Being a Jew in modern-day Poland; Israeli Jew who is of Polish descent

I don't think that anti-semitism is really so strong in Poland. Some half-brained football hooligans writing stupid graffiti ...or brainwashed people listening to Radio Maryja?

It is a bit amusing reading some expats patronizing opinions ....As I am aware it was in USA racial segregation for quite long time, It was in UK that black people were killed with racial reasons but it looks that these countries are very civilized now but we are so backwards :-(

If I can speak from my experiences with Polish-Americans here, especially of the 50+ group, unfortunately, while not actively anti-Semitic, many do harbour anti-Jewish sentiment and subscribe to the


. What's also worrying is that, very often, these same people are at the same time very religious and supporter the RCC's involvement in the public sphere.

Tbh, I don't really mind the American Poles. In general, all the 50+ fellas are usually more problematic yet they matter less, being older now.

UK


Its Yoav Shamir you should watch his film Defamation there are some good bits about Poland through the eyes of Israeli visitors

There is a Jewish festival in Warsaw here is the link festiwalsingera.pl there are very inexpensive flights Warsaw/Tel Aviv with the discount airlines.

I believe in areas like Warsaw, people are very friendly and will not be bigots.


Compared to other countries like England and Germany, it unfortunately is.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, Poland has one of the most anti-Semitic populations in Europe along with Spain and Hungary.
adl.org/press-center/press-releases/anti-semitism-international/adl-survey-in-ten-european-countries-find-anti-semitism.html#.U1mgiFeTKM0

Is being a Jew in modern-day Poland better or worse than being a Palestinian under Israeli occupation?

Poland should never compare itself socially to those nations. Germany and especially UK have major ongoing cultural issues with foreigners. I.E. i don't remember the last time a Pole was nearly decapitated on a main road in broad day light, like occurred in London.

I'm fairly certain if I moved to Israel, I would be judged (by some) for being Polish. If i moved to South Africa, I would be judged (by some) for being White. Etc etc etc. I have never and would never expect native people to change because of me.

People on this forum are mostly foreign people living in Poland or Polish ex-pats living abroad. The former group does not command Polish sufficiently enough to follow the real Polish life in full, the latter group live abroad for a sufficienly long time to have lost their touch with the ever changing Polish reality here (occasional tourist visits cannot help). The two groups carry an ongoing tribal war against one another on the forum. I am one of the very, very few real Poles on this forum now, which means a Pole who has never lived abroad (except for a six-month period in the UK in my twenties), has a pure Polish ancestry and a purely Polish wife. If I have to, I usually take sides with the latter group since many of the former present this nasty megalomaniacal attitude towards Poland and the Polish singing this well known British post-colonial tune "We are better than you. We are British" of which they do not even think as post-colonial.

Yet some of the living in Poland ex-pats' opinions seem to be close to reality as the one expressed by warszawski:


Surprisingly enough, such a view is also held by some Jewish people whose accounts I can sometimes read in this "Jewish" newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza (the biggest circulation among the Polish "heavy" papers). Jewish people are a rare species in Poland these days, most of them are assimilated, so you will not see them in their Jewish traditional dress in the streets of Polish cities as you coud before 1939. If you see them dressed like that, you will instantly think that they have just come from Israel. I once saw such a man near a synagogue in Kazimierz, the former Jewish district of Kraków, and I was sure he came directly from Israel. And it was not until he spoke in Polish that I realized he was an orthodox Jew of Cracow since every language nuance in his Polish was perfect.

Kraków has the biggest population of "real" Polish Jews who or whose families survived the Shoah. As far as I know there are around 400 of them living in the ancient Polish capital. When you go to the cemetery bordering Kazimierz, you will see a lof of contemporary tombstones (dating from 1950s onwards) bearing the Star of David on them.

I like you, you can come to Poland with no problem with me :P

Really? Personally I walk past the synagogue in Warsaw every day on my way home from work (and sometimes on my way to work, it depends which route I take) and I certainly haven't noticed any lack of Jews here.


You might, I certainly won't.


That's the claim, but it isn't supported by your claims about where bus stops are.


Nobody who knows anything about Polish history would make such a stupid claim.

If you also saw a young man in a baseball hat and raiders top would you consider he just arrived from the USA. It is a regular occurence to see men walking on the streets of Warsaw wearing a kippah.

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.

On my way to work I was waiting to cross the road next to a man wearing a Colorado Avalanche, it didn't even enter my head that he was from the USA.


There was a bloke in the bar last night wearing one, he appeared to be Polish (was reading GW).

foxnews.com/opinion/2013/06/21/why-jewish-life-is-thriving-in-today-poland/

Yes, but you'll catch up with us eventually ;)


It is comparatively tiny.


No we don't, I'm not even sure if they number in the tens of thousands. But the number is growing every year.

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.

Maybe the man I saw was a rabbi. It wasn't a mater of kippah only. He was all in black, I am not even sure if he was wearing something on his head. What was pecular about him was that he was all orthodox Jew, from head (still not sure about the head) to feet, and he had what we call in Polish "pejsy". He was as if taken out from a film; I never see Jewish people dressed like that in Warsaw, though I am not saying that you can never meet them (especially near a synagogue).

