History / History of Poland in 10 minutes. Really worth seeing! [134]

Nice little film. I'm no scholar of Polish history, but wasn't there a cossack invasion in 1648? What about the Swedish invasion after that? Is it my imagination or was there a Warsaw ghetto uprising? And what about the Polish uprising after that? Was the holocaust not part of Polish history?

History / History of Poland in 10 minutes. Really worth seeing! [134]


Yes. All we care about is money. Maybe the holocaust was all a jewish idea. What a genius theory you came up with. Go crawl back under a rock.

History / History of Poland in 10 minutes. Really worth seeing! [134]


I assume you're referring to things that occured in the Bible more than 3000 years ago. Whatever we did then I can't deny or comment about. But I don't see where we've taken pride in that. Where do you see that?

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]

Doing a simple google of the name I see a lot of instances where its a woman's first name. So my guess is that the name Szejwa (pronounced "Sheiva"?) is a shortened version of the name Bas-sheiva which is the Ashkenazi pronunciation of the biblical name Bathsheba. I never heard of it as a Jewish family name. But many family names come from first names.

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]


There is a town in Ukraine called Skwyra, which is pronounced "Skver" in Yiddish. Maybe your family was from there. It was the seat of a well-known hassidic dynasty, the Twersky family. They relocated to New York State after the war and established a town called New Square. Here's a link: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skvyra

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]


So Kaizerski is either a scion of the hassidic Twerskys or he is eating crunchy pork. Hmmm...

Genealogy / Polish surname Gil. My ancestors were from the town of Widelka. [74]


Not quite right. Most Jews expelled from Spain settled in Mediterranean countries like Turkey, Italy and North Africa. Some, but not many, did go to Poland, to Zamość in particular. IL Peretz, the author, was a descendent of Spanish Jews.

But the name Gil might have a Jewish connection anyway. Gil is a relatively common name in Israel. In Hebrew it means "joy". On the other hand, it's not particularly common among Jews from Poland. So you should probably go with one of the other theories.

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]


That's really interesting! I have two acquaintances (both Jews) with those names. One, Lopata, is a lawyer in New York, and Wrubel (which I assume comes from Wróbel) is a teacher and a rabbi in Israel. I guess their ancestors lived in small villages.

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]


No it doesn't. It just looks a bit like "Haifa" but it's not related.

History / What Was Happening in Poland around 1905? [73]


And emphysema was a Jewish invention? I thought we just created the bubonic plague.

Food / Do you call it kiszka or kaszanka? [55]

Just for general knowledge: Jews think kishka is a Jewish food. (I had no idea that Poles eat it.) But Jewish kishka is different because we don't eat blood. Our kishka is intestine (or a manmade substitute) stuffed with chopped meat, potato and fat. It's usually cooked together with Tsholent, which is a stew made of potatoes, chunks of meat, beans, barley, beef bones, and when we're lucky... kishka.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]

The interesting thing from the Jewish point of view are the Jewish Poles who rediscover their jewishness. I heard this story from friends in New York:

A jewish family in a suburb of New York employed a Polish cleaning woman who was in her 50s or 60s. On the first friday she worked there, while the cooking for sabbath was going on, she started crying for no apparent reason. When she tried to figure out what triggered the crying, she thought it might be the smell of the Chulent on the stove. The jewish family asked her if she ever ate chulent or knew what it was and she said she somehow felt that the smell was really familiar and it brought back vague memories of childhood.

After that, the woman and the jewish family did some reasearch among her relatives and they found out that this woman was born a Jew and was hidden during the war by a polish family. She was too young after that to have any memory of her original family, but the memory of the scent stayed with her. According to the story she decided to learn about Judaism and live as a Jew again. From our point of view a happy ending.

Maybe it's true, maybe not. But I'm sure stranger things have happened to Jewish children who were hidden.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


The Khazars probably didn't look like Europeans at all. They probably looked like Chechens and Georgians. They were a Turkic people. If the Ashkenazi Jews were descended from the Khazars we would be darker and more Asian looking. The reality is probably that the Khazars who became Jews (which was only the ruling class and not the whole population) assimilated with the other Khazars and stayed where they were, dropping Judaism. A few might have gone west towards ukraine and poland and eventually assimilated into the Ashkenazi communities who had spread from the Rhineland into the rest of central europe. I probably have more Polish blood than Khazar blood, but not much of either.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]

Quite a late start. I wouldn't brag about that.

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]


A couple of clicks on google leads to your home town...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karczew

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]

For once i have to agree with Sokrates.
Until the late 19th century there was no social mixing between Jews and Poles. Farmers and Jewish townspeople would buy and sell from each other in the marketplace and there were functional relationships between nobles and Jewish agents, but there was no socializing. And even if occasionally a Jewish girl and a Polish boy would fall in love, there was no such thing then as a secular/civil marriage. There was only religious ceremony. So one half of the couple would have to convert to the other one's religion. Jews were brought up to die rather than abandon the faith. A christian converting to Judaism would be killed, often with a few more Jews for good measure. (That's also why Jews got the habit of discouraging converts from joining.) So there had to be very little mixing of the gene pools. After the emancipation there were more opportunities to mix but that was only about 150 years so it wouldn't affect the Polish gene pool significantly.

When a Jew looks particularly blond and blue-eyed, his friends will ask (joking) if his grandmother was raped by a cossack. I guess that happened sometimes too.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


I didn't mean they were killed by a mob but by the authorities. The penalty for Jewish proselytizing, in some periods, was death. This of course didn't always happen but there was that danger, at least in the public mind, so there were very few converts. Here's a incident that may or may not be true:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_ben_Abraham

In this book there's some mention of people being killed for converting (pages 44, 65-67)

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]

They were cut off from the Jewish community. It was social and religious treason.


