The Unregenerated Jews of Poland

[4thskorpion]

Do all those Hassidic Jews actually live in Poland and Ukraine? Or are they just visiting from the United States?

Visitors from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom:

Yarzeit in Przedborz:This past Wednesday prayers were said at the grave of tzadik Isaiah of Przeborz, marking the 175th anniversary of his death. Members of Hasidic communities including those from Tosh, Satmar, and Bobov from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom came to Przedborz for the sole purpose of participating in the yarzeit.

[wm]

A new Polish feature film about Uman and the Jews making a pilgrimage to the tomb of tsadik Nachman there - The Dybbuk. A Tale of Wandering Souls:

30 thousand Hasidim journey to Ukraine to celebrate the Jewish New Year at the gravesite of their holy leader Rebbe Nachman. A Ukrainian far-right group erects a cross at the site of Hasidic prayers and builds a monument to Cossacks who slaughtered thousands of Jews and Poles in 1768.

The film was inspired by the 1937 Yiddish language Polish fantasy film drama The Dybbuk, beautiful Lili Liliana (frequently confused with another actress Lili Zielińska) plays Leah:

It was filmed on location in Kazimierz, Poland, and at the Falanga Film Studios in Warsaw.
It's one of the top 10 Jewish films as selected by Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR's Morning Edition.

[wm]

Another yahrzeit. The rabbi's name is Moses Isserles (Rema), he died in 1572. The place is the Remuh Cemetery in Kazimerz (established in 1535, closed for burial in 1800).
In the same year The Dybbuk was filmed there.

[uberjude]

Primarily visiting from Israel and the US. Uman has developed a small Hasidic community that basically exists to provide services and accommodations to the large number of Hasidic pilgrims to the Bratslaver Rebbe's grave. There are other graves that have become pilgrimage sites, but Uman is the most popular.

[wm]

The popularity of a Rebbe's grave is proportional to the size of the movement he inspired. A Hasidic group generally only visits their own pilgrimage sites.

And as usual there is a dark side, prayer and pleasure in Uman:

Each year, a quarter of a million people, from the decidedly secular to the most fervent of believers, make the pilgrimage to the city because, according to tradition, the rabbi promised to intercede on behalf of anybody praying at his grave on Rosh Hashanah.

It isn’t only Hasidim who travel to Uman for the High Holy Days. Come Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot, prostitutes also pack onto the trains in Kiev, to help local professionals meet demand.

Rabbi Nachman-related tourism is big business, turning over hundreds of millions of shekels a year. After the gravesite became a hit, the local authorities fixed it up, helped by Jewish tycoons from around the world. New hotels and hostels were built and even the locals fixed up their houses.

That’s the upside for Uman, but there has been a downside too. One is Israeli criminals fleeing the long arm of the Israeli law, some of whom settle down in Uman and resume the lifestyle they know best: pimping. One Haredi who’s been to the city dozens of times claims the prostitution is controlled by Israeli crime bosses in league with Ukrainian pimps.

“At first just a few dozen would visit prostitutes while in Uman,” says Jacky, a Breslov Hasid. “It might happen at the park, in houses on the edge of town, or in the hostels. Nobody talked openly about it.”
But that drip became a torrent, so much so that special “modesty patrols” were set up to punish errant Hasids, Jacky says (though they didn’t last).

[...]the patrols – paid for mainly by donations from the religious tourists - did a good job in deterring men from visiting prostitutes, though a hard core of customers not deterred by the patrols did remain.

In any case, after a year the whole idea fell through because even though they weren’t asked for more than about a dollar each, the travelers balked at paying anything for the pleasure of being policed by the zealous modesty patrols.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish children play at the lake next to the tomb of Rabbi Nachman:

[4thskorpion]

And as usual there is a dark side....

And especially where Jews are concerned, is that not so, wm ? :roll:

[David Thompson]

Let's stay on topic. The thread is about some Jews in rural Poland; not all Jews everywhere.

[wm]

No quite, it's true there are few of them today (well, 1.5 million worldwide).
But before the WW2 they were the majority, for most people they were the Jews, and actually they lived mostly in cities and towns.

BTW those people and those prostitutes are doing nothing wrong. It should be add that Israel has decriminalized prostitution, in contrast to some, let's say backward countries like Ukraine, the UK and the US.

This below was written by a policeman in Kazimierz (the place where the Remuh Cemetery is located) - Franciszek Banaś. It shows a quite a different place and much darker that myth makers want it to be today.
The policemen on the photo above is not him unfortunately, although probably they knew each other. That man is an off-duty policeman hired to keep the peace at the entrance to the cemetery.

They had two convents of the Servants of the Poor there. In both, under the mendacious cover of pauperisation lived people who landed at the bottom of abyss, women and men, destroyed morally and physically. They pretended to be poor but in fact all they were, let's say, emeritus thieves and emeritus prostitutes, derailed people.
Young and old, they did nothing but roamed the city all day trying to steal anything they could, for booze of course.
The convents gave them breakfast, dinners, and suppers. [...]
They had large rooms there, full of wood bunks. Those people slept on them side by side, or rather drank booze or denatured alcohol. Later at night old scores were settled and knifes fights began, and then the police would come.

If a big fish visited Kraków the police used to surround the convents at dawn and arrest those men and women [the streets looked nicer without them]. [...]
When the French Marshal Foch paid a visit, I counted only the beggars brought by the police, and there were 500 of them.

Beggars at the entrance to the Remuh Cemetery:

In the period between 1921 and 1935 Kazimerz's population probably was about 45 thousand people.
This bunch of people had nothing else to busy themselves about except trading, racketeering, thievery, prostitution, and black marketeering. It was a rich place. The Jews had lots of gold, foreign monies, shops were full of goods.
In Kazimierz four Churches, ten synagogues and a Reform synagogue could be found. Only compassion couldn't be found there, among those people.
There were lots of poor people, both Jews and Poles who slept in cellars, stalls, entrances to buildings, corners. When winter came they went into the sewers because it was warmer there.

