poland 2005

 

The parliamentary and presidential elections held in Poland on 25 September resulted in a nationalist right-wing victory and boosted the influence of the antisemitic, Catholic nationalist Radio Maryja. The level of antisemitism remained relatively high despite the paucity of Jews living in Poland.

 

the jewish community

There are some 5,000–10,000 Jews in Poland out of a total population of close to 40 million. The majority live in Warsaw, Wroclaw, Krakow and Lodz, but there are smaller communities in several other cities. There are virtually no Jews in the eastern part of Poland where once large, important communities, such as those of Lublin and Bialystok, existed.

The Union of Jewish Religious Communities (Zwiazek Kongregacji Wyznania Mojzeszowego), or Kehilla, and the secular Jewish Socio-Cultural Society (Towarsztwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydowskie), or Ferband, are the two leading communal organizations and these, together with other Jewish groups, are linked by membership in the KKOZRP, which acts as a roof organization. There is a Jewish primary school in Warsaw maintained by the Lauder Foundation, which has been active in rehabilitating Jewish life in Poland, especially through youth projects. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is also active in Poland, particularly in social welfare. The leading Jewish publications are the monthly Midrasz, Dos Jidische Wort, Jidele for youth and Sztendlach for primary school children. Significantly, all of these publications appear in Polish, except for Dos Jidische Wort which is published in a bi-lingual Yiddish-Polish edition.

Important institutions are the Jewish Historical Institute, with its revamped museum, the E.R. Kaminska State Yiddish Theater in Warsaw and the Jewish Cultural Center in Krakow. There are centers for Jewish studies in Warsaw University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

The restitution of Jewish communal property continues, but very slowly. In the meantime, legislation has yet to be enacted addressing the issue of private property. In 2005, at the prompting of the World Jewish Congress and a Landsmanschaft (group from the same town), public latrines erected on the site of a Jewish cemetery in Szczelociny were finally removed. Also in 2005, a memorial designed by the Polish-Jewish architect Czeslaw Bielecki at the Radegest station, from which Lodz Jews were deported to their death, was unveiled.

The design of Finnish architect Rainer Mahlamaeki was chosen for the new Museum of the History of Polish Jewry in Warsaw. The land on which the museum is to be built was donated by the city of Warsaw, which also gave $13 million to the project. The Polish government contributed another $13 million.

There is heightened awareness of Poland’s rich Jewish past and the tragedy that befell most Polish Jews. In 2005 the first issue of the journal Zaglada, published by a special section of the Polish Academy of Science and devoted to the Holocaust, made its appearance. In recent years there has been a spate of other publications on the same subject; especially noteworthy are works of the Institute of National Memory.

 

Parliamentary organizations and extra-parliamentary groups

The 2005 Elections

The parliamentary and presidential elections held on 25 September 2005 radically changed the political map in Poland. Notably, it increased the influence of the antisemitic, Catholic nationalist Radio Maryja, together with its associated TV and print media, as well as its founder Father Tadeusz Rydzyk. Their support for the right-wing conservative Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc − PiS) and its presidential candidate Lech Kaczynski was a major factor in their dual electoral victory. The far right antisemitic League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin − LPR) and the nationalist populist Self-Defense (Samoobrona) party joined forces in an informal coalition backing the Law and Justice government.

The LPR, led by Roman Giertych, polled only 8 percent of the vote, after losing the support of Radio Maryja to the PiS. In the second half of 2005 PiS appropriated the Catholic fundamentalist and nationalist ideology of the LPR, and Radio Maryja became the main medium for the promotion of Law and Justice policy. It should be noted that in the 1990s Jaroslaw Kaczynski (who is widely believed to be the PiS’s real leader) was a vocal critic of Radio Maryja and of the nationalist fundamentalist tendency. His strategic U-turn and the adoption of this ideology may be seen as political opportunism. Samoobrona, headed by Andrzej Lepper, received 10 percent of the vote.

New Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz from the PiS, as well as his top cabinet ministers, frequently traveled to Radio Maryja’s headquarters in Torun, in order to take part in marathon live broadcasts. and express support for the controversial radio station. The government even promised to build a new motorway from Warsaw to Torun for the convenience of the station’s bosses and the state lottery announced it would co-finance Radio Maryja’s private university.

