A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  HOW MANY JEWS are in Poland remains unknown. It is often said that there are five thousand, and some think there are perhaps seven thousand. There is one operating synagogue in Warsaw, a small Jewish community in Wroclaw, another in Lodz, and two synagogues in Cracow, though only one is used at a time. Lodz and Wroclaw on occasion get ten men. In Warsaw the half-dozen aging Yiddish speakers scour the area near the synagogue three times a day looking for the two or three more Jews they need for minyans, and the Cracow synagogues make their minyans on tourists. It would be difficult to show that there are one hundred Jews in Poland who practice the Jewish religion with regularity. But there are many hundreds more in search of some relationship with Judaism.

  After the fall of Communism the three most likely places to find foreign visitors in Warsaw were the old town, the hotel strip by the central train station, and Grzybowski Square. The historic old town, so carefully restored after the war before anything else was, became one of Poland's first experiments in capitalism, with cafes, restaurants, and bookstores all of limited appeal to foreigners, even though they were a new phenomenon for Poland. The hotels by the train station were also an experiment in capitalism. Even before the fall of Communism, they had become a center for prostitution. Most of the hotels were new glass high-rises catering to the few bold foreign businessmen looking for investments in Poland. The Polonia Hotel, that once-elegant survivor where Barbara Gora had followed diplomats up stairways, was no longer draped in flags, but it was still international. Women in the Polonia who were dressed in peculiar and revealing outfits could say, “Let's have a drink,” in Russian, Polish, German, English, or French.

  The third tourism center in Warsaw, Grzybowski Square, was the closest there was to a Jewish tourism area. Since a large portion of the world's Jews had roots in Poland, Jewish tourism ironically became the greatest part of the new Polish tourist industry. So many tourists were Jewish that the Poles had to change their little souvenir Hasid dolls. These wooden carvings that were sold in Poland's main tourism centers—such as Warsaw's old town and the center of Cracow—portrayed Hasidim much as in Goebbels's hate films, with sunken avaricious eyes and jagged menacing noses. It was an authentic Polish souvenir but in time the Poles noticed that the tourists, being mostly Jewish, didn't seem to like these dolls, and so they softened their appearance.

  With the growth of Jewish tourism, Grzybowski Square, the green triangle on the opposite side of the Culture Palace from the Polonia, became an attraction. The Culture Palace itself—a tower ornamented in the basic medieval/Moorish/art deco/neoclassical architecture that had become a symbol of Stalinism—though hard to ignore, was not an attraction. But a guidebook for Jewish tourists could describe the Grzybowski Square area as offering a synagogue, a Yiddish theater, and a kosher restaurant.

  The kosher restaurant, decorated in white and blue, was one of the more expensive restaurants in Warsaw and struggled to survive with a small, mostly foreign clientele. The synagogue also often needed a tourist or two to have a minyan. The Yiddish Theater was of some distinction until 1968, when its director, Ida Kaminska, and most of its actors emigrated. Now it was run by a dramatic white-haired man, Shimon Szurmiej, who was one of the least-liked figures in the Warsaw Jewish community. During Communist times, as head of the Social and Cultural Association, Szurmiej was a token “Jewish leader” and was ready to give credibility to any position that the regime took, from rejecting criticism from world Jewry to establishing martial law.

  The Yiddish Theater would not be much of a draw for Polish Jews in any event, since only Moishe Shapiro and a handful of others understood the language. Next to the synagogue was a free lunch program—a very basic lunch weighted with a lot of potatoes—where these few could socialize with each other and speak Yiddish. These people had very little money and went neither to the kosher restaurant nor to the Yiddish Theater. The rarely-more-than-half-filled theater was made up of a few Poles curious about Yiddish theater and schoolchildren who had no choice. Headphones were provided with a monotonous, droning translation into Polish, but many of the schoolchildren did not even put the headphones on. Aside from Szurmiej, his wife, and his son, most of the actors were not Jewish. They had been coached in Yiddish but were not conversant. And since they knew nothing of Hasidim or shtetl life, their attempts to imitate it ended up as buffoonish anti-Semitic stereotypes. It was the performance equivalent of the carved wooden dolls.

