New foundation to aid Jewish restitution claims
Ronald S. Lauder is chairing a newly registered foundation here that will put in place resources to help the Polish Jewish community reclaim communal property seized in the previous half century.
The eight existing Polish Jewish religious congregations have filed an estimated 500 claims to schools, synagogues, cemeteries and other communal properties of prewar Jewish religious groups.
This has proven slow going, however, partly because of the scarcity of resources with which to collect information needed to document claims for property owned by Polish Jewish religious groups in thousands of communities across Poland.
Jews comprised about 10% of the population of Poland before World War II, more than 3 million people. About 300,000 survived the Holocaust but many left Poland either immediately or as a result of anti-Semitic purges under the postwar communist regime. Today, there are an estimated 30,000-80,000 Polish Jews living here.
Many began to acknowledge their heritage only after the collapse of communism. Others are just now learning that they are Jewish, having been reared in Catholic families when their parents died or fled during the war. And some now defining themselves as Jewish are not necessarily religious.
They may have minimal contact with the Jewish congregations operating in Wroclaw, Warsaw (which also includes the Gdansk congregation), Bielsko-Biala, Legnica, Lodz, Szczecin, Katowice and Krakow or with the several smaller religious affiliates in a handful of cities such as Lublin.
Under the 1997 law on restitution of Jewish communal property, claims can only be filed by Jewish religious congregations here. There is a 2002 deadline for filing claims.
This is a complex process legally as well as politically, since in many cases the property seized by the communists has been used since the war by one part of the Polish government or another.
"This is a foundation that has been in the making for about three years, to work to preserve Jewish culture and memory here in Poland," said an individual close to the foundation. It is backed by "the local Jewish community together with Polish Jews who no longer live here, (and stands) for the restoration of Jewish communal property to the Jewish community."
Wrangling on which groups should participate consumed nearly 18 months of time with the clock ticking.
The overriding goal remains "to bring together the expertise of the international Jewish community with the legal standing and knowledge of the local Jewish communities," said a diplomat monitoring the process. "The foundation can form a database, decide which former communal properties they really want to go for and then file the claims before the deadline."
There are 2,000-6,000 onetime communal properties under scrutiny.
Lauder's attorney, Charles Goldstein of New York, has been spending much time in Poland spearheading the birth of the foundation. A first board meeting was held in early November and a second is slated for next month. No one has yet been named director but Goldstein is working on renting office space and doing the initial hiring.
In addition to Lauder, five members of the foundation are Polish Jews living here, while another five are from the world Jewish community. They are: Polish-born Hassidic Rabbi Chaskel Besser; Kalman Sultanek of the World Jewish Congress; Saul Kagan of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany; Herbert Block from the Joint Distribution Committee; and Aryeh Edilist of Israel from the World Jewish Restitution organization. Those from Poland include Jerzy Kichler of Wroclaw, head of the Union of Jewish Congregations; Andrzej Zozula and Piotr Kadlcik from Warsaw, also with the Union; Tadeusz Jakublowicz, head of the Jewish community in Krakow; and Zofia Radzikowska of Krakow.
The Polish government has also enacted laws giving other religious groups the right to get prewar property back.
The Lutherans, the largest Protestant group with a nationwide presence in Poland, filed 1,200 claims before the deadline of mid-1993. Many reclaimed properties are in the parts of Poland that had been German and heavily Lutheran before the war.
This has brought the Lutherans new financial challenges as well. One large building reclaimed in Bielsko-Biala had been converted into a residence for the elderly. The Lutherans got responsibility for the old folks when they got the building back. Now they are fundraising in small and large Lutheran churches across Poland to help finance the operations of the home as well as those of other properties.
The Catholic Church was the first to win property-restitution rights under a 1991 law. Tens of thousands of schools, orphanages, hospitals and other properties taken by the communists are now back in the hands of a variety of Catholic institutions.
In some cases, this is providing a new economic base for the church. In one example, an order of nuns won restitution of a former government hospital on ulica Emilii Plater, which in recent decades had provided medical care to government elites. The nuns severed the relationship with the Health Ministry and contracted with Dr. Jerzy Jedrzejak's JNJ health association. JNJ is paying far higher rent to the nuns than the government had, and has also embarked on a $30 million rebuilding and modernization project of the downtown hospital facility.
