Euro Soccer Championship draws attention to Jewish sites
The recent European soccer championship pushed two countries into the foreground, Poland and Ukraine, which once were the homelands of a thriving Jewish life. This Yiddishland no longer exists.
From 1941 to 1945, the area stretching from central Poland to western Russia and south to the Crimea became the Bloodlands, the killing fields of Eastern Europe. A least three million Jewish citizens of Poland and 900,000 Jews who lived in the territory of today’s Ukraine were murdered. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the majority of the surviving Ukrainian Jewish community emigrated in the 1990s, most of them to Israel, the US, and some to Germany. Today, the Ukraine’s Jewish population numbers about 360,000, constituting the third largest Jewish community in Europe and the fi fth largest in the world. Jewish life is on the upswing, and it was probably the achievement of the Jewish oligarch Grigori Surkis, president of the Ukrainian Football Federation, that the Union of European Football Associations made the Ukraine a host country of the 2012 soccer championship. Surkis is owner of Dynamo Kiev, while another entrepreneur, Vadim Rabinovich, president of the Ukrainian Jewish Congress and a major donor to Jewish causes, has purchased Kiev’s second premier club, Arsenal. Venues like Kiev, Donetsk, Charkiv, and Lviv were now in the limelight. Was there some impact on Jewish life? “Not really”, says Rabbi Alexander Dukhovny, the leader of the Reform movement in the Ukraine. “There were less people attending services during the days of the football matches, and there were many talks about the games”. Apparently, fans didn’t revive anti-Semitic stereotypes. More than 80,000 police offi cers and stewards received “anti- discrimination training” to cope with Euro 2012. However, tourism has made anti-Jewish stereotypes commercially viable: A theme restaurant in Lviv, “At the Golden Rose”, treated diners to Klezmer music, distributed black hats with pejot, sidelocks, to mimic Hassidic Jews and asked them to haggle over the price of their food. “Yes, there are people who hate Jewish people,” Dukhovny admits. He states that it is simplistic to assume that anti-Semitism is rife. Poverty is the greatest threat to Jewish life in the Ukraine. Because of extreme food shortages for the elderly and middle-aged unemployment, the World Jewish Relief supports dozens of projects in the Ukraine. The Wohl Center in Charkiv provides support for the city’s 40,000-plus Jews. In other places, for example in Donetsk, it is Chabad Lubavitch which offer programs and services for the needy. In Poland, the economic situation is much better than in Ukraine. However, like many central European cities, this year’s football venues struggle with their Jewish past. The grand New Synagogue of Poznán was used as a municipal swimming pool from 1940 on. The pool was closed last fall.
However, the lack of funds is still a stumbling block for any efforts to convert the synagogue building into a Jewish space. The Poznán Gmina is part of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland which numbers about 8,000 members. The Union’s president Piotr Kadlčik, who serves also as president of the Jewish Community of Warsaw, quotes Kurt Tucholsky to describe the current situation: “I am a Jew and I am proud of it. Even if I would not be proud of it, I would still be a Jew. Therefore I choose to be proud.” Kadlčik wants to encourage those who hesitate to join the Jewish community. The country is still suffering from the Jewish exodus of 1968. “Those who did not leave Poland left their Judaism”, a Jewish spokesperson points out. There are ten thousands of people of Jewish origin in Poland who were raised as Catholics or grew up in a secular environment. According to the Israeli Law of Return, the Polish Union welcomes everybody with a Jewish grandparent to reconnect, although those who are no halakhic Jews are not entitled to be called up to the Torah.
In Poland, “Zyd” or “Zydzi” (“Jew”, “Jews”) is still a curse, and sometimes there are anti-Semitic slogans and chants in the stadiums. And yet, there were no incidents. “I haven’t felt any rise of anti-Semitism during the Euro 2012”, says Rabbi Stas Wojciechowicz, who serves the Jewish Community of Warsaw. “The only problem were the clashes between Polish and Russian pseudo fans.” Poland has become an open and pluralistic society, and the city of Wroclaw has been named Cultural Capital of Europe for 2016. Since 1990 there has been a gradual process of rebuilding of Jewish community life around the White Stork Synagogue, with young people reclaiming their Jewish identity. This summer, many of them will travel to Hungary, a country shaken by xenophobia and the revisionism of its right-of-center government, to be part of Summer U 2012, an event sponsored by the European Union of Jewish Students in partnership with the JDC. The EUJS is proud to engage the local Jewish community and to discover Jewish life in Hungary, against all odds. “Some of us are born optimists”, says Rabbi Ferenc Raj, who serves Budapest’s Bet Orim congregation. “We Jews are asirei tikva, prisoners of hope.”