Jewish Poland Revisited

Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places

Erica T. Lehrer

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253008862
• eBook ISBN: 9780253008930
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

National Jewish Book Award Finalist: "A fresh and delightful portrait of Jewish renewal in Poland . . . Highly recommended." — Choice
Since the end of Communism, Jews from around the world have visited Poland to tour Holocaust-related sites. A few venture further, seeking to learn about their own Polish roots and connect with contemporary Poles. For their part, a growing number of Poles are fascinated by all things Jewish.
In this book, Erica T. Lehrer explores the intersection of Polish and Jewish memory projects in the historically Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz in Krakow. Her own journey becomes part of the story as she demonstrates that Jews and Poles use spaces, institutions, interpersonal exchanges, and cultural representations to make sense of their historical inheritances.

CHAPTER ONE

MAKING SENSE OF PLACE: HISTORY, MYTHOLOGY, AUTHENTICITY

I arrived in Kazimierz for the first time in April of 1990. It was a fortuitous moment; ferried by a hospitable middle-aged Polish painter who had become my and my brother's impromptu tour guide to the city, we drove into the bleak neighborhood under a white banner stretched across the road, advertising the second annual Festival of Jewish Culture. As I tried to grasp this unlikely event, our new Polish friend's white Polonez hatchback rolled to a stop, parking alongside a few other cars in a strip up the center of the spacious, aptly named Szeroka (“wide”) Street. We walked the few steps down to the old synagogue, where we saw a small crowd of people—the only sign of life in the otherwise dreary square—filing into the old synagogue museum for a concert. Our host was tickled by his good fortune in stumbling on such an apposite event for his Jewish guests. I was still orienting myself to the idea of Jewish entertainment in what for me was a post-apocalyptic Jewish site, when the evening's performer, cantor Jeffrey Nadel from Washington, D.C., stepped onto the bimah and began to sing in a powerful tenor.

I was perplexed by his presence. He represented a kind of contemporary, mainstream American Jewish normality that—foreign to me though it also was—seemed shockingly out of place in this seemingly most marginal of Jewish spaces. He was the Jewish present; what was he doing here in the Jewish past? Looking back, it seems clear that I might have posed the same question of us. But I wasn't yet able to discern the trend of which we formed a part. We were all early evidence of the transnational flows of Jewish people and culture traversing Poland, and Krakow's Kazimierz in particular, which began to burgeon through the 1990s. At times linking to local counterpart projects of Jewish salvage and revival undertaken by Poles (Jewish and non-Jewish), such flows eddied in the quarter. Whereas the Jewish neighborhoods in most Polish cities were destroyed during the war, Kazimierz's core is an architecturally intact, historic Jewish town; the neighborhood today comprises almost a quarter of Krakow's city's historic center. Jewish seekers were drawn by the rich and heavy history, tangible as much through the Jewish human absence as the striking Jewish material presence. But Szeroka Street was also a magnet because it was endlessly surprising, yielding unlikely interlocutors and a regular stream of grassroots Jewish-oriented events, making it an epicenter of ferment, dispute, and development around Jewish and Polish heritage and identities and a touchstone for projects of cultural salvage and development.¹

In 1993, the iconic Cracovian Jew Henryk Halkowski, amidst a sudden (if small) flurry of interest in Kazimierz on the part of architects and planners, mused about his dream of a Kazimierz that would provide a counterpoint to the dominance and teleological views of the Holocaust in popular conceptions of Poland's Jewish history—the way the memory of Nazi destruction has made everything that came before seem inevitably doomed and rendered everything after it invisible. He wished that the quarter would be developed in a way that balanced attention to the old, absent, and irreplaceable with the new and functional. He saw Kazimierz as a place where such historical and cultural synergy was uniquely possible, where Jews with Polish roots could feel proud of their heritage, a reminder of the everyday Polish-Jewish life that had once been a reality, yet “without [such life] remaining only in the past.”²

This was a hard sell for foreign Jews. I vividly recall the Argentine-Jewish student who voiced a widespread but usually unspoken sentiment regarding Kazimierz's growing liveliness. “I want to see the synagogue in ruins,” he said. “I have to see the ruins because that's what I can find here. Ruins of a culture, of a cultural group…. I just don't like to have so much life here.”

From my earliest interest in the social life of Poland's Jewish past in the present day, all roads seemed to lead back to Kazimierz. Aside from its local and national magnetism among Polish Jews, the quarter quickly became a kind of “poster child” for (particularly North American) Jewish communal anxieties about the unforeseen, surprising, confusing relationships of local East European populations to “things Jewish” emerging with the end of communism, when it became clear that “antisemitism without Jews” no longer told the whole story. A site dense with tangible evidence of a once-vibrant Polish Jewry and scarred by its more recent, horrific abjection, Kazimierz was an ideal petri dish to observe the materials used for and choices inherent in the (re)making of Jewish space and Jewish selves. Given this symbolic trove of Ashkenazi Jewish experience in more and less tangible forms, what aspects seemed useable, for which purposes, to whom?

These questions drew me to continually return to Kazimierz. I returned summer after summer through the 1990s, talking and listening and taking notes and photographs, and then spent eighteen months there doing my “official” (grant-funded) fieldwork between November 1998 and August 2000. I had already been adopted by the Jarden Jewish Bookshop at the northern end of Szeroka Street; the store formed my base of operations for research and socializing (difficult to separate in ethnographic work), and its owners became my “key informants” and my de facto family. The quarter's rich social and material offerings provided me ample opportunity to develop and consider my research questions. It also forced me, constantly, to reflect on my own, conflicted relation to this past. I touch on my personal story at the end of this chapter, as I was as much a character in Kazimierz's Jewish heritage reckonings as those who became my main interlocutors.

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Place

Jewish settlement in Poland can be traced back approximately 1,000 years. Jews came to Poland mostly from Western Europe, fleeing from persecution and drawn by Poland's relative tolerance under rulers Boleslaw Pobożny (“the Pious,” 1239–1279) and Kazimierz Wielki (“the Great,” reigned 1333–1370), who offered the Jews significant rights and protections in exchange for their services as tradesmen, merchants, estate managers, and fiscal agents for noblemen. Jews first lived in Kazimierz about 700 years ago. Having been driven out of their earlier settlement in the center of Krakow by anti-Jewish riots beginning in the mid-1300s, the Jews were forced by King Jan Olbracht (reigned 1492–1501) to move in 1495 into a walled section of Kazimierz, itself a separate city surrounded by branches of the Vistula River. Kazimierz has several monumental Christian churches including the gothic Corpus Christi and St. Catherine's, built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the eighteenth-century Baroque Skałka sanctuary, a national pilgrimage and honorific burial site in honor of the martyred St. Stanisław (marks of whose blood are said to be visible on a fragment of wood and a stone step from the original eleventh-century church). The quarter has always had a Christian population that lived alongside the Jews, although in parallel, rather than intermingling, fashion.³ The population of the Jewish section of Kazimierz, known as the Oppidum Judaeorum or “Jewish City,” grew as Czech, German, Spanish, and Italian Jews flocked to the locale, which became one of Europe's largest districts of continuous Jewish settlement as well as Polish Jewry's spiritual and cultural center. In 1568 due to overcrowding by Jewish immigrants from the West, local Jews requested and were granted a ban on further Christian settlement within the district's walls.⁴

By the sixteenth century, about 80 percent of world Jewry, or 200,000 people, lived in Polish lands. It was a golden era for Jewish Kazimierz, which became a center of talmudic learning; many revered works of Jewish scholarship, still setting standards today for ritual behavior for religious Jews around the world, were produced there.⁵ Along with two cemeteries and several commercial and residential buildings, seven major synagogues—built from the 1400s through the late 1800s—still stand today, although only the Remu synagogue has regularly functioned since World War II.⁶ Kazimierz's city walls were removed in the 1820s under Austrian rule when the district was administratively incorporated into Krakow, and fifty years later Jews were given the right to vote.⁷ During the 1800s the restrictions on Jewish residence were gradually revoked and Jews began to spread throughout the city, but Kazimierz remained the center of Jewish cultural and religious life until World War II.⁸ It was a poor area, though, and if people could leave it, they did. Poland, similarly, remained the center of world Jewry—second only to the United States in Jewish population—until the war. While historiographical disputes exist regarding the place of the Jews as “within” or “apart from” the European lands they inhabited (Poland in particular), Jewish history in Polish lands is inseparable from that of the larger Polish nation.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, there were approximately 64,000 Jews living in Krakow proper, about 25 percent of the city's populace.⁹ The first ghetto was established in the municipality in March 1941, when the Jews were removed from Kazimierz and concentrated in Krakow's Podgórze district across the river along with other Jews forced from the countryside. The ghetto subsequently underwent three consecutive liquidations in which its inhabitants were either sent to the adjacent Płaszów camp or directly to Auschwitz. Those who protested were killed on the spot.

