History / Polish hatred towards Jews... [1290]


Other people's business? What 's that? Everything is everyone's business.

History / Polish hatred towards Jews... [1290]

No.
Why would they think they are Jewish? It's very rare to see a Polish Jew in Israel under the age of 70. So a Polish tourist would clearly be non-Jewish, but assumed to be friendly to Israel.

If i saw a young Jewish tourist from Poland (which I never did) I would wonder why he lives there and not here.

History / Polish hatred towards Jews... [1290]


I don't understand the question.

History / Polish hatred towards Jews... [1290]


First of all let me clarify one thing - people in Israel don't normally go around talking about Poles at the breakfast table. There are more pressing matters going on here. But if you ask someone about Poles, they still think in terms of the 1930s and they'll say, "yeah, they hate us." That's because they've never been on the Polish Forum so they don't know any better.

If any of you on this forum were ever in Israel as tourists or on business, I'd like to know how people treated you. My guess is that they'd be friendly to Polish tourists because they would assume anyone visiting Israel is a friend.

History / Polish hatred towards Jews... [1290]


Jews don't hate Poles, but a lot of Jews assume that Poles hate us so they relate to Poles in that way. It's a reaction.


Hug a Jew.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]


Do you bother to read anything I wrote?. If this is what you got out of it I can't help you.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]

The theological questions that come out of the holocaust have been discussed by smarter people than you or me, people who were there and people who weren't. I would stay away from that topic because it's a dead end.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]


But Poles in the US and UK don't seem to realize that, so they say things like...


The fact that people discuss whether Poles saved or didn't save Jews from the Nazis indicates that Poles were in a different situation and were in a position to save Jews (at the risk of death) because they weren't targeted for extinction, yet.

If the Nazi plan to exterminate the Polish speaking people actually reached the stage of being implemented, then there would be no difference. But the Germans were defeated before that could happen, thank G-d.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]


Of course it was much harder for Poles and Russians than for Americans or British because that's where the fighting was. And the german occupation was far more brutal to Poles than to the french. (And unlike France, Poland didn't have a collaborationist government). But my point is to explain that the Jews were not war casualties, but murder victims. And that's why Jews jump whenever we're told that not only Jews were killed.


It shouldn't be. That's an impression I'm trying to correct here. WWII was one catastrophe and the holocaust was another. The effects they had on each other are many and complex.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]

We Jews don't say that only Jews were killed or suffered the most in the war. Millions of people suffered. What was different about what happened to the Jews, what we refer to as the holocaust, is that they weren't killed in the war. What do I mean by that? I mean that the German program to exterminate the Jews was not part of the war – if anything it was hampered by the war. Had there been no war after the invasion of Poland, they would have killed every last Jew they got there hands on. The Germans started the program way before the war started, with severe persecution in the 1930s, and eventually declared the program's goal to be the extermination of ALL the Jews. Not just communists, not just the bankers, not just religious Jews, but every single Jew. The people who were gassed at treblinka were not war casualties, they were victims of a systematic program of extermination that was designed specifically for Jews and Roma and not any other ethnic group that I'm aware of.

The millions of Poles and Russians and others all over the world that were killed in the war were mostly casualties of a war that didn't distinguish between combatants and civilians. Some of them were murdered in camps for political affiliation or for opposing the regime – in other words, for their actions, not for the "crime" of being born. It was a human tragedy that they were killed, but it's a whole different event than what happened to the Jews. That's why we get frustrated and defensive when these arguments are brought up.

USA, Canada / Marriage laws: dual citizenship (Polish and US) preparing to get married to an American. [65]

Do you like living in Poland better than living in Amman?

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]


There's nothing antisemitic about questioning the Jewish narrative. What's antisemitic is perpetuating stereotypes like this...


We Jews won't be satisfied till you give us our pound of christian flesh.

Food / Is carp indigenous to Israel? [39]


All I know about is St Peters Fish (which we call "Amnun") and I've also seen catfish near the restaurants on the shore, lapping up what falls in the water. But we don't eat catfish. There are also little fish that nibble at you when you swim there, but I don't know what they're called.


So I guess an appropriate symbol for christianity could be Gefilte Fish made of carp.

Food / Is carp indigenous to Israel? [39]


No.


Yes.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]


That answers my question to Greg. Poles moved in, and I 'm not passing judgement on people who did that because it's behind us now. All this was a result of the holocaust and the war. But Greg seems to think that no Jews lost property as a result of the holocaust, and that there's no justification for a surviving Jew to reclaim his property.


To me? I have no claims anywhere in poland.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]


No idea at all. But just answer this: After the Nazis emptied a town of its Jews, what happened to their homes? Specifically, after the war was over, who moved in, who assumed ownership of the property?

History / What British unit liberated Poland in 1945?? [445]


Because our religion is a national religion.We are a nation that has it's own religion and we're a religion that has it's own nation. Our nationhood was on hold because of the exile from the land of Israel, and so it took a different form, emphasizing the religion. Jews were absorbed (some more, some less) into the counties where we lived, so individuals like you, for example, can choose to identify as a Canadian of the Jewish faith. That's your right as an individual. But the core of the nation has never lost its identity. Now that we have a country again, the nature of our nationhood is shifting again, and it puts people like you in an ambiguous state. But these issues will iron themselves out over the next 200 years or so.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [636]


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 / Jewish Roots of Poland [636]


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

this is making me hungry.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [636]


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.

Food / Cabbage and Noodles of Poland - Golabki? [30]


We do that here in Israel too. We call it "Poika". I have no idea where the word comes from, but young people do this at campfires (without the bacon).

It's funny to hear that stuffed cabbage is called Halupki. In Yiddish it's called "Holopches", apparently derived from Halupki. Among Jews there is "Polish" style Holopches which is sweet and sour, and "Galicianer" style which is less sweet and has more salt and pepper.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [636]

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 [636]


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 [636]

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 / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4501]


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

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [636]

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

Life / WHY ARE POLISH CALENDARS SKEWED? [42]

On my Mac calendar the week starts with Sunday.



You can thank the Jews for the whole idea of a 7 day week with a day of rest. We got the idea from G-d, Jesus kept shabbat, you guys got the idea from him, although someone changed it to Sunday, and the Muhamad liked the idea too and used it in Islam, changing it to Friday. The 7 day cycle has no astronomical logic. It was a gift from the creator.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [636]


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 [636]

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.

History / Have Poles blood on their hands? :) [496]

There could be two people on the island, a Jew and a Pole. Each one votes for himself and then of course nobody wins. The Jew blames it on anti-semitism and the Pole blames it on a Jewish conspiracy. Then they would have to make a coalition which would carry out a policy neither one of them likes. In the end they both compain about how democracy is a sham.