Warsaw, Poland - Poland's Progressive Jews will install their first resident rabbi since the Nazi German invasion in 1939, as part of a revival in the country that before World War II had Europe's biggest Jewish population.
Burt Schuman, a native New Yorker who moved to Warsaw from Altoona, Pennsylvania, will take over tonight as the leader of Beit Warszawa, a group whose Progressive tradition is similar to Reform Judaism in the U.S., he said in an interview.
The group believes ``there's no contradiction between living the Jewish life and embracing the general culture'' and is trying to help improve Polish-Jewish relations, Schuman said.
About 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Others emigrated after the war and during an anti-Semitic campaign supported by the communists in 1968. Israel's Foreign Ministry this year criticized the presence of the conservative Catholic Polish Families' League in the current governing coalition, saying the party has an ``anti-Semitic ideology.''
There are 20,000 to 30,000 Jews left in Poland today, with 2,500 in the official Orthodox community, the U.S. State Department says. Schuman said that contrary to the image in popular culture, pre-war Poland's Progressive Jews, Zionists and Socialists outnumbered the Orthodox in many communities.
Beit Warszawa was founded in 1999 by Polish and American Jews who wanted to practice their religion ``in a more liberal way than that offered by the only other Jewish spiritual center in Warsaw, the Orthodox Synagogue,'' according to its brochure.
Changing Image
``North Americans need to disabuse themselves of this `Fiddler on the Roof' image of Jews in Poland,'' Schuman, 58, said by telephone yesterday. ``It's not true. A lot of the people who celebrated the life of the shtetl -- the writers, the musicians -- went to cafes on Friday nights, not to the synagogue.''
More than 90 percent of Poles are baptized Catholics. The Polish Families' League may be an exception in Polish politics when it comes to attitudes to other religions.
The country's biggest parties ``work very hard'' to build good relations with the country's Jews, Schuman said. Poles and Jews are ``two very proud peoples'' who often ``just talk past each other,'' he said.
``We need to create climates where people feel each other's pasts, and feel each other's pain, rather than talking about who's the bigger victim,'' Schuman said.
About 3 million Poles were also killed in World War II, which ended with an occupation by Josef Stalin's Soviet Union that led to five decades of communist rule.
Last month Germany's Jewish community ordained three rabbis, the first since 1942.