May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

; and Donna Bailey Nurse, “Just ‘Rosie’,” University of Toronto Magazine, Winter 2006, Internet: . (Rosalie Abella’s son, no doubt tutored by his mother, has made similar claims in Nexus, University of Toronto Law School’s alumni magazine.) In fact, there were no quotas or special seats assigned to Jews at that time, and more than 1,000 students, including very many women (which was unheard of in Canada at the time), who declared themselves to be Jews were enrolled in the Faculty of Law. The following statistics are taken from Kulczykowski’s authoritative study, Żydzi–studenci Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego w Drugiej Rzeczypospolitej (1919–1939), 66 (Table 9): in 1928–29, of 2,525 students enrolled, 1,074 were Jews (including 121 females), or 42.54% of all students; in 1929–30, of 2,565 students enrolled, 994 were Jews (119 females), or 38.75%; in 1930–31, of 2,660 students enrolled, 1,084 were Jews (169 females), or 40.75%; in 1931–32, of 3,096 students enrolled, 1,182 were Jews (230 females), or 38.18%; in 1932–33, of 3,049 students enrolled, 1,167 were Jews (246 females), or 38.28%; in 1933–34, of a total enrolment of 2,970, 910 were Jews (191 females), or 30.64%.

The numerus clausus (“closed number” in Latin), or quota restrictions, introduced at some Polish universities in the mid–1930s, sought to limit Jewish enrolment to that group’s overall share of the country’s population (which was a little under 10%) in face of the marked overrepresentation of Jewish students in the early 1920s when they made up about 25 percent of the entire student body. There was a longstanding tradition of restricting Jews in Czarist Russia, Imperial Germany and the Autro-Hungarian Empire. Similar policies were put in place post-World War I in many European countries such as Hungary, already in the early 1920s, in Austria, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia. See Peter Tibor Nagy, “The Numerus Clausus in Inter-War Hungary: Pioneering European Antisemitism,” in East European Jewish Affairs, vol. 35, no. 1 (June 2005): 13–22; American Jewish Committee, The Jewish Communities of Nazi-Occupied Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1982), Estonia, 2–3, Latvia, 21, Lithuania, 6. The number of Jewish students at Tartu University in Estonia dropped precipitously from 188 in 1926 (4% of the student body) to 69 in 1938 (2.1%). As restrictions were imposed on Jewish students in the medical, agricultural, and engineering faculties, the number of Jewish university students in Lithuania fell from from 26.5% (1,206) in 1932 to 14.7% (500) in 1938. Jewish students at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas were required to occupy separate benches in the lecture halls. (This information is entirely overlooked in a recent article by a Lithuanian historian who claims, falsely, that the numerus clasus was a Polish “law,” and that so such “laws” were introduced in Lithuania, in contrast to other new central European nation states. He also alleges that Lithuanian students’ demands for separate seatings for Jews were never implemented, contrary to Jewish sources. See Vladas Sirutavičius, “‘A Close, but Very Suspicious and Dangerous Neighbour’: Outbreaks of Antisemitism in Inter-War Lithuania,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 25: Jews in the Former Grand Duchy of Lithuania since 1772 (Oxford and Portland, Oregon: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2013), 247, 259.) Moreover, like in other countries, violent attacks on Jews in the streets and on Jewish property were not uncommon in Lithuania, with hundreds of Jews suffering injuries. Nationalist economic policies also targeted Jews, who were virtually excluded from the public service, and nationalist policies, such as discriminatory electoral practices and the outlawing of all signs and posters in public places in a language other than Lithuanian, permeated public life. The Business Association called for a boycott of Jewish enterprises, while “Iron Wolf” members vandalized Jewish shops. See Alfonsas Eidintas, Jews, Lithuanians and the Holocaust (Vilnius: Versus Aureus, 2003), 82–88; Dov Levin, “Lithuania” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, vol. 1, 1073; Christoph Dieckmann, “Holocaust in the Lithuanian Provinces: Case Studies of Jurbarkas and Utena,” in Beate Kosmala and Georgi Verbeeck, eds., Facing the Catastrophe: Jews and Non-Jews in Europe during World War II (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011), 74; Vladas Sirutavičius and Darius Staliūnas, “Was Lithuania a Pogrom-Free Zone? (1881–1940),” in Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Gaunt, Natan M. Meir, and Israel Bartal, eds., Anti-Jewish Violence: Rethinking the Pogrom