Contrary to that, if I saw "a young man in a baseball hat and raiders top", I would not even think of him as arriving from the USA. Most probably, I would not even notice him or take any attention of him, and if you asked me if I saw anyone like him, I would have probably said to you "No, sir, I haven't seen anyone like that".

If it's a "regular occurence to see men walking on the streets of Warsaw wearing a kippah", I promise I will try to pay utmost attention in the coming weeks to spotting people wearing kippahs. And of course I will be happy to report each of the spotted case to you in this thread. I promise to be very honest about it as I feel truly sorry about the fact that Warsaw has lost its Jewish heritage which was so lively before the WW II. I would wish more Jewish people to be still living in Warsaw now since if you know its history, you would feel that Warsaw is in a way an empty or hugely disfigured place without them. So from now on, I will report to you every kippah I spot in the street of Warsaw. I usually move about (but not every day) in the center of the city (- square between the streets of: Marszałkowska, Jerozolimskie, Nowy Świat, Świętokrzyska; - the Royal Route from Staszica Palace to Zamkowy Square; - occasionally the Old Town and the New Town, Zawiszy Square and the district of Praga west of Warszawa Wileńska railway station). Maybe you are right when saying that it is a regular occurence to see men wearing a kippah in Warsaw, so it is going to be a really exciting exercise for me to try be spotting them in those streets.


I like you, too. But I won't be coming to Poland with you since I am in Poland all the time and am writing this post from Poland which a moderator can confirm by checking my IP (unless it goes through some bizzare service provider in the Bahamas).

So, none of the 'traditionally' Jewish parts of town then.

He was really an Israeli :-)


If you take the Jewish community in the UK more than 70% reside in or around London there are small communities in Leeds,Birmingham,Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow.So it is understandable outside of Warsaw and Krakow the numbers are much smaller.

He could well have been. But statistically he was almost certainly Polish (given that about 98% of fluent Polish speakers are Polish).


And they are smaller, much smaller. Lublin used to be a major Jewish city, a centre for learning of global repute, some called it the "Jewish Oxford"; now the synagogue is rarely working because they don't have a minyan.

Church influence has nothing to with it.
Jewish- friendly? Really? You are asking a very strange/leaded qestions.


Yes that is a kind of paranoia.


Oh? Point to me a country where Jews are liked? Only in Poland there is issue of liking or cherrishing Jews and their culture. I would say that it is a very strange phenomena.


If that is your worry you must be a lot free time on your hands.


For all things you could feel sorry for you cry after Jewish heritage - that very strange, and people around the world are worrying about anti-semitism in Poland, figures.

Yes, that's why most Poles hate ppl from Warsaw :P


It's not as it used to be but maybe soon it will be different. If they don't want to come because they don't like Poland but I hope soon the fear of anti-semitism will be gone.


Hmm, that doesn't put nice image... Quite ignorant. Don't judge book by the cover (or past for that matter) Hopefully such attitude is not to spread.

Church influence has A LOT to do with it. I think the primary reason that antisemitism in Poland even existed in the first place was because "Żydzi ukrzyżowali Jezusa" here and "Żydzi zabili Jezusa" there. No offence.

And yes, Jewish-friendly, as in relatively clean of antisemitism and hatred for Jews, like, say, Denmark. You can even call it indifferent towards Jews if you'd like.


I know, but you have to understand that such sayings are only because of the bad history, not the present. There is a kind of bad feeling because of what happened that's still not fully passed, mostly among the older generation - like in Poland.

Well, this link shows evidence that some areas of Warsaw and Krakow are very tolerant. However, can the same be said for the rest of Poland? I mean the Anti-Defamation League has concluded that Poland is one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe that they investigate...

Well, unlike people of your sort, I have the courage to face up to the problem instead of looking away or pretending there's no problem.


It sure does. I also see very little real tolerance for other religions. Too often it is along the lines: we (the RCC) are the only one true and real church, we own the monopoly on being always right in moral and religions matters, while everyone else, while 'tolerated' (i.e. not openly criticised), is by default assumed to be morally less important and less right... I never quite understood why, but such condescendingness is not only irritating, it is plain wrong.


Yet you would be surprised how many of the religious zealots/anti-Semites do not know that Jesus was a Jew himself...

....but only on his mother's sideLOL

From what I have read on the ADL and seen in documentaries I would have to question the motives of the ADL, not saying they are all bad, although they are not saints either.

And I would say that Israel is one of the most anti-polish country in the world.

Conclusion?

May I ask what is so stupid about Ziemowit's opinion?
It is a wery well known fact that Poles are the most homogeneous nation in Europe
No doubt , fortunately, Ziemowit's stupid opinion has much more to do wth the reality than your suggestive statement,

Even if that's true, and it probably isn't as they've psychologically moved on from what I understand, it's not exactly hard to understand is it. The truth that many Poles helped Jews escape Nazism is recognised by a memorial and list called Righteous Among The Nations with more Poles on it than any other nation, but the fact a lot of the Holocaust happened in Poland (because of the Nazi occupation forcing it on Poland) is an infinitely tragic fact that cannot be deleted from those who have no choice but to remember.