[(Continued from p.4)]
on its cover had the banner headline "Europe Activates Terror Against Israel." Weinbaum writes that the influential Polish weekly Politica on April 13 published an article uncovering the true nature of Arafat's regime. The right-wing, notes Weinbaum, is divided, with the nationalist newspaper Gazetta Polska supporting Israel.The support for Israel takes other forms. Weinbaum reports that as Israel's coffee houses and bus stations became battlefields and her hotels and ulpans for foreign students emptied, Polish official delegations multiplied. To take one example, the student delegation from SGH, a well-known economic school in Warsaw, refused to cancel its student exchange with Tel Aviv University.
Public support for Israel is manifest in the popularity of Jewish cultural events and the enthusiasm for the Israeli ambassador, Polish-born Shevach Weiss (Knesset Speaker from 1992-96), who has become a cultural icon. In Krakow, at the end of June this year, writer Ruth E. Gruber reports that 10,000 Poles -- 90% non-Jewish -- crammed the main square of Krakow's old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, for the final concert of the week-long Festival of Jewish Culture. Dancing in the midst of the cheering throng was Shevach Weiss, who, according to Konstanty Gebert, publisher of the Polish Jewish monthly Midrasz, "is probably the only Israeli ambassador in the world whose main threat comes from being smothered in love." Weiss calls the Polish elites and the Polish media "the most pro-Israel and pro-Jewish in Europe today....It sounds surrealistic, but it's a fact."
Poland is actively seeking to raise popular consciousness of the Jewish contribution to Polish history. In the May/June 2002 issue of Midstream, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland's former ambassador to Austria and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2001, writes of plans to build a Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He writes: "The history of Polish Jews is linked inseparably to the history of Poland. Any attempt to eliminate this wonderful strand in the history of the multinational Polish Commonwealth, which lasted up to the end of the 18th century, would be like recounting the history of France without mention of Paris or Marseilles, German history without Berlin, Polish history without Warsaw. A surreal exercise!" Admittedly, Bartoszewski is an unusual person: active in the Polish resistance, later imprisoned Auschwitz, he was a co-founder of Zegota, the organization dedicated to rescuing Jews under the German occupation, and has been honored at Yad Vashem. But today his attitude toward Jews and Israel resonates widely in academic circles as well. Writes Bartoszewski: "I often tell my friends in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Washington and New York that in today's Poland a whole new generation of academics has developed an avid interest in the history of the Jews in Poland and the Jewish contribution to Polish history. There are countless academic papers and doctoral theses by students and academics who by no means have Jewish antecedents, on music, philosophy, architecture, religion, economics, local government, social history -- the entire world of the Jewish past....If one were to count the references relating to Jewish matters in current academic journals and books, the figure would be truly astonishing." He concludes: "That Polish national memory in the future must include the great contribution of Polish Jewry is unassailable, and the sacred mission of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews."
Israeli ambassador to Poland Shevach Weiss is probably the only Israeli ambassador in the world whose main threat comes from being smothered in love.
Does this throw conventional wisdom upside down? You bet. But no more so than the situation in the U.S., where American Jews are no longer Israel's chief supporters. As Dennis Prager explains: "Many Jews are leftists -- that is their identity as well as the source of their values, not Judaism. Anti-Israel rhetoric from Jews is so common that letters to the editor about the Middle East signed with a Jewish surname are now almost as likely to be anti-Israel as pro-Israel."
Christian evangelicals have supplanted American Jews as Israel's most powerful support group.
Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost
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July-August 2002 - 5 - Outpost