69 Facts About Polish Jews

Poland became a shelter for Polish Jews persecuted and expelled from various European countries and the home to the world's largest Jewish community of the time.

The Polish Jews state supported Jewish paramilitary groups such as the Haganah, Betar, and Irgun, providing them with weapons and training.

One of them, a diplomat and merchant from the Moorish town of Tortosa in Spanish Al-Andalus, known by his Arabic name, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, was the first chronicler to mention the Polish state ruled by Prince Mieszko I In the summer of 965 or 966, Jacob made a trade and diplomatic journey from his native Toledo in Muslim Spain to the Holy Roman Empire and then to the Slavic countries.

The first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the 11th century, where it appears that Jews then lived in Gniezno, at that time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty.

Under Boleslaw III, Polish Jews, encouraged by the tolerant regime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border in Lithuanian territory as far as Kyiv.

Related searches

Jews worked on commission for the mints of other contemporary Polish princes, including Casimir the Just, Boleslaw I the Tall and Wladyslaw III Spindleshanks.

The Councils of Wroclaw, Buda, and Leczyca each segregated Polish Jews, ordered them to wear a special emblem, banned them from holding offices where Christians would be subordinated to them, and forbade them from building more than one prayer house in each town.

Polish Jews inflicted heavy punishment for the desecration of Jewish cemeteries.

In, broad privileges were extended to Lithuanian Polish Jews including freedom of religion and commerce on equal terms with the Christians.

In 1423 the statute of Warka forbade Polish Jews the granting of loans against letters of credit or mortgage and limited their operations exclusively to loans made on security of moveable property.

In 1495, Polish Jews were ordered out of the center of Krakow and allowed to settle in the "Jewish town" of Kazimierz.

Poland became more tolerant just as the Polish Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, as well as from Austria, Hungary and Germany, thus stimulating Jewish immigration to the much more accessible Poland.

Indeed, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Poland became the recognized haven for exiles from Western Europe; and the resulting accession to the ranks of Polish Jewry made it the cultural and spiritual center of the Jewish people.

In 1503, the Polish Jews monarchy appointed Rabbi Jacob Pollak the first official Rabbi of Poland.

The Polish Jews government permitted the Rabbinate to grow in power, to use it for tax collection purposes.

Polish Jews was equally successful in his battles against the Russians.

Environment of the Polish Commonwealth, according to Hundert, profoundly affected Jews due to genuinely positive encounter with the Christian culture across the many cities and towns owned by the Polish aristocracy.

Polish Jews Jewry found its views of life shaped by the spirit of Talmudic and rabbinical literature, whose influence was felt in the home, in school, and in the synagogue.

Polish Jews lived and died in Lublin, where he was the head of the yeshivah which produced the rabbinical celebrities of the following century.

Polish Jews's disciples taught and encouraged the new fervent brand of Judaism based on Kabbalah known as Hasidism.

Polish Jews were most numerous in the territories that fell under the military control of Austria and Russia.

The progressive elements in Polish Jews society recognized the urgency of popular education as the very first step toward reform.

The territories which included the great bulk of the Jewish population was transferred to Russia, and thus they became subjects of that empire, although in the first half of the 19th century some semblance of a vastly smaller Polish Jews state was preserved, especially in the form of the Congress Poland .

Under foreign rule many Jews inhabiting formerly Polish lands were indifferent to Polish aspirations for independence.

In 1804, Alexander I of Russia issued a "Statute Concerning Polish Jews", meant to accelerate the process of assimilation of the Empire's new Jewish population.

Related searches

The Polish Jews were allowed to establish schools with Russian, German or Polish curricula.

The harshest measures designed to compel Polish Jews to merge into society at large called for their expulsion from small villages, forcing them to move into towns.

Once the resettlement began, thousands of Polish Jews lost their only source of income and turned to Qahal for support.

Unlike the general population that had to provide recruits between the ages of 18 and 35, Polish Jews had to provide recruits between the ages of 12 and 25, at the qahal's discretion.

Pale of Settlement was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia in which permanent residency by Polish Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited.

At times, Polish Jews were forbidden to live in agricultural communities, or certain cities, as in Kyiv, Sevastopol and Yalta, excluded from residency at a number of cities within the Pale.

Polish Jews generally were less influenced by Haskalah, rather focusing on a strong continuation of their religious lives based on Halakha following primarily Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, and adapting to the new Religious Zionism of the Mizrachi movement later in the 19th century.

Polish Jews took up socialism, forming the Bund labor union which supported assimilation and the rights of labor.

In 1914, the German Zionist Max Bodenheimer founded the short-lived German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, with the goal of establishing a buffer state within the Jewish Pale of Settlement, composed of the former Polish provinces annexed by Russia, being de facto protectorate of the German Empire that would free Jews in the region from Russian oppression.

Prominent Polish Jews were among the members of KTSSN, the nucleus of the interim government of re-emerging sovereign Poland including Herman Feldstein, Henryk Eile, Porucznik Samuel Herschthal, Dr Zygmunt Leser, Henryk Orlean, Wiktor Chajes and others.

