Abstract: At least twenty thousand Jews live in Poland. The two leading organizations, the Union of Jewish Communities and the Cultural and Social Association of Jews, each have about two thousand members.
The subject of Jews and Poland involves three interrelated matters. The first concerns what is currently happening to the Jews living in Poland. The second is Poland’s Jewish heritage, including its physical remnants: cemeteries, synagogues, communal and private property. The third has to do with the nature of Polish- Jewish relations.
Poland is still in a major state of flux. Since 1989, official Poland has wanted to reexamine its relations with the Jews. The main reasons for this are the teachings of Pope John Paul II, Poland’s admiration for the United States, and the rejection among the younger generation of everything their parents and grandparents stood for.
Although the main government force, the Law and Justice Party, is not anti- Semitic, the coalition now contains an anti-Semitic party, the Polish Families League, whose leader, Roman Giertych, is deputy prime minister and minister of education. This poses many dilemmas for the Jewish community, and Israel is boycotting Giertych.
Abstract: It is unusual to find the words “revival” and “British Jewry” in the same sentence. Several decades ago, the title of this paper would have come as a surprise to the many critics of British Jewry. For example, in 1989, Professor Daniel Elazar observed that “the powers that be in British Jewry are content with the status quo and do not seek change.” Author Steven Brook (1990) scathingly remarked that the leadership of British Jewry “revels in its mediocrity, shallowness and philistinism.” And, in 1996, in the conclusion of his study, entitled Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews of Europe Since 1945, Professor Bernard Wasserstein stated that the Jews of Britain are “slowly but surely … fading away. Soon nothing will be left but a disembodied memory.”
The current claim that a revival of British Jewry has taken place is supported mainly by the excellent work of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) in London. The JPR has carried out an important analysis of the UK national census data of 2011 and supplemented it with its own more recent community studies, in particular, its 2013 National Jewish Community Survey (NJCS) and its 2016 Jewish Schools report. To be sure, as with all sociological studies, particularly concerning Jews, there are less encouraging data that emphasize the challenges, failures and threats that confront the British Jewish community.
This essay, however, argues that the vibrancy of a community should not be judged by the threats that it faces. While threats and danger form an existential part of Jewish life, they do not necessarily determine the strength or weakness of a particular community. It is important that a community understands the nature of such threats and can organize to overcome them successfully. In doing so, the Jewish community in the U.K. provides evidence that it is vibrant and undergoing a revival. This study focuses on four aspects that show the revival of British Jewish life: demography; religious identity; educational and cultural activity; and confronting antisemitism.
