Odkrywanie tożsamości żydowskiej w cieniu Holokaustu a dziedzictwo polskiej wielokulturowości – wyzwania dla edukacji i dialogu międzykulturowego

Abstract

What constitutes a current challenge for intercultural education is the situation of discovering and specifying one’s own cultural (national, religious) identity by individuals or more or less numerous communities, which – due to some reasons and historical determinants – have been deprived of reliable knowledge and consciousness of their inherited identity. The individuals and groups who have not been shaped in their “indigenous identity” (and who have been frequently formed against the essential elements of their identity) start to function in a different (from the previous) way when they come to discovering and acquiring their “native identity”. They draw attention and orient their activity to the values associated with the discovered identity. They re-evaluate the process and effects of education to which they have been subjected and they undertake the rebuilding and completing the resources of “personal knowledge” in order to adjust them to the requirements of the new identity. The identity given (instilled) by the previous “course of life” is confronted with the identity to discover – along with its hidden (implicit) layers in one’s own existential experience. The sense of this experience is read “anew” and in the context of the subject matter appropriate for the acquired identity.What seems cognitively interesting for the analyses in the field of intercultural education are the situations when the previously unknown identity is discovered by mature people with a well-established social position, who practice intellectual reflection by profession – the reflection which is interwoven with revealing and specifying their own identity. In Poland, among the well-known figures who learned about their Jewish origin and faced the challenge of recognizing their identity anew are Jan Hertrich-Woleński (born in 1940, learned about his Jewish roots about 1980 as a middle-aged widely recognized philosopher in the current of analytic philosophy, deeply anchored in the philosophical-logical tradition of the Lviv-Warsaw School) and Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel (born in 1943 in the ghetto in Stare Święciany near Vilnius, as a son of Jakub and Batia Weksler, received and saved by Piotr and Emilia Waszkinel – a Polish married couple, learned about his origin at the age of 35 in 1978, already as a Roman Catholic priest who scientifically focused on French philosophy). What is suggested in the undertaken analyses in the area of intercultural education is applying the point of reference of Jan Woleński’s considerations focused on the “Jewish issues”, which to a large extent directly concern discovering and specifying his own cultural identity. On one hand, this is the confrontation with the past, especially with the shadow of the Holocaust, and also with discovering the cultural heritage of Polish Jews. This is making even with such education (in the times of communist Poland) in which the presence and activity of Jews in Polish history was marginalized. On the other hand, this point of reference means searching for such (also educational) solutions which will be currently optimal and will facilitate building a better future. Woleński formulates the idea of “double inclusivism” and, promoting this idea also with an educational goal, initiates discussion aiming at deeper insight into diagnosing the complicated Polish-Jewish relations and viewing their prospects (in 2001–2003 in the Jewish Culture Centre, Woleński conducted an authorial series of meetings with special guests, which he entitled “Poles and Jews – anew?”). Developing the idea of double inclusivism, he expresses the belief that “the Jewish issues will remain unsolved as long as Jews are treated by others as exceptional (mostly in the negative sense) and are treated as such by themselves (mostly in the positive sense). The Jewish inner exclusivism (a specific messianism), as I would call the idea of the chosen nation, and the applied (towards them) outer exclusivism are two sides of the same coin. They should be replaced by inner and outer inclusivism, that is by Jews’ acceptance of others and others’ acceptance of Jews”182. Implementing the idea of mutual acceptance (double inclusivism) understood in such a way requires appropriate intercultural education which will respect this idea.