History of the Jews in Poland: Encyclopedia II - History of the Jews in Poland - Interwar period 1918–39

History of the Jews in Poland - Interwar period 1918–39

History of the Jews in Poland - Independence and Polish Jews

Jews also played a role in the fight for independence in 1918, some joining Józef Piłsudski, while many other communities decided to remain neutral in the fight for a Polish state. In the wake of World War I and the ensuing conflicts that engulfed Eastern Europe — the Russian Civil War, Polish-Ukrainian War, and Polish-Soviet War — many pogroms were launched against the Jews by all sides. As a substantial number of Jews were perceived to have supported the Bolsheviks in Russia, they came under frequent attack by those opposed to the Bolshevik regime.

Just after the end of World War I, the West became alarmed by reports about alleged massive pogroms in Poland against Jews. Pressure for government action reached the point where President Woodrow Wilson sent an official commission to investigate the matter. The commission, led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., announced that the reports of pogroms were exaggerated, and in some cases may even have been fabricated (Morgenthau Report). It identified eight major incidents in the years 1918–1919, and estimated the number of victims at 200–300 Jews. Four of these were attributed to the actions of deserters and undisciplined individual soldiers; none were blamed on official government policy. Among the incidents, in Pińsk a Polish officer accused a group of Jewish communists of plotting against the Poles and shot thirty-five of them. In Lviv (then Lwów) in 1918, after the Polish Army captured the city, hundreds of people were killed in the chaos, including some seventy-two Jews. In Warsaw, soldiers of Blue Army assaulted Jews in the streets, but were punished by military authorities. 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 Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in Ukraine^[3]. The result of the concern over the fate of Poland's Jews was a series of explicit clauses in the Versailles Treaty protecting the rights of minorities in Poland. In 1921, Poland's March Constitution gave the Jews the same legal rights as other citizens and guaranteed them religious tolerance.

History of the Jews in Poland - Jewish and Polish culture

Main articles: Jewish culture and Polish culture

The newly independent Second Polish Republic had a large Jewish minority – by the time World War II began, Poland had the largest concentration of Jews in Europe. According to the 1931 National Census there were 3,130,581 Polish Jews measured by the declaration of their religion. Estimating the population increase and the emigration from Poland between 1931 and 1939, there were probably 3,474,000 Jews in Poland as of September 1, 1939 (approximately 10% of the total population). Jews were primarily centered in large and smaller cities: 77% lived in cities and 23% in the villages. During the school year of 1937–1938 there were 226 elementary schools and twelve high schools as well as fourteen vocational schools with either Yiddish or Hebrew as the instructional language. Jewish political parties, both the Socialist General Jewish Labor Union (The Bund), as well as parties of the Zionist right and left wing and religious conservative movements, were represented in the Sejm (the Polish Parliament) as well as in the regional councils.

The Jewish cultural scene was particularly vibrant. There were many Jewish publications and over 116 periodicals. Yiddish authors, most notably Isaac Bashevis Singer, went on to achieve international acclaim as classic Jewish writers, and in Singer's case, win the 1978 Nobel Prize. Other Jewish authors of the period, like Bruno Schulz, Julian Tuwim, Jan Brzechwa and Bolesław Leśmian were less well-known internationally, but made important contributions to Polish literature. Yiddish theatre also flourished; Poland had fifteen Yiddish theatres and theatrical groups. Warsaw was home to the most important Yiddish theater troupe of the time, the Vilna Troupe, which staged the first performance of The Dybbuk in 1920 at the Elyseum Theatre.

History of the Jews in Poland - Growing anti-Semitism

As the Second Republic matured, there was rising persecution of Jews in Poland, who were often not identified as true Poles; a problem caused by both Polish nationalism, supported by the Sanacja government, and the fact that a substantial proportion of Jews lived separate lives from the Polish majority: 85% of Polish Jews listed Yiddish or Hebrew as their native language, for example. Although matters improved for a time under the rule of Józef Piłsudski (1926–1935), who opposed anti-Semitism, they deteriorated after his death. Further academic harassment, anti-Jewish riots, and semi-official or unofficial quotas (Numerus clausus) introduced in 1937 in some universities halved the number of Jews in Polish universities between independence and the late 1930s. In 1937 the trade unions of Polish doctors and lawyers restricted their new members to Christian Poles while many government jobs continued to be unavailable to Jews during this entire period. This was accompanied by physical violence: in the years between 1935 and 1937 seventy-nine Jews were killed and 500 injured in anti-Jewish incidents ^[4]. Violence was also frequently aimed at Jewish stores and many of them were looted. At the same time, persistent economic boycotts and harassment including property-destroying riots, combined with the effects of the Great Depression that had been very severe on agricultural countries like Poland, reduced the standard of living of Polish Jews until it was among the worst among major Jewish communities in the world. The result was that at the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish community in Poland was large and vibrant internally, yet (with the exception of a few professionals) also substantially poorer and less integrated than the Jews in most of Western Europe.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Interwar period 1918–39", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki