A Chosen Few (40 page)

World Jewry ignored Marek Edelman’s plea, and the government was able to bring more rabbis to Warsaw than had been seen there since the war. The fact that none of these visiting Jews would participate in the unofficial ceremony to which they were also all invited left Gebert with a lingering bitterness. It was the logic of the time. When you are visiting a Communist dictatorship, you do not publicly participate in dissident activities—not if you ever want to come back. The result was that instead of having a rabbi to say the prayer for the dead, Gebert’s group had to use a Catholic priest.

The day after the Umschlagplatz ceremony, Gebert and some of his group participated in a small private memorial over a ghetto hero’s grave in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery. This was not a large Solidarity show but was planned for a few local people. As the group was arriving at the cemetery, the official Jewish Community, which was sponsored and controlled by the regime, had the solid steel gates to the cemetery closed. Unable even to see past the rusting metal, they laid their wreaths on the gate. There were not even ten Jewish men, a minion, to say Kaddish for the dead. Some of the foreign Jews came to the cemetery in tour cars driven by Orbis, the state travel agency, and shot photos without getting out of their cars. Gebert tried to see their faces through the closed windows of the air-conditioned cars, and for the first time he did not feel proud to be a Jew.

N
INEL
K
AMERAZ AND HER HUSBAND
were part of a small group of Solidarity supporters who produced pamphlets and books on taboo subjects, often contradicting official versions of history. Printed on a hand press, each sheet of four pages had to be placed in the press, printed, and then lifted off. It was a common process in the Solidarity movement. Gebert’s overfed black and white cat
was named Offset after the piece of equipment they could only dream of getting.

The pages had to be collated and stapled and then clandestinely handed out by the thousands. To Ninel, it was a fight against the system that had broken her family. “Jews would come and say to me, why are you involved in all this? Why do you have to fight this? There are no Jews. Why is this your business? This was my business because Communism destroyed so many Jews. It was terrible in my own family. It was my business, and I’m glad I did it.”

In 1983, Jaruzelski allowed Warsaw’s one remaining synagogue—the spacious, decorative turn-of-the-century Nozyk Synagogue, which had survived the war by serving as a stable for German horses—to be reopened. Ninel started going to services for major Jewish holidays. A hard core of a half-dozen elderly Yiddish speakers formed the beginning of a minyan. One of them, Moishe Shapiro, approached Ninel and asked if she wanted her two sons to learn Hebrew.

Ninel had already come to the conclusion that she would never be able to adapt to a Jewish way of life. It was too alien after two generations of Communism. The one thing she could do was pass Judaism on to her sons. “But there was nothing Jewish around. It was up to me. This was my responsibility,” she said. “For me, the most important thing is that my children know that they are Jews. What they do with it, that is their business. But they have to know, and then they will have to choose.”

Lukasz was already 13 and Mateusz was 11 — Luke and Matthew. Mateusz immediately loved the idea, but Lukasz was not interested in religion. His mother decided he had no choice: They both had to study Hebrew for one year. “How can you say you don’t want it when you don’t know anything about it?” she argued. After a year of study Lukasz was still certain that he didn’t want it. But Mateusz continued. He had spent his childhood delivering his parents’ underground literature through the Warsaw streets—“between the tanks,” he liked to say. He had grown up with the idea that Poland was his country and that it was his responsibility to make it a country that still had Jews.

Mateusz asked Ninel if he could have a bar mitzvah. It was what she had wanted, but having never in her life done anything religious, she had felt she could not talk about it. “I didn’t feel I could dare to tell him to do it. But if he came to me and said I want a bar mitzvah—it gave me such happiness.”

