Rediscovering a Jewish Wrocław

The Centre for Jewish Culture and Education at the restored White Stork Synagogue in Wrocław is open to all residents. Photo: The Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities

“Here the stones speak Polish!” “We were here, we are here and we will be here!” Today these are laughable slogans, but even a few decades ago they were the expressions of communist propaganda which stemmed from the interwar nationalistic and pan-Slavic doctrine which assumed Germany was Poland’s centuries-long enemy and would remain so forever. The only method of defence, as envisioned by the nationalists, was an alliance with Russia.

Our Heimat!

Today Wrocław, previously Breslau. It was once a Czech, a Polish, a Silesian and a Habsburg city. Then it was a Prussian and a German one; and finally it became a Polish one again. The city was Catholic for a long time and then it was Protestant. Today, it is ethnically part Ukrainian, as the Poles who came here from Poland’s Eastern lands (Kresy) are now joined by tens of thousands of Ukrainians who are coming to Wrocław in pursuit of peace and prosperity.

Wrocław is probably the most European city of all of today’s Polish towns. This is true not only because of the city’s attractive location that favours trade and investment, but because the fascinating story that has created today’s Wrocław is finally being fully revealed. It is here where, after the largest ethnic cleansing in Europe’s history occurred, new Polish residents built a new life on the ruins of a foreign city, and since 1989 found a new identity. It is an identity which consists of the legacy of their heirs and those who carry on their ancestors’ heritage. Thereby, we enrich our patriotism through our love for Wrocław and Lower Silesia – our small homelands. This is our Heimat. It is time we seize this German word and include it in our language!

Wrocław is also a Jewish city. The history of Silesian Jews spans here for centuries with encounters and confrontations between Orthodox Polish Jews and liberal German Jews. This interaction was most visible at the end of the 18th century. At that time Prussia, ruled by Frederick the Great (a king with a bad record in Polish history as he was among the co-initiators of Poland’s partitions) entitled Jews civil rights and unprecedented development opportunities. Consequently, the direction of Jewish migration from West to East changed for good, leading them towards more enlightened monarchies.

The Jews saw a chance for security and development in the assimilation and reform of the rigid religious doctrines, which was illustrated by the Jewish Enlightenment movement – Haskala. Its representatives in the first two decades of the 19th century had a clear advantage over the shrinking minority of traditional Jews. As a result, Breslau became one of the main centres of reformed Judaism. Its Jewish Theological Seminary was the first scientific institution for the training of German rabbis; and as such it was the prototype for those founded in Vienna, Berlin and many other German cities. Quite tellingly, the one and a half million (a quarter of American Jews) that adhere to this stream of Judaism are usually not aware that its roots stem from Wallstrasse. Today it is called Włodkowica Street, and is located right next to the White Stork Synagogue which was beautifully renovated by the Bente Kahan Foundation and re-opened after restoration in December 2015.

1453

The history of Wrocław/Breslau Jews did not start in the 18th century. The oldest piece of evidence of Jewish material culture was found to go back as early as 1203. It was the headstone, the Matzevah, dedicated to cantor David, son of Sar Shalom. However, it is clear that David’s brethren in faith lived here much earlier – since the founding of the city over a thousand years ago. They shared the common fate – good and bad – of this part of Europe which was often marked by discrimination and persecution, and also sourced in Christian antisemitism and aversion towards others.

The year 1453, however, marked the beginning of a centuries-long exile for Wrocław Jews, which was followed by brutal pogroms. It was in the summer of that year when John of Capestrano, a charismatic preacher from Italy, stopped off in Wrocław on his way from Prague. As a religious fanatic and inquisitor, he was mobilising Christians to fight against the Muslim conquerors of Constantinople. As there were probably no heretics in Wrocław, the object of the preacher’s attack were patricians, their debauchery and wealth. The power of his words was strong indeed. His faith was equally robust, and as a result a lot of luxurious goods (unnecessary, in his view, for external salvation) were burned. The worst was yet to come after the holiday of Corpus Christi that year. Probably not accidentally, a gossip was spread that the Jews had desecrated the sacramental bread (the host). After they were tortured, they quickly pled guilty, and 42 of them were burnt at the stake. For those who thought the trial by fire was too terrifying they chose the option of water – in other words, they were baptised. The rest were expelled.

The place of their murder is today commemorated with a monument located in the middle of Solny Square. It is in the form of a spire that is twisted, as if by a flame, towards the sky. There is no plaque. Yet John of Capestrano, who became a Catholic saint in 1724, remains the patron of one of Wrocław’s streets.

Jewish Breslau

In the 19th century thousands of Jews, mainly from the territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, settled in Silesia. A majority of them chose Breslau as their home. Prussia, and later Germany, was a state ruled by law. However not many today seem to remember that the Prussian king, Fredrick the Great, was the first European leader who prohibited torture. Also under his rule, a number of areas in social economic life expanded for Jews, who were now finally able to practice their religious and cultural freedoms openly and enjoy greater civil liberties.