  Pinhas Menachem Yoskowitz, a Gerer Hasid from Lodz who had survived the ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, was brought from Israel to Warsaw by American Hasidim to be the rabbi for the Nozyk Synagogue. He came from an important Ha-sidic family, and a marriage had been arranged between one of his seven children and Chaim Rottenberg's son, Mordechai, who took over from his father on Rue Pavee. Yoskowitz, in his sixties, was a tall, thin, meticulously dressed figure in the long dark garb of Gerer Hasidim with an expensive-looking black broad-brimmed fur hat. His eyes seemed to sparkle with a sense of mischief, and his long white beard caught the breeze and rippled across his chest.

  Yoskowitz was given to making outrageous statements to the press, at one point talking about the evacuation from Poland of the Jewish community because of growing anti-Semitism. Many of Poland's Jews, especially the young ones who were just discovering their Jewish identity, found Yoskowitz a difficult man with whom to talk. He appeared to have a short attention span and little patience for lengthy conversations, which was an odd trait for a rabbi. In fact, although he had been ordained a rabbi in Germany after being liberated from Bergen-Belsen, he had spent most of the subsequent years in Israel as a businessman.

  When he arrived in Warsaw as the rabbi for the Nozyk Synagogue, he took the title Chief Rabbi of Poland. A second Chief Rabbi of Poland showed up from New York during a service, and their dispute ended up with the two rabbis in a physical tussle. The other Chief Rabbi was Wawa Moreino also from Lodz. Moreino had been the Chief Rabbi of Poland, traditionally a lifetime position, but he had been removed by the regime in 1955 and forced into exile.

  Three times a day, Moishe Shapiro and about six other elderly men waited at the Nozyk for a minyan. Simon Heustein, the kosher slaughterer for the restaurant, would walk over to be the eighth. When Yoskowitz was in town, he made the ninth, and they only needed one tourist, any Jewish man. They looked out toward the square and waited to pounce. Tourists did show up full of questions—how many Jews are here, how did you survive the war, what happened to your parents—all very sympathetically posed. “Later,” they would say to the tourist. “Come to the shul. We need a minyan.”

  The kosher restaurant was funded by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. Lauder, the heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a Reagan-appointed ambassador to Austria, had an idea that with his considerable financial resources, he could make a difference in the future of Central European Jewry. He made his greatest effort in Poland. But to many of the Jews here, he simply created the illusion of Jewish life. Yes, there was a kosher restaurant, an education program, a summer youth camp, a Jewish youth newspaper, and an organization to help the so-called “hidden children” who were just discovering their Jewish origins after a half-century, but all of this was done by an American financier and without him it would collapse. The idea was to create a foundation on which Jews in Poland could build, but Jews in Poland were skeptical. “Lauder is trying to resuscitate things,” said Ninel Kameraz, “but it won't work. If you want to live a Jewish life, you have to leave Poland.”

  Simon Heustein, the shochet, or kosher slaughterer, was born in Przemysl in 1929, and survived the war in Siberia. When he returned, he had found Cracow to be a relatively thriving Jewish community in need of a kosher slaughterer. There he learned the shochet trade and then in the 1950s emigrated to Israel, along with most of his customers. In 1991, Yoskowitz persuaded him to come to Warsaw. “I wanted to do something for the Jews,” Heustein said. He kosherized the Polish restaurant with $6,000 worth of new plates and new pots and pans, and he trained the non-
Jewish staff in the dietary laws. Its clientele was a combination of Orthodox Jewish tourists who complained about the prices, and Polish non-Jews who believed that the high quality of kosher food justified the price. It was always a Polish belief that kosher things were better because the Jews knew secrets and took special care and got only the best. On a Friday afternoon in any store, workers in overalls lined up to buy bottles of vodka. While waiting in line, they argued with each other over which kosher vodka to buy. They were not interested in the quality Polish vodkas that are prized in gourmet circles in Paris and New York. They wanted the kosher stuff because the Jews really know how to make it. It's cleaner. It's stronger. It's healthier. It gets you a better drunk. These were all commonly offered reasons for drinking kosher, and they consumed the vodka with frightening speed.

