'Prozna Project' revives memories of a lost era
It took four years but Menachem Rosensaft ultimately worked out all the legal niceties to enable Ronald Lauder to go forward soon with the development of the "Prozna Project."
That is the shorthand name for the planned renovation of portions of ulica Prozna, once a center of Polish-Jewish cultural life and business in prewar Warsaw. The block was one of the few left partly intact after the saturation Nazi bombing of Warsaw in 1944. It also had been spared total destruction a year earlier when the Nazis eliminated the Jewish ghetto they had created ulica Prozna was just outside the Nazi-decreed ghetto prison.
The World Monument Fund, which Lauder chairs, includes Prozna on its list of the 100 most endangered sites. "The Jewish intelligentsia was as prominent in Warsaw as in Berlin or Vienna," says Marie-Monique Steckel, who took over management of the project from Rosensaft this summer. "This should show the first-hand experience of 19th century Jewish life the grandeur of Jewish life; and the struggle for integration," she said.
Four buildings on the block, which were damaged but not destroyed during the war, have been targeted for varying degrees of renovation under the Lauder project. Lauder's emissary Rosensaft bought the first two buildings in 1996 from the original owner. That was deceptively easy compared to the politically induced slowdowns in subsequent years during negotiations to buy the two other buildings which ultimately took place in public tenders from the city in 1997-1998. And then there were two more years of jumping through bureaucratic hoops to get building permits, and fending off thinly disguised attempts at shakedowns. He worked closely with the top-rated local Wardynski law firm. "Menachem got all the permits through blood, sweat and tears," Steckel said.
Prozna 7 has been empty; Prozna 9 had three families living in it. Those two buildings will be renovated inside and out and Prozna 9 will become a site of multiple public activities. The two other buildings, Prozna 12 and 14, were once the homes of prosperous Polish Jews. Now they are occupied by 83 families (a microcosm of what happened to most onetime single-family homes under the socialist housing relocations). The Lauder project will focus on these buildings' exteriors, including expansion of the courtyards, but the existing families will stay put.
Prozna 9 was built in 1882 by the architect who had designed the nearby Great Synagogue which, as the war neared an end, Hitler ordered destroyed as final proof that the Jews had themselves been destroyed. The onetime synagogue site is now Plac Bankowy, home to a skyscraper. The Jewish Historical Institute, which rescued many priceless religious objects from the synagogue, is next door.
"Prozna 9 was built as a state-of-the-art building. And it soon became clear that if we were going to restore it, it was too historic for rentals. So we made it into a public space," Rosensaft said.
The Prozna 7 and 9 buildings will be renovated, inside and out, and will include a kosher pizzeria and a multi-language bookstore that, at the least, will have books in Polish, English and Hebrew "and it's probably worth the effort to include some in German and in Russian and, if we can, also in French and Yiddish," Steckel said. A French-born American and an international telecommunications specialist, she originally worked with Lauder on his Central European media ventures in Prague. She jumped at the chance to take on the next stage of the Prozna project.
This will greatly enlarge the city's basic resource centers that could shed light on prewar Polish-Jewish residents "for a Jewish kid coming here for the March of the Living or for a Polish university student," Rosensaft said. The basement of Prozna 9 will be a multi-visual mecca, Steckel and Rosensaft said. "Memory is through experience not just in books, but memory is shared experience. It is experiential and visual and not just through the brain," Steckel said. Some of the "memory" to be shared may come from prewar residents of Prozna 9 tracked down in the United States, she added.
In addition, the Lauder team is working with Dr. Eleonara Bergmann, a historian at the Jewish Historical Institute, on gathering pertinent "period" material for the exhibits.
Steckel and Rosensaft said the Prozna project would not compete with a proposed museum planned for a city-donated site near the Ghetto Uprising monument, which would show 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland. "This would be complementary," they said. "This would be a slice of that prewar life, a specific place." They met with the museum project's current director, Jerzy Halberstadt, while they were in Warsaw.
While Steckel is a newcomer to Poland, Rosensaft has roots here. His father was from the town of Bedzin, near Katowice. In 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz, "but took a dive out the train window. He was shot three times, in the head and in the hand. A Polish woman bandaged him up and he made his way back to the ghetto in Bedzin."
He was deported a second time to Auschwitz. "And he escaped again and was hidden again by a non-Jewish woman. And he was captured again and this time was put in block No. 7, the torture cell." He ultimately was liberated from a concentration camp in Germany.
After the war, the Rosensaft family left Germany and lived eight years in Switzerland, then moved to the United States when Menachem was 10 years old. He became an international lawyer and worked 15 years for Chase Manhattan.
Rosensaft knows very well the complexities of Polish anti-Semitism. When his mother was in a displaced persons camp, "she talked to an emissary of Pope Pius XII about what good he could do for them if he would issue an edict to give up the children," referring to the children of Jews who had been given to Catholic families by fleeing Jewish parents. "It was never done. Baptizing those kids was an act of faith," Rosensaft said.