There were Cheders there. [...]. They maintained iron discipline in them, didn't spare the rod. When on duty I [frequently] saw a rebe pummeling his pupils with a stick.
In my opinion Kazimerz, with its inhabitants, customs, traditions and economy was a state within a state.

Jewish street sellers in Kazimerz:

[David Thompson]

wm -- you wrote:

But before the WW2 they [the unregenerated Jews of Poland] were the majority, for most people they were the Jews, and actually they lived mostly in cities and towns.

(1) "they were the majority" -- For a claim like that, let's see some proof.

(2) "for most people they were the Jews" -- As you have phrased it, this observation is rubbish. If the thread is intended to be anti-Semitic, we don't tolerate that sort of thing on AHF and it can go into our institutional waste basket. The opening premise of the thread (or so I thought) was that the "unregenerated" Jews of Poland were vulnerable because their self-conscious cultural separatism made them highly visible and may have contributed to violent xenophobia and bigotry (as it did in the United States, with the Chinese population). In other countries, the Jewish portion of the population were more assimilated into national life, and hence less vulnerable. If you are suggesting that "most people" outside eastern Europe viewed Jews generally like the "unregenerated Jews of Poland," we can close out the thread right now.

[wm]

To speak of the Jewish community or Jewry in interwar Poland is something of a misnomer. The Jews of Poland after the partitions were as divided and divergent as the Poles, if not more so. In the formerly German provinces of Poznan, Pomerania and Silesia, Jews were few but westernized. In former Galicia Jews were almost ten percent of the local population and conspicuously traditional. Religious reform had made little headway; Yiddish-speaking, Hasidic Jews with black coats and sideburns personified foreignness and peculiarity to the Poles. The largest number of Jews lived in central, formerly Congress Poland, concentrated in large cities like Warsaw and Lodz. There alongside the dominant world of separatist (including Hasidic) orthodoxy, were a smaller but important group of Jews who under the impact of Jewish Enlightenment (Hascala) had embraced Polish culture. In the multi-national eastern provinces (Lithuania, Belorussia) Jewish enlightenment tended not toward polonization but religious Zionism and socialism.”

Taken altogether, the majority of Polish Jews were still strongly orthodox (anti-socialist and anti-revolutionary), with a small but growing sector of polonized Jews embarrassed by the dress and outlandish ways of the various Hasidic sects.
Ronald Modras, The Catholic Church and Antisemitism

In interwar Poland the average Pole was a peasant, the average Jew was a traditional Jew. It would be reasonable to remember this.
Especially as the non-traditional Jews were invisible, on the streets they looked as anybody else.

The opening premise was that the Polish Jews were different from those you, Westerners are shown on TV, in movies and books. That they were the most easy target during Holocaust is obvious.

As to violent xenophobia, the Polish peasants and the traditional Jews lived together much longer that the US has existed. For a Polish peasant an Orthodox Jew was the most familiar sight it could be - that Jew wasn't his enemy and wasn't even highly visible.

Of course for most people means Poland and the Poles, the foreigners including the neighbours like the Germans, didn't know anything about Poland then, and they know little today.

But I have a question to all the detractors. Are you offended by the looks of those people, their customs, that they were different, religious, poor, sell things on the streets?
That their houses, their cemeteries were in poor shape, and looked positively post-apocalyptic? Would you like to regenerate them? And why?
I'm asking because I genuinely dislike elitism and progressivism. Those people are us, only the clothes are different, and the last thing they needed/need is another regeneration.

[David Thompson]

wm -- What I would like to regenerate is this thread, which, judging from your reply has little or nothing to do with the holocaust or war crimes. The section rules, posted for all to see over the past eleven years, provide:

Permissible subjects for this section of the forum are the holocaust and twentieth century war crimes. If a thread isn't discussing something related to those subjects, it's off-topic.

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=53962

[wm]

Well, those are the people that were corralled into Ghettos a few years later, who didn't resist, were considered poor soldiers, had trouble to survive outside, among the people depicted by Mr Banaś.
It's hard to understand all that without knowing them, and the others better.

[4thskorpion]

Well, those are the people that were corralled into Ghettos a few years later, who didn't resist, were considered poor soldiers, had trouble to survive outside, among the people depicted by Mr Banaś.
It's hard to understand all that without knowing them, and the others better.

Another excuse to have an anti-Jewish rant.

And those Jews that did resist were low-life criminals robbing and murdering their good neighbours, Eh?

[4thskorpion]

"Antisemitic propaganda poster distributed in Poland in 1923.
The poster is essentially a riddle detailing all the negative qualities associated with Jews."

Below from 2014: Warsaw show displays pre-war anti-semitic cartoons

The exhibition, which is being hosted by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, presents about 300 press cartoons from the years 1919 to 1939. “The image of the Jew that emerges from these drawings in the Polish press is horrifying,” commented Teresa Smiechowska, head of the arts department at the institute.

Were there anti-Polish cartoons in Poland's Jewish press of the time?

[wm]

And those Jews that did resist were low-life criminals robbing and murdering their good neighbours, Eh?

Most of the Jews didn't resist and most of the Poles didn't resist, they were trying to survive - not to engage in pointless resistance that did little harm to the German Army but cost lives of up to 200 civilians per killed German.
It was the job of the Polish Army, and groups authorized to do that, like the AK.

And, it happened that a Jewish group was led by a pre-war criminal, and sometimes they used criminal methods to survive.