That was the period when traditional society started to gradually break down and there were more opportunities for a Jew to assimilate culturally without converting. So there were certainly more intermarriages than before, and a couple like that would usually become more Polish and less Jewish. But it was still rare.

If you want a really good picture of how traditional life changed during the 19th century, social upheaval and changing relations between Jews, Poles, Russians and Germans, you should read the novel "The Brothers Ashkenazi" by IJ Singer. (That's the older brother of the Nobel winner IB Singer. I think he was a much better author, but he died in the 1930s). The novel takes place mostly in Lodz as it developed into a textile center in the mid 19th century and continues till the communist revolution.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


Bagels are not a Jewish food. Only in the US they think it's Jewish. In Israel it's looked at as an American food.


You are probably only familiar with Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, which is heavily influenced by Polish cuisine, but there are lots of different kinds of Jewish cuisine, and in Israel they all come together.


I don't know about real cross-cultural influence, but there is i think a mutual fascination, sometimes attraction and sometimes repulsion. Why am I on a Polish forum if I wasn't drawn somehow to Poland? Why are there Jewish style restaurants in Krakow?

But I think in the next generation or two the relationship will fade away – no love, no hate.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


Maybe there was once, but I never heard of it.

this is making me hungry.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


I suppose a Jew of this generation born in Poland could say that, but there aren't many of those living in Israel. There are more than a million people here who's ancestors came from Poland, but it would be extremely unusual for one of them to move from Israel to Poland. I've never heard of such a case. There's not a lot of violence in Israel despite the impression from the news, but if someone did find life here not to his taste, he would be more likely to move to the US, or western europe.

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4500]


Bachur in Hebrew means young man. (Bachura means young woman).
Maybe it made its way to Polish through Yiddish, where it is pronounced "Bochur".

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


I have to correct you on the history. The word "Ashkenazi" in classical Hebrew simply means "German". The Ashkenazi Jews first formed a distinct identity in the rhineland in the early middle ages, and then spread to other parts of germany and france. In the late middle ages they started migrating Eastward to poland and later to Ukraine and Lithuania. The movement was from west to east until the 19th century when it reversed.

You can see this trend by looking at where the famous ashkenazi jewish scholars came from. Gershom Ben Yehuda was born in Metz in the 900s. A century later there was Rashi in Troyes and his grandchildren were the Tosafists who lived in Worms, Mainz and Speyer. (They were descendants of Jews who migrated from Italy and elsewhere.) Later scholars were in Rothenberg and Frankfurt. In the rennaissance period the big Jewish scholars were in Prague and German cities. You start hearing about big Polish and Lithuanian Jewish scholars in the 17th century. That's when the Hassidic movement was born. The greatest scholar of the 18th century was Elijah of Vilna. From then, the center of gravity for Jewish scholarship was Lithuania and Poland till WWII. During the 19th century Ashkenazim drifted to western europe the US and Palestine. The main centers of scholarship are now in Israel and the US, reflecting where most jews live.

History / Question about Warsaw Ghetto (shared building?) and Monument [29]

The Law Courts building had an entrance from the Aryan side on Ogrodowa Street, and for the Jewish side on Leszno Street. I've never seen a picture of it.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


I'll oblige.


I don't think you're anti-semitic. I think you have very superficial knowledge about Jews, our history and you get most of your information about Israel from biased sources. You have a lot of assumptions about jews that are based on stereotypes. To be fair, I know very little about Scotland and its history, but then I don't give my opinions on Scottish affairs.


Why would G-d be against Zionism? His prophets predicted our return to Israel more than 2000 years ago.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]

It's not clear what the conditions are. It would include repentance for having done idol-worship. Since we haven't touched the stuff since ancient times, I think that's been fulfilled. I think the main condition is that as soon as the geo-political situation made it possible for us to return en masse, we did.

I am also Orthodox. Most of the Orthodox groups that opposed zionism before the war changed their minds since then. Now it's a very small minority that opposes it actively. Their reasons are totally religious and have nothing to do with anyone's human rights. They see the zionist movement as a rebellion against the exile decreed by G-d. They have no doubt about our eventual right to the land, but they want to keep it in the realm of a supernatural messianic age. In my eyes, they are like a hostage who has been imprisoned so long that he is afraid to leave captivity and believes he is meant to stay like that.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


They don't impact at all on religious freedoms. People here can follow whatever religion they like. Likud is politically center-right, but it includes both religious and secular people.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


A few technical corrections:
B'ezrat Hashem is Hebrew, not Yiddish. It means "with G-d's help".

The word Hashem means literally "the name" and it refers to G-d whose name we don't say or write. It has nothing to do with Shem the son of Noah.

Hebrew is close to Arabic, but Yiddish, which is based on German, has nothing to do with Arabic. It uses Hebrew loan words but is not a semitic language at all.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


Well done.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [638]


I remember you asked me that and I had never heard that word. But now that you mention that in Fiddler the rabbi says it and the people repeat it, I now realize what you mean. The word is "umain". That's "Amen", which is what you answer to a blessing. ("So be it.")

The Jews from Galicia and Hungary pronounce it "Umain". Jews from Lithuania pronounce it "Omain". Sefaradi Jews and Israelis say "Ahmen."

Another mystery cleared up.