in East European History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 146–47; Vladas Sirutavičius, “‘A Close, but Very Suspicious and Dangerous Neighbour’: Outbreaks of Antisemitism in Inter-War Lithuania,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 25 (2013): 245–62; Solomonas Atamukas, “The Hard Long Road Toward the Truth: On the Sixtieth Anniversary of the Holocaust in Lithuania,” Lituanus, vol. 47, no. 4 (2001): 19–21. Even in the Soviet Union, Jewish students were expelled to make room for Slavs, e.g., in 1922, Jews constituted over 60% of all students at institutions of higher learning in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, whereas Belorussians accounted for only 31%. By 1927, Belorussians constituted 61% of all students in tertiary education, their numbers growing at the expense of Jews. See Per Anders Rudling, The Battle Over Belarus: The Rise and Fall of the Belarusian National Movement, 1906-1931 (Edmonton, Alberta: n.p., 2010), 245. Polish interwar quotas, which lasted less than a decade, were clearly more short-lived than the restrictions imposed on Jews, Blacks, Catholics, and other “undesirables” by many universities in the United States (especially Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell) and in Canada (McGill University, University of Toronto, University of Manitoba), which reached their height in the 1920s and 1930s but were in force as late as the 1960s (e.g., at Yale). As Oscar and Mary Handlin note, “In the 1920’s almost every leading American college and university, formally or informally, adopted a quota system for Jewish students. Unofficial regulatory agencies made it difficult for Jews to enter almost every profession. In 1944 and 1945, some representative groups in the fields of dentistry and psychiatry went so far as openly to propose a quota system in those fields.” See Rose and Rose, Minority Problems, 22. Conditions for blacks were, of course, far worse. As president of Princeton, Woodrow Wilson excluded blacks entirely: he did not admit any black students to Princeton during his tenure. He was a vocal advocate for the Ku Klux Klan. In his 1901 book, A History of the American People, he extolled the Ku Klux Klan for helping “the white men of the South” to rid themselves of “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes.” As president of the United States, he resegregated the federal civil service and removed black employees from positions of authority. He told a group of black professionals, “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” It is not surprising, therefore, that anti-Jewish discourse publicly flourished on American university campuses on the eve of the Holocaust, that American educators helped Nazi Germany improve its image in the West, and that leading American universities such as Harvard and Columbia welcomed Nazi officials to campus and participated enthusiastically in student exchange programs with Nazified universities in Germany. Indeed, American interactions with Nazi Germany—financial, commercial, cultural, academic, and political—were extensive throughout the 1930s and even into the first months of World War II. See Leonard Dinnerstein, Anti-Semitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Stephen N. Harwood, The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). During the Second World War, American bureaucrats went out of their way to stop the arrival of Jewish refugees. Breckenridge Long, the assistant secretary of state in charge of visa policies, issued a classified interdepartmental memo that outlined how U.S. diplomats could circumvent their own government’s immigration quotas by putting obstacles in the way of and delaying the issuance of visas. Consequently, the number of Jewish immigrants to the United States fell from 43,450 in 1939, to 4,704 in 1943. See Valery Bazarov, testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law, March 19, 2009. Remarkably such policies, which also excluded Blacks and other minorities, continued well into the 1960s in countries like the United, States, Canada, and Australia. Eve toda, the chances of visible minorities gaining admission to prestigious universities in the United Kingdom are still negligible. Of the 2,653 students accepted at Oxford in 2010, only 41 were members of visible minorities. Discrimination against visible minorities is a persistent feature in Western countries. A Law Society of Upper Canada report released in 2014 revealed that “overt discrimination and bias are a feature of daily life” for visible minority lawyers in the province of Ontario. “Racialization is a constant and persistent factor,” the report stated. See Colin Perkel, “Discrimination a Daily Reality for Visible Minority Lawyers in Ontario, Report Says,” Toronto Star, November 14, 2014.