A bar mitzvah marks the moment, on the thirteenth birthday,
when a male takes responsibility in the religious practices of a community. He now wraps
tefillin
on weekday mornings, is counted in a minyan, and can be called up on Saturday morning for Torah reading. In traditional Jewish life, as it was practiced in Poland before the war and as it still is in Antwerp and on Rue Pavée, all of these functions are a normal part of daily life. The bar mitzvah is the first time in which he is called up to read Torah—presumably the first of many times. But in assimilated communities since the war, the bar mitzvah, rather than being a beginning, is the singular moment, often the only time in his life that the bar mitzvah boy will go up and read in a synagogue. For this reason, assimilated Westerners have approached bar mitzvahs with ever greater fanfare. Central European communities, many of which had not seen a bar mitzvah in decades, saw bar mitzvahs as nothing less than a reaffirmation of the existence of Judaism.

Ninel was secretly afraid the entire thing would be an embarrassment. Did Mateusz really know how to read Hebrew? It was difficult for her to imagine Mateusz standing on a
bimah
reading in Hebrew. No one she had ever known in her family had ever done anything like that. But in fact Mateusz had learned Hebrew and gave a well-studied delivery to a synagogue filled with the people he had invited. Praying in a full synagogue stirred many memories for the few elderly survivors, and they wept. Mateusz’s bar mitzvah—the first Poland had seen since the 1950s—received international press coverage. For months afterward, Ninel and Mateusz were interviewed on foreign television. A few years later, when she visited Israel, people recognized her on the streets from television interviews about her son’s bar mitzvah. But her best memory from Israel was learning that Ninel is not only
Lenin
spelled backward but that in Hebrew
Nin El
means “great-granddaughter of God.”

“Finally,” she said, “the hunchback fell away.”

A
MONG THE MANY
foreign rabbis who arrived in Poland to help the struggling Polish Jews, none came as a greater shock than Emily Korzenik. She was a feminist-turned-rabbi in Stamford, Connecticut, where she particularly delighted in weddings and bar mitzvahs because they symbolized the continuation of Judaism. “A bar mitzvah,” she said, “is a celebration of the continuity of the Jewish people.”

Several members of her congregation were part of a tour of
Poland and Israel. Such tours were a growing phenomenon. A group would be taken to Poland, where they would visit cemeteries and concentration camps, and then go on to Israel to see “Jewish life.” In Cracow they visited a Jewish canteen where the elderly remnant of a once-major community gathered for lunch. The canteen was run by a woman in her late seventies, the youngest person there. The group asked her if there was anything she needed from America, and she replied, “Bring us life.” She told the story of her nephew who had been taken away and killed by the Nazis while preparing for his bar mitzvah.

When Emily Korzenik heard this story, she decided that she would bring these people a bar mitzvah. Not that she would train a Cracow boy. Rather, she would choose among the boys in Connecticut whom she was preparing. She picked a handsome blond of Polish Jewish origin. Korzenik thought it would be a wonderful thing for the people of Cracow to have his bar mitzvah in their synagogue.

Two Cracow synagogues had been reopened after the war, and until 1968 they both offered daily services. The more famous was the Remuh, named after a sixteenth-century Talmudic scholar whose work is still regarded by the ultra-Orthodox as defining precepts for their way of life. Every year on the anniversary of his death, the Orthodox had made a pilgrimage to his nearby grave. When the regime would let them, ultra-Orthodox from New York took up the practice again. With the help of such visitors, the Remuh Synagogue was able to get a minyan.

The other Cracow synagogue was the Templum, which had been liberal. Before the war, there had been a reform movement in Polish Judaism, but the few surviving Jews in Cracow had no memory of this. Although they could not keep kosher or maintain most Orthodox practices, they felt attached to orthodoxy, thinking of it as the genuine thing. “It’s a paradox,” said Henryk Halkowski, a Cracow Jew. “We have only Orthodox synagogues now, but almost no Orthodox Jews.”