  Kosher vodka was also one of the issues in the fight between Yoskowitz and Moreino: which of them had the right to put the seal of the Chief Rabbi of Poland on a profitable line of kosher vodka? Yoskowitz, who was, after all, a businessman, wanted to expand his line to more than just vodka, and he even offered a kosher mineral water with the brand name Chaim.

  Still, Poland's only kosher restaurant barely survived. The shuffle of Simon Heustein, the small disheveled shochet, in his limp gray suit and hat, with his scruffy beard and dust-clouded eyeglass lenses, making the minyan and going back to the restaurant three times daily, became one of the Jewish sights of the Grzybowski Square area.

  “Hello, Mr. Heustein. How are you?”

  “Oiy,” he said. “It's slow, this kosher business.”

  ‘That's because you charge too much. The Poles can't afford it.”

  “No. The Poles come. If it wasn't for the Poles, we would have been out of business two years ago. But the Jews—”

  THE MARKET FOR KOSHER PRODUCTS was only one of the signs that Jewishness, along with anti-Semitism, had become fashionable in post-Communist Poland. Jewish studies became one of the fastest growing fields in Polish universities, and Jewish books grew in popularity. Every sidewalk bookstand offered Polish translations of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novels. Poles with only one possibly Jewish grandfather were saying they were really Jewish. But most Jews suspected that this philo-Semitism, or Jew-loving, was simply the newest trend in anti-Semitism. It was also something that was left over from the old Solidarity days. The anti-Zionist campaign of 1968 had fixed in people's minds the idea that sympathy for Jews was an anti-Communist act. A young man from Cracow who had never before met a Jew—in itself something that would have been unimaginable in Poland even one generation earlier—took the opportunity to apologize on behalf of Poland to the first one he met for the anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, which he termed “Poland's greatest disgrace.” He apparently knew of no earlier disgraces for which Poland should apologize to Jews. It was the Communists who had destroyed Polish Jewry, he believed.

  At the same time, to walk around Poland in Hasidic garb is an act of physical courage. Yoskowitz was assaulted more than once by skinheads punching him in the face, shouting “Zyd.” The few religious Jews left in Poland do not even go outside with a yar-mulke on—that is only for the house or synagogue. Mezuzahs are placed inside, not outside doorways. A New York rabbi, not understanding this world, walked into a small-town store in southern Poland in search of a soft drink. The local peasants, who were already visibly drunk though it was still morning, spied his small knit yarmulke. One of them said, “You're a Jew, aren't you?”

  “Yes,” the rabbi replied.

  “Give me your money.”

  “I'm not going to give you my money.”

  “You owe me your money.”

  In the back a few were angrily chanting, “Zyd, Zyd, Zyd.” But the rabbi was able to leave with no more than a little shoving.

  Yoskowitz, however, was not only assaulted, he was also frequently assailed by young Poles who wanted him to convert them to Judaism. He refused. He did not want Christians. He wanted to find the hidden Jews, people like Barbara Gruberska who had been placed in non-Jewish homes by Jewish parents who did not survive. Nobody could be certain how many now-middle-aged people like her there were, who had not yet discovered the truth.

  A YEAR AFTER Mateusz's bar mitzvah, Moishe Shapiro prepared a second bar mitzvah for Barbara Gruberska's son, Andrzei. Barbara had wanted very much to give her son and daughter the Jewish identity out of which she had been cheated. Her husband, a non-Jew whose family had been socialists since the nineteenth century, despised the Catholic Church but had no ill will toward Judaism.