Approximately 3,000,000 Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Of the 300,000 who survived the war (many in the Soviet Union), few returned to Poland to stay. Many of those who came back felt fearful and unwelcome (either personally or politically) and moved on. About 6,500 had returned to Krakow by the spring of 1945. A pogrom in Kazimierz in August of that year left 1 Jew dead and 5 wounded, and 42 Jews were killed in the nearby Kielce pogrom of July 4, 1946. These events compelled many Jews to leave. Between 1945 and 1948, 120,000 Polish Jews emigrated, and most of the rest followed in the mid-1950s or after a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign in 1968, which was taken by many observers as the decisive end of Poland's Jewish community.¹⁰

While Kazimierz, unlike other Jewish quarters across Europe, was physically spared, both its humanity and its movable material culture were gone. Already in 1943, when the quarter's Jews were moved to the ghetto in Podgórze, Poles from that poorer neighborhood moved in; after the war, the state distributed still-empty apartments to the needy, probably including individuals displaced from the eastern territories Poland lost in 1945. Despite a few state efforts to reenergize the quarter in the late 1950s and 1960s that supported artists and their projects, the “heritage” of the area was largely ignored. This is perhaps unsurprising given the communist government efforts to keep “the Jewish issue” out of public discourse.¹¹ For most Poles, the Jewish identity of the quarter had been lost; Cracovians knew it only as a slum.

Kazimierz's remarkable built environment—a complex of Jewish communal structures dating back to the fifteenth century—helped put Krakow on UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1978, and individual cultural seekers began to rediscover Kazimierz in the mid-1980s. But the neighborhood's historical riches made at that time little, if any, impression on the larger city or beyond. In addition to having the worst living conditions in the city, the local population was looked upon as “second class,” home to drunks, prostitutes, vendors of illegal home-brew, and feral cats and dogs. Steven Spielberg's choice in 1993 of Kazimierz as the central location for shooting Schindler's List put the dilapidated quarter once again on the map for Jewish heritage explorers and jump-started its process of gentrification. But the tri-national Kazimierz Action Plan that produced an elaborate blueprint for the sustainable revitalization of the quarter in 1994 did not manage to move past the idea phase, and alternative comprehensive betterment schemes have remained elusive. Instead, “the vagaries of market forces prevail[ed],” bringing their own problems, central among them the alienation and disenfranchisement of locals from an increasingly fashionable café culture with its attendant late-night noise, tourists, and skyrocketing rents.¹²

Although the “problem” of Kazimierz from an urban planning perspective has been greater than just its Jewish half—as noted, it contains key monuments of Christian heritage and despite the recent inroads of gentrification, a largely socially disadvantaged local population—the Jewish heritage of the quarter has been a particularly thorny subject. Despite the Action Plan's attempts to ensure that neighborhood development proceeded with the interests of local inhabitants in mind, Kazimierz Trafas, professor of cartography at Krakow's Jagiellonian University and chairman of the taskforce behind the plan, explained to me that local people had resisted cooperating with the plan, fearing that Jews would take away their property if they managed to renovate it. Though in more recent years those whom Trafas called “Polish yuppies” began to invest in the neighborhood, in the early 1990s only artists, writers, and a few Jewish cultural seekers were drawn to try their luck as new, makeshift denizens in what would become a grittily hip local address. He singled out the proprietors of commercial venues on Szeroka Street as examples of those few people who had had the vision and commitment to develop Kazimierz in a substantive manner. They were there, he said, “before it was fashionable.”

While representatives of the tiny local Jewish community were open to collaborating, Trafas said that American Jews had not expressed interest in investing in the quarter. Indeed, he told me he had trouble getting any foreign Jews interested in the question of what should be done with Kazimierz. Trafas seemed concerned to determine whether Jews felt that local Poles had the “right” to develop the Jewish heritage here. He sought input about what Jews thought about and cared about in Kazimierz. He came away with the sense that foreign Jews simply didn't identify with the place.

For the bulk of foreign Jews Poland has remained resolutely about the Holocaust, and the notion of vibrancy surrounding things Jewish—in the past and especially in the present—is a kind of “undesirable” heritage. Most foreign Jews come to Kazimierz because it is on the way to Auschwitz. Through the mid-1990s I knew many Jewish visitors who arrived in Krakow only to go directly by bus or taxi to the Holocaust's central symbol, returning the way they came. Only a few, perhaps those with specific ancestral ties, would bother with Kazimierz, seeking traces of flaking Hebrew lettering among the ruins, or stopping in entrance ways with visible impressions of mezuzahs (small receptacles containing a biblical text traditionally affixed to doorframes) that had been wrenched away in the wake of the Nazis' brutal removal of the Jews. It was easy to be struck primarily by the sense of Jewish absence, “particularly visible, since in spite of the destructive force of the war, the cultural landscape and urban fabric had survived.”¹³ Decades of economic stagnation made it appear as if time had stopped in the near aftermath of destruction, leaving a monument to the apocalypse.