Many other events in Poland were later found to have been exaggerated, especially by contemporary newspapers such as The New York Times, although serious abuses against the Polish Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in Ukraine.

The result of the concerns over the fate of Poland's Polish Jews was a series of explicit clauses in the Versailles Treaty signed by the Western powers, and President Paderewski, protecting the rights of minorities in new Poland including Germans.

In many areas of the country, the majority of retail businesses were owned by Polish Jews, who were sometimes among the wealthiest members of their communities.

Many Polish Jews worked as shoemakers and tailors, as well as in the liberal professions; doctors, teachers, journalists and lawyers .

Polish Jews owned land and real estate, participated in retail and manufacturing and in the export industry.

Polish language, rather than Yiddish, was increasingly used by the young Warsaw Jews who did not have a problem in identifying themselves fully as Jews, Varsovians and Poles.

Interwar Polish Jews government provided military training to the Zionist Betar paramilitary movement, whose members admired the Polish Jews nationalist camp and imitated some of its aspects.

Between 1935 and 1937 seventy-nine Polish Jews were killed and 500 injured in anti-Jewish incidents.

The Polish Jews government hoped Palestine would provide an outlet for its Jewish population and lobbied for creation of a Jewish state in the League of Nations and other international venues, proposing increased emigration quotas and opposing the Partition Plan of Palestine on behalf of Zionist activists.

One hundred thirty thousand soldiers of Jewish descent, including Boruch Steinberg, Chief Rabbi of the Polish Jews Military, served in the Polish Jews Army at the outbreak of the Second World War, thus being among the first to launch armed resistance against Nazi Germany.

Related searches

Polish Jews later served in almost all Polish formations during the entire World War II, many were killed or wounded and very many were decorated for their combat skills and exceptional service.

Polish Jews caught at border crossings, or engaged in trade and other "illegal" activities were arrested and deported.

Former senior officials and notable members of the Polish Jews community were arrested and exiled together with their families.

The general feeling among the Polish Jews was a sense of temporary relief in having escaped the Nazi occupation in the first weeks of war.

Some scholars note that while not pro-Communist, many Polish Jews saw the Soviets as the lesser threat compared to the German Nazis.

Additionally, it has been noted that some ethnic Poles were as prominent as Jews in filling civil and police positions in the occupation administration, and that Jews, both civilians and in the Polish military, suffered equally at the hands of the Soviet occupiers.

Whatever initial enthusiasm for the Soviet occupation Polish Jews might have felt was dissipated upon feeling the impact of the suppression of Jewish societal modes of life by the occupiers.

Small numbers of Polish Jews were able to leave the Soviet Union in 1942 with the Wladyslaw Anders army, among them the future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin.

Some six million Polish citizens perished in the war – half of those being killed at the German extermination camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, and Chelmno or starved to death in the ghettos.

Germans ordered that all Polish Jews be registered, and the word "Jude" was stamped in their identity cards.

For example, Polish Jews were forbidden to walk on the sidewalks, use public transport, enter places of leisure, sports arenas, theaters, museums and libraries.

Many Polish Jews tried to escape from the ghettos in the hope of finding a place to hide outside of it, or of joining the partisan units.

Hiding in a Christian society to which the Polish Jews were only partially assimilated was a daunting task.

The Gestapo provided a standard prize to those who informed on Polish Jews hidden on the 'Aryan' side, consisting of cash, liquor, sugar, and cigarettes.

In extreme cases, the Polish Jews informed on other Polish Jews to alleviate hunger with the awarded prize.

Adam Czerniakow who was the head of the Warsaw Judenrat committed suicide when he was forced to collect daily lists of Polish Jews to be deported to Treblinka extermination camp at the onset of Grossaktion Warsaw.

When we invaded the Ghetto for the first time – wrote SS commander Jurgen Stroop – the Jews and the Polish bandits succeeded in repelling the participating units, including tanks and armored cars, by a well-prepared concentration of fire.

Many Polish Jews were found alive in the ruins of the former Warsaw Ghetto during the 1944 general Warsaw Uprising when the Poles themselves rose up against the Germans.

Also, all Polish Jews who perished in the Holocaust behind the Curzon Line were included with the Soviet war dead.

Those Polish Jews who remained, the rebuilding of Jewish life in Poland was carried out between October 1944 and 1950 by the Central Committee of Polish Jews which provided legal, educational, social care, cultural, and propaganda services.

Related searches

Hand-picked by Joseph Stalin, prominent Jews held posts in the Politburo of the Polish United Workers' Party including Jakub Berman, head of state security apparatus Urzad Bezpieczenstwa, and Hilary Minc responsible for establishing a Communist-style economy.

The state-sponsored "anti-Zionist" campaign resulted in the removal of Jews from the Polish United Worker's Party and from teaching positions in schools and universities.

The campaign damaged Poland's reputation abroad, particularly in the U S Many Polish intellectuals were disgusted at the promotion of official antisemitism and opposed the campaign.

Poland is currently easing the way for Polish Jews who left Poland during the Communist organized massive expulsion of 1968 to re-obtain their citizenship.