This intimacy between the country’s leadership and extremists is without precedent in Poland. Meanwhile, Radio Maryja continued to promote antisemitic views, including denial of the facts of the Jedwabne pogrom in 1941.

Although President Lech Kaczynski claims he is not a nationalist, in an interview with the weekly Polityka, he stated “I believe in the need for cooperation with people of national Catholic views in one political party.” While the president’s circle includes some moderates, nationalist activists in the ruling party include Parliamentary Speaker Marek Jurek. Known for years for his Catholic fundamentalist views, Jurek made a much publicized trip to London in 1998 to meet his hero, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, while the latter was under arrest in Britain.

Jurek’s traveling companion was Michal Kaminski, whose political record includes mobilizing the local population of Jedwabne in northeast Poland in 2001 against commemoration of the wartime pogrom there. Kaminski, now a PiS MEP, is on record as declaring his allegiance to the infamous slogan “Poland for the Polish,” which invokes memories of the antisemitic violence of the 1920s and 1930s. In the early 1990s Kaminski was a member of the neo-fascist National Rebirth of Poland (see below; now part of Roberto Fiore’s European National Front). Kaminski was among Kaczynski’s main campaign advisers.

Another PiS activist is MEP Marcin Libicki, until recently a leading member of the National Right (PN), the official sister organization of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France. In the 1990s Libicki was a member of the board of Prawica Narodowa (National Right) magazine, which published, inter alia, Holocaust-denying texts written by the late Belgian collaborator General Leon Degrelle. In March 2001 Libicki supported the release, on ‘humanitarian grounds’, of Henryk Mania, who was convicted by a Polish court of participation in killing Jews at the Chelmno death camp.

In 2005 Libicki launched a campaign to force the Polish public prosecutor to take legal action against the website of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles for alleged ‘anti-Polish’ content in its presentation of WWII history.

A leading MP elected on the Samoobrona ticket is Mateusz Piskorski, a 28-year old graduate of Szczecin University, active in radical neo-fascist circles since the mid-1990s as an editor and publisher of several ultra-nationalist and racist magazines (such as Odala), which espouse open admiration for Adolf Hitler as well as crude Holocaust denial. Piskorski is also linked to Tomasz Szczepanski’s neo-pagan nationalist association Niklot, which is active among skinheads and in the ‘blackmetal’ subculture. In 2005 he emerged as the party’s main spokesman on international affairs and has strong links to the extremist Moscow-based Eurasian Movement, led by Alexander Dugin. In December 2005 Piskorski traveled to Transnistria on the territory of Moldova to demonstrate his support for the regime of the self-declared republic ruled by a pro-Russian dictatorship of Russian nationalists. He also participated in various events organized by the extremist Belgian PCN (Parti Communautaire National-européen) and by the conspiracy-minded international group Voltaire Network, which claims the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks were organized by the CIA and the Mossad.

Another extremist who resurfaced in 2005 is Jaroslaw Tomasiewcz, a veteran activist who promotes various ‘national-revolutionary’ movements as well as the New Right ideology of Alain De Benoit. Tomasiewicz became a political consultant for the Sobieski Institute, a think-tank connected to Law and Justice. He also remains a leading contributor to the right-wing anti-globalization magazine Obywatel (The Citizen), edited by Remigiusz Okraska. This publication has repeatedly been criticized for providing a platform for extremist views, such as those of Horst Mahler, former member of the terrorist Red Army Faction (RAF), turned neo-Nazi activist, in Germany.

The government’s new orientation found immediate expression in the prohibition and subsequent violent dispersal of an anti-discrimination march in Poznan on 19 November. Seventy-five people were held for taking part in the ‘unlawful demonstration’ and right-wing politicians and the Catholic Church accused the organizers of the march of promoting gay rights. The following week a wave of protests and solidarity demonstrations swept throughout numerous Polish cities, led by a broad coalition of anti-fascists, human rights supporters, intellectuals, artists and various political groups voicing their resistance to new government policy, especially the banning of demonstrations. In cities such as Elblag, demonstrators were violently confronted by skinheads and football hooligans, some belonging to the antisemitic National Rebirth of Poland and LPR’s youth wing, All-Polish Youth.