Quite soon the Jews, even though they were a small (less than one per cent) group in the overall German population, started to hold high positions in all areas of society. Such was also the case in Breslau, where the local Jewish community was the third largest in Germany, after Berlin and Frankfurt am Main. Before Hitler came to power, members of the Jewish community in Breslau reached 22,000. These German Jews became conscious citizens. Thus when subsequent wars broken out, they did not refuse to pay the price to their homeland with blood.

In Breslau, just like elsewhere throughout Germany, Jewish life flourished. The great potential of Jewish religion and philosophy, their cult of education, knowledge, entrepreneurship and hard work, brought about unexpected results in a democratic country with a strong rule of law. Unfortunately, these achievements also contributed to the emergence of a new kind of antisemitism, one that was no longer about simplistic superstitions, but jealousy. With time, this anti-Jewish attitude became the foundation for the most primitive form of social Darwinism, in its extreme Nazi and racist editions.  It was this kind of “modern” German antisemitism that first led to an unprecedented level of discrimination and stigmatisation – against the Jews and later to their mass murder – the Holocaust.

The prelude to the atrocities took place in November 1938. Kristallnacht – in English it is known as the Night of Broken Glasses – was an organised massacre of the Jews that took place throughout Germany, including in Breslau. It was marked by the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish shops, schools and synagogues were brutally smashed. In what would mark the beginning of the later massacre of tens of thousands of Jews from Breslau in the concentration camps, the Germans burnt down the New Synagogue, which was one of the largest synagogues in the German Empire. To make matters even more hideous and cruel, the bill for cleaning the conflagration and ruins was sent to the Jewish community.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust brutally affected Breslau’s Jews. Of the 22,000 who lived in the city before the Second World War, half managed to survive. The German authorities were actively removing them from the city since 1933, taking over property and driving them to migration, which was often hindered by the numerous visa restrictions imposed on Jewish travellers in the free world that feared “an increase of antisemitism” in the receiving countries.

For those who managed to escape, the doors were closed in Sweden, Switzerland, British Palestine and the United States, which after the Wannsee Conference, meant the Shoah. Jews from Breslau were murdered on a mass scale in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Kaunas. After the war, only a small number of them managed to survive the death camps and return back to the ruined city. At that time Wrocław was under the temporary control of Soviet commanders, and it was gradually being populated by new Polish residents. They were of a different culture and language.

Thus, the German Jews who survived the war became, for the second time, strangers in their own city. They were treated by the new settlers as Germans, and thus there are disturbing accounts of Jews whom the Soviets were forcing to exhume and re-bury the bodies of fallen Red Army soldiers. What is even worse, they had to perform the task with their bare hands. They were not Germans to the Nazis, but were Germans to the Soviets. Soon afterwards the last German Jews left the city for good.

Today the descendants of the Jewish immigrants from the Third Reich and Jewish survivors visit the city in search of their ancestors. They come here from all over the world: Israel, the United States, Argentina, Costa Rica, South Africa and Australia. They arrive in a city that is foreign to them, but sometimes they find their relatives’ graves or traces of their existence in the city archives.

Rebuilding from ruins

After the Second World War, Wrocław became home to migrants from Poland’s lost Eastern Borderlands, displaced inhabitants from Central Poland (with homeless Warsaw residents among them) as well as thousands of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. Even though the first Polish Jews arrived to the still burning city in their camp clothes – they had just been liberated from the Gross Rosen concentration camp – a majority of those who settled in post-war Wrocław came from the East. Among them were those who survived the war in Siberia and Kazakhstan – places where they had been sent by Stalin. They stayed there together with thousands of Poles from 1939 until 1941. A paradox of history: these Jews survived the Shoah because of Stalin’s deportations.

After the war, Lower Silesia was shortly inhabited with over 100,000 Polish Jews. Twenty thousand of them lived in Wrocław. They ran schools, clubs, theatres and established co-operatives. Together with other pioneers they were raising their country from the ruins. Some of them put faith in the communist vision of brotherhood of nations and social justice. They devoted their skills and talents to the building of a new political and economic system, often times believing that the victorious Soviet Union was a guarantor of peace, while the new order meant a final barrier to fascism and antisemitism. These Jews were still a minority in a group of 250,000 Polish Jews who survived the horrors of the war and the Holocaust.

The number of Jews living in post-war Poland quickly fell. The majority used every opportunity they could to leave the land that – because of the Germans – became a large graveyard for their own people. They were discouraged from staying there by an increasingly oppressive Stalinist regime and a new wave of growing antisemitism – the Kielce pogrom being its cumulative effect. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the hope for a new life in a Jewish state also encouraged many to leave. It was also tempting to be far away from the place of the Shoah, which could always come back in nightmares, but was not yet to be regularly seen in empty squares of former ghettos. Consequently, in 1950 there were only around 50,000 Jews in Poland. Of the 20,000 who lived in Wrocław after the war, only around 4,000 lived there in the early 1960s.

