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


I resent that ignorant comment. The nation is Israel and yes, it issues passports. I have no problem with calling it "Jewland" either. Of course in the period you are discussing there was no Israel, and even when it was established, not every Jew around the world became a citizen of Israel, just like not every ethnic Chinese is a citizen of China.

Harry, Polish Jews were a clearly defined ethnic group that were Polish nationals but not ethnic Poles. Nothing to do with bigotry – it's just historic fact.

That has no bearing on Torq's point on whether Poles are to blame for Poland being communist. It seems clear to me that most communists in post-war Poland were ethnic Poles and many were ethnic Jews. There seems to be a tendency to minimize the role of ethnic Poles because it isn't something Poles are proud of. But like Vichy France, where French people collaborated with the Germans, many ethnic Poles must have collaborated with the Soviets or the regime would not have lasted so long. The fact is that when ethnic Poles stopped cooperating, the communist regime fell. So I respectfully disagree with Torq's point, but to attack him as a bigot because he recognizes there is such a thing as Jewish ethnicity is absurd.

(Your style in general is really nasty. If you can't stand Poles, why do you live in Poland?)

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


That's because we didn't kick out most of the Arabs who were here when the state became independent. I don't think that should count against us. But the state was created by Jews to be the politically independent homeland of the Jewish nation. It's main language is Hebrew and it's holidays and public life reflect Jewish history, culture and values (although not as much as I'd like it to.)


No. He thinks that only ethnic Poles are ethnic Poles (a self-evident statement). He never said that ethnic Jews, Germans, Tatars or Ruthenians that are of Poland are not to be considered Polish nationals.

I don't know where you come from, but not all countries are like the US or Canada, where there is no core national ethnicity and where citizenship is determined only by where you were born. Many other countries define themselves by ethnicity but also recognize citizenship of minority ethnic groups that are native to the country. That's why there are two different words in the English language – nationality and ethnicity. An Arab citizen of Israel, for example, has Israeli nationality and Arab ethnicity.

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


It's not exactly the same. In the US there is no core ethnic group (not since the end of the 18th century at least). It's a country founded on a political belief and not on ethnicity. It's not a nation state. So in theory no ethnic group in the US is more "American" than another. But in nation states, like Poland, Israel or Spain, for example, there is a difference between the core ethnic group and minority groups. The minorities have citizenship and political rights as individuals but the core ethnic group dominates the culture, public life and politics of the nation. So if I was born in Poland and had Polish citizenship (like my grandfather, say) I would not be as "Polish" as my ethnic Pole neighbors, even if I could talk the talk and walk the walk.

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


Never miss an opportunity to say something untrue about Israel, do you.
Let's see if you're right... You say the UK took in 800,000 into a population of 60 million. That's only 1.3%. I'm not impressed.

Would Israeli Jews do that?
Just in the 1990s we took in 956,000 immigrants into a population of about 5.5 million. That means we took in the equivalent of around 18% of our population. So, yes, I can see Israeli Jews doing that.

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


What's the relevance of your point? Why Israeli traders? Why not say that Italy wouldn't take in Polish immigrants because they would compete with Italian traders?


You're right that we wanted to maintain the demographic edge over the arabs. Makes sense doesn't it? I don't want to be outnumbered by people who deny my right to a country. But it's also altruistic because Russian Jews wanted to come here. No one forced them to. The only thing i agree on partially is that not all of them are Jews. I would prefer they limited it to Jews and immediate family members. But now that they're here, I welcome them.

News / The "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign theft from Oswiecim, Poland [240]

I think everyone, including my government and the honorable members of this forum, should wait and see what exactly happened before making statements and accusations. What's interesting is how an incident like this arouses so much comment and how the comments are all so predictable.

News / The "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign theft from Oswiecim, Poland [240]


A bit of overstatement, no question. But you should know that there's a habit among Israeli politicians, even when criticizing eachother, to use strong language and overstate their point. It's a style of talking which annoys me, but since I'm used to it I know how to interpret it. Don't go quoting every statement by every Israeli and make too much out of it. It's not Moses talking from Sinai. It's just a guy commenting for some TV reporter.