It is also worth noting that in contemporary Israel, Palestinians are severely disadvantaged in terms of employment in the civil service, access to and use of land, educational opportunities, and in many other respects. It is exceedingly rare—approximately one in a thousand—for an Arab Bedouin, a group numbering some 150,000, to reach higher education. See Zama Coursen-Neff, “Discrimination Against Palestinian Arab Children in the Israeli Educational System,” Journal of International Law and Politics, vol. 36 (2004): 101–62; The Inequality Report: The Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel (Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, 2011). While Jews continually harp on the Polish interwar record as if it were a current event and demand that Poles apologize and be chastised for it, Jews do not feel that they themselves have anything to answer for with respect to their own record and become indignant when Israel’s discriminatory practices are pointed out to them. Yet the record is quite poor. As pointed out by Baylis Thomas,

It is clear that the Israeli government and its Jewish citizenry see Arab-Israelis as aliens. … Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948 were held under martial law for eighteen years. These Arab-Israelis lost most of their land to Israeli confiscation. Today, after sixty years, Arab-Israelis are denied state benefits, equal employment, adequate water and electricity, education, and cultural freedom. Israel, in its own opinion (Or Commission, 2003), behaves in a “neglectful and discriminatory” manner towards its Arab-Israeli citizens. …

Between 1967 and 1998, no Arab-Israeli ever served as a cabinet minister; none served as a member of the Security and Foreign Affairs Committee; none chaired any Knesset committee; none directed any state-owned enterprise or government bureau (including the branch that handles Arab communal and religious interests). Although comprising 20 percent of the Israeli population, Arab-Israelis in 1998 held seventeen of 1,300 senior government positions, ten of 5,000 university posts and garnered, on average, 5 percent of Knesset seats. …

Other major obstacles to a one-state solution consists in Israel’s agencies of institutional discrimination—sometimes referred to as Israel’s “invisible” government or “the glass wall.” In Israel, quasi-governmental agencies are the guardians of unofficial discrimination against non-Jews. These agencies include the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, both explicitly chartered by the government to serve Jewish interests only. … The JNF bars Arab-Israeli use of 94 percent of the land of Israel. … Upon statethood, the Israeli government assigned the JA primary responsibility for Jewish immigration, settlement, and development in Israel. During the first quarter century after statehood, the JA financed the immigration of 1.4 million Diaspora Jews, providing all their settlement needs cost-free (food, clothing, medical care, generous benefits, grants, employment, and housing). No assistance was given to Arab-Israelis who were discriminated against in employment, civil service positions, schools, and health services. When two-thirds of their farmland was confiscated, they resorted to menial construction jobs and remained segregated in isolated villages without adequate services. The JA, not an official part of the government, freely discriminates against Arab-Israelis.
See Baylis Thomas, The Dark Side of Zionism: Israel’s Quest for Security through Dominance (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2009), 172–74. According to the United States Department of State 2009 Report on International Religious Freedom, Israeli government allocations of state resources favoured Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious groups and institutions, discriminating against non-Jews and non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. Abusive and discriminatory practices by individuals and groups against Israeli Arab Muslims, evangelical Christians, and Messianic Jews persisted. Non-Jewish holy sites do not enjoy legal protection under the 1967 Protection of Holy Sites Law because the government does not recognize them as official holy sites. Thus many Muslim and Christian sites are neglected, inaccessible, or threatened by property developers and municipalities. The state transportation company, Egged, which operates the country’s public transportation system, continued to operate sex-segregated buses along routes frequented by ultra-Orthodox Jews, and women who refuse to sit at the back of such buses risk harassment and physical assault by male passengers. The government funds the construction of Jewish synagogues and cemeteries, but not non-Jewish ones. Government resources available for religious/heritage studies to Arab and non-Orthodox Jewish public schools are significantly less than those available to Orthodox Jewish public schools. State funding for public and private Arab schools is proportionately less than the funding for religious education courses in Jewish schools. Housing, educational, and other benefits, as well as employment preferences based on military experience, effectively discriminate in favour of the Jewish population, the majority of which serves in the military. The 2008 budget for religious services and institutions for the Jewish population was approximately $457 million, whereas religious minorities, which constituted slightly more than 20 percent of the population, received approximately $18.6 million, or just less than 4 percent of total funding. The municipal authorities of the Be’er Sheva area, with 5,000 Muslim residents and no mosque, blocked the reopening of the city’s old mosque, while there was one synagogue for every 700 Jews. A group of approximately 200 Orthodox Jews violently disrupted the religious service of a Messianic congregation in Be’er Sheva, and pushed and slapped the congregation’s pastor and damaged property. This was but one of a number of violent attacks on Messianic Jews that occurred throughout Israel. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which ostensibly preaches tolerance, was given permission by the High Court to continue construction at a site containing a centuries-old Muslim cemetery. Israel’s Interior Ministry has attempted to revoke the citizenship of persons discovered holding Messianic or Christian beliefs and to deny some national services (such as welfare benefits and passports) to such persons. The police had to reissue a 1999 directive to police precincts throughout the country reminding them of their duty to fully investigate crimes against minority religious communities. Members of Orthodox Jewish groups continued to treat non-Orthodox Jews with displays of discrimination and intolerance. Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and other ultra-Orthodox enclaves threw rocks at passing motorists driving on the Sabbath and harassed or assaulted women whose appearance or behaviour they considered immodest, including throwing acid on them. Members of Jehovah’s Witnesses reported an increase in assaults and other crimes against their members and faced difficulties convincing the police to investigate or apprehend the perpetrators. Vandals painted anti-Muslim and anti-Arab graffiti—including slogans such as “Mohammed is a pig,” “death to Arabs,” and “Kahane was right”—on the doors and walls of the Al-Bahar mosque in Jaffa. A less than positive note was the sentencing, in November 2008, of two defendants to a mere two months’ imprisonment for their part in a 2006 attack on a group of Christian tourists in Jerusalem launched by approximately 100 ultra-Orthodox Jews. According to this objective report, the situation for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories was incomparably worse, with violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers on the increase. Israeli settler radio stations often depicted Arabs as subhuman and called for Palestinians to be expelled from the West Bank. Jewish settlers, acting either alone or in groups, assaulted Palestinians and destroyed Palestinian property. Most instances of violence or property destruction committed did not result in arrests or convictions.