Too large to fill, the Templum was used only on rare occasions. None of the locals objected when the New York Orthodox built a
mikveh
next to it, even though liberal synagogues do not use
mikvehs
. There were no liberals left. No one in Cracow had used a
mikveh
since before the war. The New York Jews would bathe in the
mikveh
to purify themselves before making a pilgrimage to the cemetery at the Remuh. Word spread among Poles that these Jews
could not refuse a panhandler once they had been to the
mikveh
. They were in a purified state, and if they rejected a beggar they would have to go back to the
mikveh
and bathe again before going to the cemetery. Believing this, the Poles would line up to greet the Orthodox as they left the
mikveh
.

Emily Korzenik arrived in Cracow without speaking a word of Polish or Yiddish. But she had an entourage of translators. Also with her was an NBC television crew, a documentary film crew, and a photographer from
People
magazine. The elderly woman who had said “Bring us life” had not said anything about bringing press coverage, and she gazed uncertainly at these Americans. Not knowing what else to do, she invited them to lunch. Korzenik looked at the well-kept little Remuh and at the larger Templum, where the walls were rotting and old papers were stacked along the walls, and decided that she liked the Orthodox synagogue better. “It seemed like the most cleaned up,” she said.

Czeslaw Jakubowicz, a white-haired man with a sturdy broad-featured face, was the president of the handful of people that was the Cracow Jewish Community. He was the old-timer who hadn’t left. He had not stayed out of principle, however. In 1956, when large numbers of Cracow Jews were leaving, he decided that he would emigrate to Antwerp with the remainder of his family. They already had relatives there. But Jakubowicz’s family did not understand the rules of this game, and so instead of lying and saying they were going to Israel, they applied to emigrate to Belgium. Permission was denied. During the 1968 purge he again missed the open door because his uncle, the president of the Community, was arrested, and by the time he was released five months later, the government had stopped offering the visas.

Jakubowicz stayed on to become the president of the few dozen remaining people. At most there were 250 people in Cracow who would call themselves Jewish, and the majority of them were not active. At his lonely post Jakubowicz received word that Americans wanted to do a bar mitzvah in the Remuh with a woman rabbi. He could barely remember the last Cracow bar mitzvah—in the early 1950s, in the Templum. But who was this woman who said she was a rabbi? “There was never such a thing in Poland. It was not Polish tradition. Can you imagine a woman priest?” he said. Women pray in a separate space, they are not allowed to do the Torah reading, and they do not wear prayer shawls. How can a woman be a rabbi? Troubled by this, he contacted a Bobover Hasidic rabbi who was
visiting Poland and told him that an American woman rabbi wanted to bar mitzvah an American boy in the Remuh. The Bobover rabbi called New York, the home of an Orthodox rabbi named Nacham Elbaum. Elbaum was eating a bowl of soup when he received the news of a woman rabbi in the Remuh. He put down his spoon and ran for a taxi to Newark Airport for a flight to Warsaw.

The ceremony was moved to the Templum, and Elbaum led the prayer with a cantor he had recruited while changing planes in Vienna. Emily Korzenik found herself in the balcony with the rest of the women. Nor was the media very happy. Rabbi Elbaum would not allow them to use cameras, since this would be contrary to Orthodox custom. One photographer who happened to be Jewish was called up to read a passage from the Torah and hid a compact Leica under his prayer shawl, shooting between the lines of Hebrew with this almost soundless, exquisitely crafted German shutter.

For two and a half hours Elbaum and the cantor chanted, periodically walking over to the press to tell them to put down their cameras. Then the blond American bar mitzvah boy was brought up and read his passage. He then signaled for Emily Korzenik to come down from the balcony. Korzenik could stand it no longer in any case, and she pushed her way downstairs through the media to the
bimah
, the reading area. Elbaum physically stopped her from putting on a prayer shawl. A woman wearing a prayer shawl was too much for him. But he had to retreat when the bar mitzvah boy threatened not to recite anymore. Korzenik shouted from Isaiah, while Elbaum shouted “Ladies cannot speak in the synagogue!” which made Korzenik shout Isaiah even louder. As the service ended, “Violence shall be heard no more in thy land” was the passage she was screaming over Elbaum’s insistent voice. The few Cracow Jews watched in dismay.