A major factor inhibiting Kazimierz's organized development has been the issue of individual property ownership. Most local property belonged to Jews murdered during the Holocaust. Many of their descendants—living in the United States or Israel (with whom Poland had no diplomatic relations between 1967 and 1989)—made no claims to their ancestral belongings during the years when Poland was behind the Iron Curtain, for reasons both legal and emotional. Such petitions began to be made in growing numbers in the 1990s, but the situation was chaotic. There were cases of fraud, where individuals pretended to be the legal inheritors of Cracovian Jews who died during the Holocaust,¹⁴ as well as legitimate claims made just after the buildings in question had undergone costly renovations by private and local government investors, significantly discouraging further speculation. And if in reality it was only a minority rather than a preponderance of properties for which no title could be established,¹⁵ a sense of insecurity based on popular mythology and a lack of clarity—combined with the late Polish Jewish business magnate Zygmunt Nissenbaum's purchase of many such buildings on the promise of future renovation that he never undertook—has left even fashionable present-day Kazimierz pockmarked with overgrown, barricaded, empty-windowed ruins abutting its new shiny cafés and clubs.¹⁶

In 1939, Jews made up 10 percent of Poland's population and 25 percent of Krakow's, the culmination of almost a thousand years of ambivalent coexistence with Catholic Poles. Kazimierz was home to 45,000 Jews. Today, among the quarter's 18,000 inhabitants—according to one local's sardonic (though by no means implausible) estimate of the Jewish population—“there are three.” Looking at Kazimierz now, little of this history nor its complex present is immediately visible.

In Spielberg's Wake

For the three months in 1994 during which Steven Spielberg (along with Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Liam Neeson, and others) set up shop in Kazimierz to film Schindler's List, the quarter was transformed, drawn visually back in time as it was being propelled commercially forward. Spielberg chose Kazimierz over Podgórze, the neighborhood across the river where Krakow's wartime ghetto had been located, because it was free of the office buildings and TV tower that disrupted the historical look of Podgórze's skyline, and for the first time in half a century Jewish storefronts graced Kazimierz building facades and German soldiers strolled the streets. Local friends recounted with amusement watching older Poles staring in shock at the Nazi flag flying high over Wawel Castle, or encountering Nazi officers in full regalia chatting amiably over lunch on the curb with black-clad Hasidim.

Schindler's List was a boon for Kazimierz as a tourist site. It also triggered micro-level entrepreneurship whose echoes remain. Great distinction was bestowed, for example, on erstwhile Café Ariel—the only place on the square at the time where one could sit and have a coffee—by its use as the unofficial retreat for Spielberg and his entourage. Enhanced by the subsequent strategic display of a Spielberg family photograph and autographs of the film's cast members, Café Ariel became the preferred Jewish haunt in the quarter for locals and tourists alike for some time to come. “Schindler's List” tours, tracing both the sites where Spielberg filmed and their historical counterparts, were the brainchild of Zdzisław Leś of the Jarden Jewish Bookshop (the only other Jewish-themed commercial venue present at that time) and began shortly after the film's release, due to public demand. All summer tourists had been coming to his shop “ten times a day” and asking, “Where is this place from Schindler's List? Can you show me that site from the movie?” Interest was robust enough to fill multiple tours each day, so Zdzisław hired Franciszek Palowski, the Polish journalist who had had exclusive access to Spielberg during his three months in Poland, to prepare a Schindler's List tourist guidebook. The walking and mini-van tours followed.

While dismissals of Kazimierz as a Jewish Disneyland are glib shorthand that erases the cultural-political riches that have helped animate the quarter, there are ways—or perhaps moments—when the label's connotation of “digestible distortion” resonates. For one thing, the re-spatialization of Krakow's Jewishness to the convenient container of Kazimierz erases the more complex, shifting Jewish geographies of the city; not only did Jews begin their settlement just off the city's main square, but by the 1900s those who could had begun to spread across the wider urban landscape. There are unrestored prayer houses and other unmarked Jewish heritage sites in the Old City that—due to signs directing tourists to Kazimierz, Krakow's “Jewish Town”—remain invisible. But if this concentration, even “ghettoization”...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Prologue: Scene of Arrival
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Poles and Jews: Significant Others
• 1. Making Sense of Place: History, Mythology, Authenticity
• 2. The Mission: Mass Jewish Holocaust Pilgrimage
• 3. The Quest: Scratching the Heart
• 4. Shabbos Goyim: Polish Stewards of Jewish Spaces
• 5. Traveling Tschotschkes and “Post-Jewish” Culture
• 6. Jewish Like an Adjective: Expanding the Collective Self
• Conclusion: Toward a Polish-Jewish Milieu de Mémoire
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author