339 Mały rocznik statystyczny 1939 (Warsaw: Główny Urząd Statystyczny, 1939), 52. Some of the returnees (Yordim) alleged that Jews in Palestine treat the Jewish arrivals as bad as Poles treat Jews in Poland. See Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland, 260. For an example of a prosperous businessman returning to Poland see Edelstein, Tazdzikim in Sodom (Righteous Gentiles), 26–27.

340 Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 220. For an example of a Jewish girl born to Polish Jews in New Jersey who returned to Tarnów, Poland with her family, see “Spett family,” in Emily Taitz, ed., Holocaust Survivors: Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 2007), vol. 2, 476.

341 Mazur, Życie polityczne polskiego Lwowa 1918–1939, 408 (Lwów, 1936); Tomasz Marszałkowski, Zamieszki, ekscesy i demonstracje w Krakowie 1918–1939 (Kraków: Arcana, 2006) (Kraków, 1923 and 1936).

342 Mazur, Życie polityczne polskiego Lwowa 1918–1939, 61 (attacks on Jews), 114–39.

343 Josef Sztamfater, “Walki robotników w Lublinie w latach 1915–1920,” in Adam Kopciowski, ed., Księga pamięci żydowskiego Lublina (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2011), 206–7; translation of Dos bukh fun Lublin (Paris: Former Residents of Lublin in Paris, Paris, 1952).

