wave's claim that:



ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2718376/


Non-Jewish Arabs with Israeli citizenship, save for a few Bedouins and Druze, are not allowed to serve in the Israeli armed forces.

Honestly, does anyone care what Copernicus actually was?

Polish, German, who cares?

Same goes for everyone else. 1st generation in America half marry their own half the locals future generations are more and more mixed.