Jewish Heritage and Cultural Revival in Poland

Abstract

Interest in the Jewish heritage and Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland, has grown in recent decades. The cultural phenomenon has been termed variously as the “Jewish renaissance,” “Jewish revival,” or “Jewish boom” and has demonstrated enormous complexity. The phenomenon consists of two intertwined social processes: a Jewish communal revival and a Jewish heritage celebration, the latter of which includes various cultural initiatives undertaken by outsiders to the Jewish community. The opening of the Eastern Bloc after the collapse of communism made foreign institutional support and funding for the renewal of Jewish communal life available. The growing popularity of heritage and Holocaust tourism enabled the gentrification of neglected historical Jewish neighborhoods and sites and renovation or restoration of material Jewish heritage. Increasingly people have pursued their Jewish roots upon discovering them. The “unexpected generation”—the generation of Poles born between the late 1970s and the early 1990s who claimed their Jewish ancestry as teenagers—has emerged carrying their own notions of Jewishness. Simultaneously, growing interest by non-Jewish Poles in Jews and all things Jewish has been observable in the multiplication of Jewish-style cultural products, in the opening of new cultural institutions (of which the most notable is the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw), and in the emergence of Jewish studies programs at many universities. However, as many Polish cities and towns hold Jewish festivals of some kind and concerts of klezmer music are organized all over the country, artists, intellectuals, and scholars approach the “Jewish revival” with widely divergent views. They do so mainly because Poland was the geographic epicenter of the Holocaust. Little remains of Poland’s large, vibrant, and diverse Jewish communities, which, prior to World War II, constituted approximately 10 percent of the Polish population. Until recently, most historical and sociological analysis of Jews in Poland after World War II concluded that the Jewish community will soon end. Estimates of the number of members of Jewish communities range from a little over 7,000 to 20,000 people. Polish society remains overtly homogenous in terms of its ethnicity and religion, identifying mostly as Roman Catholic. Therefore, the revival of Jewish culture and the preservation of Jewish memory have been carried out mainly by non-Jews and, for the most part, for non-Jewish audiences. Consequently, the phenomenon has been often perceived as a simulacrum, as a cultural theft lacking authenticity—morally ambivalent endeavors concerning Polish complicity in the Holocaust and widespread anti-Semitism. Yet, some scholars have put forward another reading of the Jewish cultural revival, one that is not mere imitation and reproduction of the lost heritage but rather one that entails the reinvention of a new Jewish culture, which may create a new Jewish/non-Jewish contact zone. The latter approach acknowledges the role that both Polish and foreign Jewish communities have played in the phenomenon.