344 Examples of politically and religiously based turmoil, assaults and even murders are plentiful. See Leonard Rowe, “Jewish Self-Defense: A Response to Violence,” and Moyshe Kligsberg
, “Di yidishe yugnt-bavegung in Poyln tsvishn beyde velt-milkhomes (a
sotsyologishe shtudye),” in Joshua A. Fishman, ed., Studies on Polish Jewry, 1919–1939 (New York: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1974), 111–16, 201–3; Celia S. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction: Jews of Poland Between the Two World Wars (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), 255–57. It is noteworthy that frequently the Polish police was called on by the Jews themselves to intervene, thus belying the claim that Jews distrusted the Polish police and that the latter were unresponsive to violence directed at Jews. The Bund Youth Tsukunft periodical, Yungt-veker, printed reports on an attempt by Communist youth to break up a meeting of the Tsukunft, on Communist attempts to infiltrate and disrupt local branches of the Tsukunft, and on the physical intimidation of an individual who attempted to leave the Communist youth organization in order to join the Tsukunft. See Jack Jacobs, Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 13. There were frequent political altercations in Kraków. At a Zionist meeting in 1920 invaded by Bundists, the Bundist Sacher Glasman stabbed the Zionist Szlomo Kornegold and killed him. On November 16, 1930, the day of elections to the Seym (Polish Parliament), Zionists beat up Berisch Weinberg and his son, Orthodox Jews, because they had supported the pro-government party (Bezpartyjny Blok Współpracy z Rządem). Fans of competing Jewish soccer teams were also involved in brawls. See Marszałkowski, Zamieszki, ekscesy i demonstracje w Krakowie 1918–1939. In Brańsk, according to Jewish reports, “‘there was no Saturday or holiday that passed without a fight.’ Party meetings were disrupted by the acolytes of all the other parties, and resulted in ‘bloody fights’ that spilled into the streets.” See Hoffman, Shtetl, 180–81. In Ejszyszki, the “library was the ‘bone of contention’ and constant battleground of the two camps: the Hebrews and the Yiddishists. Meetings for the election of the library management often ended in blows. Torn shirts and bloody noses were a frequent result of this language battle.” See Livingston, Tradition and Modernism in the Shtetl, 66. See also Yaffa Eliach, There Once Was a World: A Nine-Hundred-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998), 509 (Ejszyszki). In a village near Raduń, “when one of the Zionist parties sent a lecturer to speak on their behalf. Then there was fervent excitement among the younger generation, and not infrequently such a gathering would end in a free-for-all and the meeting would break up in a scramble.” See Aviel, A Village Named Dowgalishok, 11. An “ugly incident” occurred in Kolbuszowa “on Simchat Torah, the joyous holiday on which congregants paraded around bearing the sacred Torahs. With the rabbi dancing about, carrying one of the Torahs, a follower of the dayan [an assistant and rival to the rabbi] ran up and attempted to snatch it from him. A battle then ensued between the two sides. The fight ended quickly; but the matter was taken to court, where the dayan’s supporter was convicted for ‘disturbing religious services’ and received a five-year prison term. Other heated legal issues between the two sides dragged on year after year.” See Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 156–57. In Kraśnik, where the Jews were “overwhelmingly” very religious, traditionalists “fought energetically against the liberationist movement [i.e., secular leftist Jews]. There were organized groups of the Orthodox who, on every Friday evening, would break into the apartments where the Jewish youth congregated to check whether anyone was in violation of the Sabbath.” See Beniamin Zylberberg, “Żydzi w Kraśniku i … z Kraśnika,” Kalendarz Żydowski 1993–1994: Almanach 5754 (Warsaw: Związek Religijny Wyznania Mojżeszowego w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej, 1993), 35. In Pińczów, the Chasidim of Pinczow were vehemently opposed to any human (as contrasted to divine) initiative to reestablish the Jews in their homeland. … on a particular Saturday, some Chasidim hired thugs to intimidate the Zionists, threatening that if they did not stop preaching [to people move to Palestine], ‘we will knife you.’” See Yehudi Lindeman, ed., Shards of Memory: Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2007), 130. In Powursk, Volhynia, “There were two synagogues in town … Both establishments had their own followers and sometimes fights would break out between the two Hasidic camps about how the community should be run.” See Alexander Agas, “Povursk: The Town’s Jews,” in Merin, Memorial Book, 417. For accounts from other localities see Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Żydzi i Polacy 1918–1955: Współistnienie—Zagłada—komunizm (Warsaw: Fronda, 2000), 91–96 (various localities); J. Ben-Meir (Treshansky), Sefer yizkor Goniadz (Tel Aviv: The Committee of Goniondz Association in the USA and in Israel, 1960), translated as Our Hometown Goniondz, Internet: