Our trip spanned two shabbats, so we spent them with the local communities, first in Prague, then in Warsaw. In Prague, Rabbi Olivier was invited to give the sermon at the local reform community. Two different reform communities came together to see him, which I guess was a big deal, because they don't get along, for reasons we never learned. Even with the two communities combined, there were barely 100 people there, and several of the people I talked to were visitors from the states. The prayers led by the local rabbi felt stilted and rote, and the community felt like they were still figuring out their place. They met in a synagogue that functioned as a museum 6 days a week, and as a synagogue only 1 day a week. The rabbi said he hoped one day these numbers would be reversed. After the service I chatted with a local young woman, who had discovered she had Jewish roots and started coming fairly recently, and was considering converting. She said she was embarrassed that she didn't know all the prayers and seemed to think this was unusual, but the more I learned about the local Jewish communities in the Czech Republic and Poland, the more I saw that this was not unusual at all; almost everyone is in her situation. Practicing any religion at all was forbidden under communism, but as I learned from Jews in Warsaw, practicing Judaism was even more forbidden than practicing Christianity. So all of these communities have sprung up only since 1989, and they are still sorting out their place.
In Warsaw, we went to services at the local reform community, which meets in a house in the suburbs, since the only synagogue in Warsaw that survived the war belongs to the Orthodox community. When we arrived, the cantor was singing Shalom Aleichem and the entire community was walking around, shaking hands with everyone they encountered and saying Shabbat Shalom. This was a wonderful welcome. The rabbi, who I later learned was Israeli, gave sermons and announcements in English and people from the community translated into Polish. He was nearing the end of a 3-year appointment here and had not learned Polish. I was told by a local that almost all the rabbis here are either American or Israeli, since the Jewish communities here were too young to have trained their own rabbis. But of course the prayers were in Hebrew, so the majority of the service was completely familiar. In both Prague and Warsaw, I loved reading the transliterations of the Hebrew prayers, and they helped me decode how most of the letters are pronounced in Czech and Polish (except that Polish has a whole bunch of letters that correspond to sounds that don't exist in Hebrew, so the transliterations were no help with these).
The Israeli rabbi here has been very busy doing conversions of huge numbers of people who have Jewish ancestry but were not raised with any kind of religion (or were raised Catholic), and are discovering it all from scratch. Many of these people did not know they had Jewish ancestry until recently. I talked to a young woman who had just converted with her 2-year-old daughter, and had to go all the way to London for her Beit Din (the panel of rabbis that asks you questions before you convert). She had always known she was Jewish, but it had taken her a while to figure out how to find a Jewish community.
I talked to one woman who said she lived in a village 3 hours away and had travelled all the way to Warsaw for services and the Shavuot workshops that were being offered during the weekend. I asked her if there was a synagogue in her village and she said no, it was destroyed during Crystalnacht.
Someone else in our group talked to a man who had started to suspect he was Jewish when he saw a picture of his mother as a child with her family and saw that she didn't look like anyone else her family, so he figured she had probably been hidden with them.
There were also many Americans here besides our group; a professor from Yale University on Sabbatical here and a guy from South Carolina who was here teaching English and had discovered Judaism in Warsaw.
After services there was a catered meal. I wanted to make sure I actually talked to the locals and not just to other Americans, so I sat down at a table where I didn't know anyone, only to discover that no one there spoke English! We all smiled at each other awkwardly, and then I moved to another table when I got up to get dessert. I ended up talking to a local who told me that the Orthodox community was trying to put this community out of business by starting their own "progressive" community nearby. He said there was a lot of fighting among the communities here because there is a lot of money at stake; American Jews are pouring lots of money into various communities here and everyone wants a piece of the pie. I asked him why he chose this community rather than the Orthodox community. He said, "I don't have the papers to prove my Jewish ancestry, and without papers they won't let me be a member. Everything there is very expensive if you're not a member, but free if you are." He waved his hand around the room and said, "Everyone here is Jewish enough for the Nazis, but not Jewish enough for the Orthodox." I asked him about whether the reform community here has the rule that you have to have been raised Jewish to be considered Jewish, and he said they can't afford to have that rule here. If they did, no one would be Jewish. I asked him about his own background and he said he had started to suspect he might be Jewish when he started traveling in other countries, and everywhere he went, people assumed he was Jewish. He found some things in his family background that made him think he was, but he still has no concrete proof. But he was drawn to Judaism and is in the process of converting. He said the Jews in Poland are like Moses; they were raised by someone else and had to go back to discover their tradition. I asked him how his family reacted to him deciding to practice Judaism, and he said when he made the decision, his wife left him. He said, "Moses also had to leave his first wife."
In my Jewish history class, we learned about the conversos in Amsterdam in the 16th century, who also had to recreate Judaism from scratch. In Spain under the Inquisition, first the Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism, and then after several generations of living as Catholics, they were kicked out in spite of their Catholicism, because of their Jewish ancestry. Many of these so-called conversos ended up in Amsterdam, and since they were no longer legally compelled to be Christian, decided to return to Judaism. However, since their families had been Catholics for generations, they had no idea how to be Jewish, and had to learn it all from books. As someone who has also learned to be Jewish from scratch, I related to this story when I first heard it. And there is something about the story of the Jews in Poland that feels similar, and similarly inspiring. But there is something about all the American money and American rabbis that feels less than inspiring. The charitable interpretation is that we are here filling the needs of a people hungry for knowledge of their ancestry and traditions, and we are helping them to recover some of what they lost under the Nazis and the Communists. The less charitable interpretation is that we are over here pushing our own agendas, fighting it out to try to spread our particular version of Judaism rather than some other version, and creating a bunch of stupid fractures in a community that is too small to be divided. I think both interpretations have elements of truth in them.
I think all of us were surprised by how small the Jewish communities here are. In all the cities we have been to, the population was about a third Jewish before the war. Now there are about 6000 Jews in Prague, 600 in Krakow, and 6000 in Warsaw. But of course these numbers depend a lot on how you define Jewish. Given the huge percentage of Jews in the population before the war and the degree of integration, it seems likely that almost everyone here has some sort of Jewish ancestry. All of these communities seem to be attracting people who have some kind of Jewish ancestry and want to come back to it. After talking to Polish Jews from the older generation, my sense is that in the 90s, the return to Judaism felt like a giant movement and they expected it to continue to grow and flourish. But it has stayed small and become fractured, and many from the older generation are disappointed and bitter because the growth did not meet their expectations. It is hard to predict what will happen in these communities. It is hard to know what should happen.
On Saturday, Olivier led a workshop on Jewish meditation at the Jewish community center in Warsaw (which was actually named something else in Polish, unlike the American-named JCC in Krakow). Attendance was light, probably because he had unwittingly scheduled it at the same time as the Shavuot workshops at the reform community. But the 5 Polish Jews who attended fell in love with Olivier and immediately started making plans to invite him back for a week-long workshop. One woman, who had been raised Catholic and was still struggling with "how to believe in God" (which I think is a very Catholic question and not a Jewish question at all), asked lots of question and had a major spiritual revelation as she worked through his answers. This was all very inspiring to see, but I worried about us being one more American group pushing our brand of Judaism. Olivier and Gerardo seemed to think we could be a bridge between different competing communities. I hope they are right.
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