In communist Poland, Jewish life became limited by the tight framework of the structures of the Socio-Cultural Society of Jews, which was a copycat of similar state- sponsored organisations. All were based on the Soviet model. Jews were trying to maintain their religious way of life through marginalised and aging Jewish communities. However, their poor financial situation was preventing them from taking care of the disappearing traces of Jewish history which took the form of empty synagogues and neglected cemeteries.

The memory of the Holocaust was also successively and consistently being erased in communist Poland. It was included into the narrative of the tragedy of six million Poles – victims of German Nazism. Thus, it was declared that Auschwitz was a place of murder, not of the Jews, but the Polish, Czechoslovak, Greek or Hungarian citizens. This became the official rhetoric, even though the majority of Nazi victims were Jews; in the case of Hungary, which was a faithful ally of Hitler, all the victims were Jewish. In this way, for the first time in history, Jews were called Poles, Hungarians and Greeks.

In the fight for freedom

The infamous March of 1968, with its hideous antisemitic campaign and purges, pushed the majority of the remaining Jewish residents out of Poland, also those in Wrocław. Their destinations included Israel, the United States, Sweden and Denmark. They wanted to be close to Poland because they felt Polish. Not because of the grace of the nationalistically-minded communists, but by their own choice. In Wrocław the Jewish school was shut down. The authorities took over the synagogue. It fell into ruin after it was transferred between subsequent owners. This was the famous White Stork Synagogue, the only one in the city that miraculously survived the Kristallnacht.

On the pretext of fighting Zionism, antisemitism was rising again. Jews became the scapegoat – this time between the power struggles within the ruling communist party. Poland’s name was disgraced for decades to come. Around the world the country became a symbol of xenophobia and antisemitism. The wider world could not understand how, in a country that the Nazis had chosen for the Shoah, a quarter century later, Jews would become victims of exclusion and persecution. It was the free and democratic Poland that emerged in 1989 from the spirit and fight of the Solidarity movement that changed this image, cutting itself off from the legacy of March 1968.

The year 1989 was also of great significance to the last Jews who stayed in Wrocław. These were often the children of those who once put faith in communism and decided to say in Poland during the 1940s and 1950s, at times showing great zeal in the building of the new system. Since the 1970s it was the young Poles of Jewish origin who became involved in big numbers in the fight for freedom among the ranks of the Solidarity movement. After 1989 many of them were involved in the process of rebuilding Jewish life in the new democratic and free Poland.

Rebuilding Jewish communities

The Jewish community revived in Wrocław. Today, you can hear Jewish prayers here. The Centre for Jewish Culture and Education at the White Stork Synagogue is open to all Wrocław residents; the city’s small, yet visible, Jewish community is not isolated nor focuses solely on its own religious or social practices. Even though it is burdened by painful experiences of the past the community is not only the guardian of graves and memory, it is also part of the greater Wrocław community that is increasingly open to those who are proudly cherishing their centuries-long heritage. Every year on November 9th the citizens of Wrocław organise a march that starts at the White Stork Synagogue and finishes at the monument commemorating the New Synagogue brutally burnt down by the Nazis. The purpose of the event is to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, but to also warn against the demons of war and genocide. Thus the memory of atrocities in Srebrenica and Rwanda are also brought up.

There is no Polish history without the Jews. There is no Jewish history without Poland. Not all Poles understand that. Neither do all Jews – those from the United States or Israel. The Jewish presence in Poland, even though bruised by the past, is needed. It is needed for Jews and for Poles. It is also needed for Europe where the vaccine of the Second World War disease seems to be wearing off and where the lessons of history are being forgotten. We can see the return of racism, antisemitism and xenophobia; also in Poland, a country with a special responsibility to counteract this disease. Yet, its authorities have recently showed at least a lack of understanding of the threat, proliferating it themselves.

We, the Wrocław Jews, are here and are moving forward. We are rebuilding our Jewish communities, in a city that is a meeting place of mutual respect. There are just a few thousand of us and only 300 members of the Jewish community. But this number is growing along with a growing  level of acceptance that you can be a Jew and a Pole at the same time; or a Wrocław Jew and a Wrocław resident; a European.

Translated by Iwona Reichardt

Aleksander Gleichgewicht is the chairman of the Jewish Community in Wrocław. He was active in the democratic opposition and the Solidarity movement during the communist regime in Poland. In 1984 he immigrated to Norway and was secretary of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. In 2001 he returned to Poland.

Breslau, Jewish history, Polish history, Wrocław