Life /
Being a Jew in modern-day Poland; Israeli Jew who is of Polish descent [269]
Warsaw is not whole Poland, please try to remember that. It's hard to deny that compared to the past the ammount of Jews in Poland is very, VERY small. I don't want to say I would be against Jews coming to Poland, I just want to say that we don't have a big group of Jews in Poland.
Some of the Jews nowadays tend to have a view about everything East of Germany, including Germany, being anti-semitic and as such automatically stay away from it. It wasn't the first nor the second time I heard the phrase "yehudi" has previously expressed in this thread - "מכל המדינות בעולם דווקא בפולין אתה רוצה לחיות?" - "From all the countries in the world, you wanna live specifically in Poland?"
I am very disappointed by the way the Israeli schools choose to label Poland. As you all probably know, teenagers come every year from almost all of the schools in Israel to visit the death camps, ghettos and forests in which Jews were executed. If they're lucky, and the school has enough money, they also visit the old town in Kraków, go shopping in Warsaw's malls or visit a Polish village to see life there.
And that's where the problem lies - more often than not, the school - whether out of paranoia or out of simple ignorance - talks about the antisemitism in Poland of the 30's and the 40's, and how the students should watch themselves in the streets and they put fear into them by telling them they will have to be protected during the whole trip and that they must look out all the time so that they wouldn't be attacked.
When you bring this together with what the students are exposed to during their visit to the camps, the poor teenagers get the feeling that "Poland=Antisemitism, Camps and Jewish death".
As a Jew whose family died in the Holocaust, I'm not saying that the Holocaust should be forgotten, and I know how important it is to preserve its memory - but I can't stand to hear about students coming to Poland for 3 days just to do a "Death camps marathon" and fly back to Israel. It's not fair towards Poland, no matter the history. They should show the true Poland more, and not fear the Poles as much as they do now. I think it's the mutual fear of "What could happen" and "What would happen" that keeps the two sides from getting along as well as they could.
By the way, I've said it earlier but I'll say it again - I think that if the religion was to be seperated completely from the state, it'd do Poland only good and open the door for it to become the most advanced country in Eastern Europe by far.
