AJC Report on Jedwabne: Poles Struggling with Personal and National Anti-Semitism

American Jewish Committee
Monday, 6 May 2002

Passions ran high last summer in Poland, as its leaders and citizens grappled with the anti-Semitism of its past and present on the eve of the dedication of a monument to the victims of an act of hate in the small village of Jedwabne, says a report issued at the American Jewish Committee's 96th Annual Meeting this week. The full report is available at http://www.ajc.org/InTheMedia/Publications.asp?did=505 .

In the AJC's Facing Jedwabne, Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld says Poland has begun "a huge undertaking to change the consciousness of a people and the political culture of a nation," prompted by the publication of Jan Tomasz Gross's Neighbors. That book, which appeared two years ago first in Polish, then English, tells of the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941.

"One day, in July 1941, half of the population of a small East European town murdered the other half," writes Mr. Gross in Neighbors. Sixteen hundred Jews – about 60 percent of the townspeople in the small farming community near Bialystok – were murdered, most herded into a barn and burned alive.

"Few works by anyone in the postwar period have drawn the kind of widespread attention or provoked the intensity of collective soul-searching that Neighbors did," writes Dr. Rosenfeld. The serious discussion engendered by the book cuts across Polish life, raising "vital questions of national history, character, culture, honor, guilt, innocence, responsibility, self- image, image abroad, and more."

Dr. Rosenfeld, professor of English and director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, was part of an AJC-sponsored delegation of Polish Americans and Jewish Americans at the July 10, 2001, memorial service in Jedwabne, marking the 60th anniversary of the town's "wild orgy of killing."

The AJC maintains a Warsaw office to advance Polish-Jewish relations, and Dr. Rosenfeld notes several organizations that, although tiny, work to educate Poles about Jewish life. He estimates there are at most 10,000 Jews or people of Jewish ancestry in Poland today, compared to 3.3 million Polish Jews before World War II

"It is ironic...that more and more Poles are coming to recognize the points of contact that their own culture and Jewish culture once shared, and there is a genuine desire on the part of some to renew such contact," he writes.

President Aleksander Kwasniewski is one Pole whose bravery stands out in Dr. Rosenfeld's story. Although facing by strong opposition from political and religious figures and repeated polls showing half the population "was against a public ceremony in which the head of state would issue an apology to the Jews in the name of the Polish nation," Mr. Kwasniewski attended the Jedwabne memorial and apologized, in words of "honesty and moral courage."

Despite some steps forward, Poland and its people are far from widespread recognition that Nazism's perpetrators, not just its victims, include Poles, writes Dr. Rosenfeld. While Poland's government may understand the nation's anti-Semitism better than its predecessors did, a more common reflection of daily reality is "the country's bishops saying penitential prayers for the murdered Jews in a church whose bookstore sells anti-Semitic literature."

Cardinal Jozef Glemp, primate of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, and former president Lech Walesa, had said Mr. Kwasniewski should not apologize. The cardinal and the rest of the Catholic hierarchy boycotted the memorial, as did Jedwabne's priest, who said "It's all lies, and I will not take part in lies." Dr. Rosenfeld notes, however, that some Polish Catholic clergy have urged "full and honest disclosure" of the Jedwabne incident.

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