In any case, if this is the worst failure of the Polish Police then you have a pretty good police force.

News / The "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign theft from Oswiecim, Poland [240]


Please translate the cartoon.

Food / Why carp for Polish Christmas? [157]


It is, but that picture looks a lot different than what this Jew eats. The carp we eat is boiled and has sugar and pepper added. It takes a long time to eat because you have to avoid choking on sharp bones, but it tastes good. I add some horseradish, which we call "chrain". We have another kind of carp in Israel that's called oriental fish and its baked with tomato sauce, onions, pepper and other spices. I prefer that. I remember my grandmother having carp swimming in a pail in the kitchen.

Food / Why carp for Polish Christmas? [157]


It doesn't have the sound of Hebrew or Yiddish, so we probably took it from you.
Thanks.

And I hope you all had a nice Christmas.

Food / Why carp for Polish Christmas? [157]

The important question is this: Is your chrain dark red with beets or is it white?

Food / Why carp for Polish Christmas? [157]

This looks familiar, although our horseradish looks a bit different, less green. When I make it by hand (once a year on Pesach) i add salt, sugar and vinegar. Otherwise it comes in the store, dark red/purple because they mix it with beets.

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


Couldn't be too many because, as you know, the vast majority of Jews in Poland did not live in the Prussian areas but in the Russian and Austrian areas. Your point about Poles being denied ownership of houses by the Prussians might be true, I have no idea. But to suggest, based on a situation in pre-WW1 Prussia, that Jews in central and eastern poland really didn't lose legitimate property in the holocaust is a ridiculous argument. I wouldn't have expected a comment like that from you.

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

vetala


I see. I didn't see the original quote on that website till now. But after reading what he wrote, what's the most horrible thing is not that people moved into his house (let's assume they thought the owners were dead), but that jews returning to their town were murdered by their former neighbors. And it's known that this happened in quite a few places. Is it any wonder that Jews who left Poland after the war are bitter about their former neighbors?

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


Jews were shipped out of towns to be killed and their property was taken over by Polish squatters. The few survivors who came back to claim it after the war were driven away. Which is the part you don't understand?


Nobody says the government of Poland is responsible for Jedwabne. What people say is that Poles massacred Jews, because that apparently is what happened there. Whether that means Poles are anti-semites is for you Poles to discuss among yourselves. I don't care.


No. I use words like "often" when I don't have statistics. This isn't a court of law, so I don't don't need to bring numbers. My point is still valid, that the shocking thing is NOT the squatters in former Jewish property but the murders. I'm not talking about pogroms, which may have been isolated incidents, but murders of individual Jewish returnees. How many murders were there? Enough to be a phenomenon and not a freak incident.

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


It's discussed as a polish phenomenon here because this is a Polish forum. Also because everything that happened in the holocaust is magnified in Poland since that's where the most Jews lived and died. There's no question that the other nations you mentioned were notorious in betraying Jews to the Nazis and that French and Dutch participated in rounding up their Jews and that Ukrainians and Baltics took part in the slaughter. But this discussion is about Poland. If I would be on a Lithuanian forum I'd give them hell, but then what's more boring than a Lithuanian forum.

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


Is that a Polish expression? Why don't you explain it.

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

Oh. Well, that clears it up.

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


Sounds like a way of evading responsibility. The man on the street may not be responsible for the situation of the world but he is responsible for his own behavior. In a democracy he's also responsible for choosing the "guy in the corner".

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


That's the problem we have in Israel's democracy. Politicians work to please their parties rather than the voters. So the citizen's influence is very indirect. So disregard my comment about democracies. I still stand by my comment about individual responsibility. The point is that when people start blaming an invisible hand for their troubles or their sins it's usually an excuse.

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.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]

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 [639]


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.

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 [639]

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

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 [639]

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 [639]


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 [639]

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.

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.