Rabbi encourages reform group to work within community
Last weekend and the first weekend in October are High Holy Days in the Jewish religion. For the first time in Warsaw, there are services in English as well as Polish at two separate venues.
Services at the Orthodox Nozyk Synagogue were to be conducted by Rabbi Michael Schudrich, who returned here early last summer under a year's contract with the Warsaw Jewish Community.
Schudrich had spent nearly a decade in Poland organizing activities for the Ronald Lauder Foundation. These included summer camps for teenagers and adults, the creation of Jewish schools and support activities for the thousands of Poles who are discovering late in life that they are Polish Jews, not Catholics, and had been adopted after their birth parents disappeared or died in the Holocaust.
When Schudrich went back to New York in 1998, Jonah Brookstein took over the Lauder Foundation here. At the synagogue, two different rabbis were brought in with fair to disastrous results.
Last spring, the Warsaw Jewish Community persuaded Schudrich to come back to take a part-time position as rabbi for the next year, nurturing the small but growing Polish Jewish community.
Meanwhile, a Jewish reform group was created by expatriate business executives with Polish Jewish colleagues. They have been holding Friday night meetings since early this summer and in August launched a search for a U.S. rabbi to conduct their Jewish New Year's services. They chose Cynthia Culpeper, an ordained conservative rabbi who leads a synagogue in Birmingham, Alabama.
For much of the outside world, this is startling news two different Jewish religious groups in Warsaw a half century after the Nazis wiped out one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the world. Warsaw's population was more than 30% Jewish before World War II, part of a Polish population of 3 million Jews.
The idea of a Polish Jewish religious community taking root again in Poland runs counter to Western stereotypes.
Few Westerners realize how many expatriate Jews have come to Poland to do business since 1990, especially from the United States, U.K. and Israel. Many have found their footing here in terms of doing business and in finding a comfortable life with minimal hassle let alone an absence, for the most part, of outright anti-semitism.
Miller, Canfield attorney Michael Traison said he frequently feels more comfortable in Warsaw than in Detroit. He said far more Polish than Michigan colleagues are able to speak knowledgeably about upcoming Jewish religious holidays.
The cross-fertilization of expatriate Jews and some Polish Jews underlies the creation of the new reform group, Beit Warszawa (Jewish Home of Warsaw).
Krzysztof Kulig, a headhunter at Heidrick & Struggles, called the Nozyk Synagogue "outstanding," but said many Jews prefer to practice a more liberal tradition, whether conservative, reformed or reconstructionist. He said this is true for some Polish Jews who are exploring their Jewish heritage for the first time "and who find the strict Orthodox practices such as the separation of men and women in the synagogue difficult to accept."
Another founder, medical publisher Jonathon Mills, who has been in Poland since 1991, said they had no intention of taking away from the Nozyk Synagogue its "historic place" in Warsaw but want to offer a choice to people. "Orthodox Judaism is too much for some of them to deal with ... It is not right for everybody. Nothing can be right for everybody," Mills said.
Mills, Kulig and an American in the energy sector, Clifford J. Aron, are among the eight expatriates who started the reform group, with about 20 Polish Jews, and who led the search for a rabbi to fly in for the holiday services.
These are being held at the Stara Prochownia Theater on ulica Bolesc, with services to be conducted in English, Polish and Hebrew. The model is one created several years ago in Prague, where women and men participate equally in all religious observances and there is a focus on education with explanations about the service as it unfolds, Kulig said.
He said the creation of a Jewish reform group is one more sign of a "resurgence of the Jewish community here." On one level, Schudrich agrees: "I welcome any kind of new Jewish activity."
But he urged the expatriates who are starting Beit Warszawa to work within the existing Warsaw Jewish Community and not start a separate group.
"This community has been battered enough by all kinds of external problems and we need to find ways to rebuild a community that basically had been left for dead," Schudrich said.
There were not many expatriates who came to Orthodox services in the past and consequently minimal pressure for services in English. He looked at the New Year services as a small step toward changing that.
Schudrich said there were many forms of Orthodox Judaism and it is up to the Warsaw community to shape one that fits here. He said he would help in that search.
Asked about the role of women, and whether Orthodox Judaism offers any models where women and men have an equal role, he said "there is a big difference between an equal role and feeling comfortable."
The Warsaw Jewish Community has several hundred members and there are 10 times that number of Polish Jews in Warsaw for whom the major question is not whether to affiliate with an Orthodox or reform community but "do I want to be Jewish at all?" Schudrich said. "That is the real gut issue."
"If you are talking about a community that has been devastated for so long, the first question is 'do I belong to them at all?' Next is 'do I fit in the spectrum' of what is being offered?" he said.
Schudrich said he talked with Rabbi Culpepper while both were in the United States and he expects to talk to her while she is in Poland. He also wants to continue talking to the expatriates at Beit Warszawa.
"I've basically given them a challenge: come and let's see what we can do ... I'm here now and I hope we can sit down and talk. It doesn't mean we're going to agree but at least we should talk about it."