The All-Polish Youth (MW) is a radical nationalist organization, which continues the tradition of the violent, antisemitic youth organization of the same name which was active in the 1920s and 1930s. In January Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s largest newspaper, reported that antisemitic books, such as Henry Ford’s The International Jew, were being used by the MW to indoctrinate its members. Also in January, LPR and MW members were observed singing antisemitic songs and shouting “Heil Hitler” on a train while on their way to the LPR national congress. In October, Roman Giertych, leader of the LPR and the MW, became chairman of the parliamentary committee on special services.

 

Extra-parliamentary Groups

The antisemitic National Rebirth of Poland (Narodowe Odrodzenie Polski – NOP), lost much of its influence in 2005 but is still active among skinheads and football hooligans. It retains strong links to the international neo-fascist movement through its participation in the European National Front, a federation of extreme right groups from several countries.

The National Radical Camp (Oboz Narodowo-Radykalny − ONR), another skinhead organization, grew rapidly in 2005. Among other activities, it attracted publicity in June due to its ‘march on Myslenice’, an antisemitic demonstration in a small town in the south of Poland, on the anniversary of a pogrom against Jewish shopkeepers by extreme nationalists in 1936.

The Polish National Party (Polska Partia Narodowa − PPN) is a radical antisemitic organization led by the racist publisher Leszek Bubel (see, for example, ASW 2004). In 2005 it absorbed some young ex-members of the MW disillusioned with the latter’s parliamentary course.

 

ANTISEMITIC ACTIVITies

The level of antisemitism remained relatively high despite the small number of Jews living in Poland. The non-governmental anti-racist Never Again Association registered about 120 incidents in 2005; a few were anti-Roma but most were antisemitic, especially verbal attacks. For example, on 14 November a group of youths insulted Jewish visitors to the site of Majdanek death camp. It was also reported that a group of local residents protesting a proposed monument at the grave of the famous 18th century Rabbi Akiba Eger in Poznan, shouted “Jews cannot tell us what to do,” and “This is a Catholic land and we don’t want a Jewish cemetery here” (Gazeta Wyborcza, 14 Nov.). Also in November, ONR skinheads marched through Czestochowa chanting “This is Poland, not Israel.”

Crude antisemitism can still be observed on the Internet, such as the increasingly popular website of the Polish section of the neo-Nazi-skinhead Blood and Honour movement, and at football matches, where football fans routinely call each other ‘Jews’ as a term of abuse.

            In a speech to trade union leaders in Gdansk on 14 August, on the 25th anniversary of the anti-communist Solidarity Movement, Father Henryk Jankowski, notorious for his antisemitic rhetoric, said “anti-Catholic Masons, Jewish bankers and hell-born atheist socialists” are imposing their agenda on the laws of Poland.

 

responses to racism and antisemitism

Responses to racism and antisemitism come mostly from civil organizations. For example, the Polish Football Association has begun removing racist symbols from stadiums following publication of a manual for football officials produced jointly with the Never Again Association. On the official level, condemnation of antisemitism is rarely followed by effective political and legal measures, as demonstrated by the continuing distribution of antisemitic material by the state owned company Ruch (including the publications of Leszek Bubel and the NOP).

On 23 February former president and Nobel Prize Laureate Lech Walesa wrote an open letter to the bishops and faithful of the Catholic Church accusing Radio Maryja of inciting antisemitism and demanding cancellation of their license. Archbishop Slawoj Leszek Glodz, head of the church Mass Media Council, replied that Walesa was emotional and that the station was merely dealing with social and political issues.

The Never Again Association monitors racism and antisemitism and publishes a journal Never Again (Nigdy Wiecej). It also runs anti-racist educational campaigns, cooperating, among others, with the Polish Football Association and the Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) network. Together with the International Network Against Cyber Hate (INACH), it launched an initiative to combat racist and antisemitic content on the Internet.