  Andrzei would have been perfectly suited to continue the cover-up in which Barbara had been raised. Tall and blond, with pale blue eyes, his appearance could be described as that of “a typical Pole,” which is what he was until his mother took him to Moishe Shapiro. Andrzei approached this Jewishness with considerable ambivalence. He had never needed any identity other than being Polish. What initially made a difference for him was the charm of this small elderly man with his permanent hat and his Yiddish-accented Polish. Andrzei, always a good student, had never had a teacher he enjoyed so much. The bar mitzvah was a great moment in his family's life. His non-Jewish father started talking about the family moving to Israel. But Barbara knew that as a doctor, she would have to work much harder in Israel than she did in Poland, if she could get work at all. It was even more doubtful that there would be any job for her husband, an electrical engineer.

  Andrzei was pleased with his bar mitzvah, and though he started calling himself Avram, he still felt ambivalent, especially about the news that his foreskin should be removed. Assurances that it would not hurt did not completely convince him. A Bobover rabbi was impressed with the former Andrzei and wanted to take him to New York to join his Hasidic community, but Barbara adamantly refused to let him go, a refusal that came as a tremendous relief to Andrzei.

  For the next two years Andrzei drifted back into his Polish life in the small town near Warsaw. But then he was offered a scholarship to a Jewish high school in Paramus, New Jersey, by the principal who happened to be passing through Warsaw and who recognized in Andrzei an unusually likable, curious, and intelligent boy. Andrzei accepted. His second day in America, he was circumcised in a Brooklyn hospital—a simple surgical procedure with a medically qualified mohel. It didn't hurt. In New Jersey, living with a religious American family, Andrzei for the first time learned what traditional Jewish life was, observing the Sabbath, praying three times a day, eating only kosher food, and keeping his head covered even on the street. He was living in a world where Jewishness wasn't hidden. After a snowstorm he built a larger-than-life snowman on the front law of the house where he was living in Teaneck. The snowman was in the shape of a long-bearded Hasid and for a hat he had a huge shtreimel. It wasn't a provocation—just fun. This wasn't Poland.

  What most affected Andrzei in America was a new version of history. To him, World War II had been a struggle of Poles against Germans. No one had told him that not only Germans but Poles had been involved in the murder of Jews. He began studying about Polish Jewry, and one day he ran across a photograph of Jews in the 1930s purging themselves in a river for Rosh Hashanah. In the picture he could see thousands of Jews on the riverbank. He recognized the spot. It was in his town. “I started thinking about all those people, the Jews that are no longer here. There are no empty houses. No burnt-out houses. Every place in town is full. And yet all those thousands that were in the picture are missing.”

  After high school Andrzei went to Yeshiva University in New York. By that time, he spoke almost flawless American English. He sometimes worried about his ability to fit in and thought that he was sometimes too easily influenced by the people around him. He was faced with a difficult decision: Did he want to be an American or a Pole? The choice was not easy for him, because he had always felt very comfortable in Poland. No one had seemed to whisper about his Jewishness there. He could play sports and drink with friends. “I love Poland. This is my country. I can walk down any street and act like a
Pole,” he said. But could he walk down that street and act like a Jew, with his head covered and tassels hanging off his hip? Could he find kosher food? Could he openly act Jewish and still fit in, or did he fit in only because he didn't look or act Jewish? He reached the sad conclusion that if he wanted to be Jewish, he could not live in Poland anymore. “You can be Jewish and American, but you can't be Jewish and Polish,” he concluded. It was still the way it always had been. You were a Pole or you were a Jew. The phrase “Polish Jew” was still only used in Western countries.

  It was very different for his younger sister, Maigorzata, who started calling herself Malka. She was not a tall, blond athletic Pole. She was short and dark, with what in Poland is called “Jewish hair.” Like her mother, she grew up with few friends. Her one friend was Catholic, and she never discussed being Jewish with her. But by then, the entire town knew her mother's history. Perhaps they had always known it. Children shouted “Zyd” at her before she ever knew what it meant. No one ever shouted “Zyd” at her brother.

  “Boys are different,” explained Andrzei. “If you can play sports, that's all they care about. I've never experienced anti-Semitism. American Jews see something written on the wall, and they call it anti-Semitism. But I've never experienced what a Jew in Poland calls anti-Semitism.”