Polish Jews stunned, scared by eruption of anti-Semitism

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Matylda Jonas-Kowalik has spent most of her 22 years secure in the belief that she would never know the discrimination, persecution or violence that killed or traumatized generations of Polish Jews before her. She once thought the biggest problem that young Jewish Poles like herself faced was finding a Jewish boyfriend or girlfriend in a country dominated by Catholics.

But an eruption of anti-Semitic comments in public debates amid a diplomatic dispute with Israel over a new Holocaust speech law has caused to her to rethink that certainty. Now she and others fear the hostile rhetoric could eventually trigger anti-Semitic violence, and she finds herself thinking constantly about whether she should leave Poland.

“This is my home. I have never lived anywhere else and wanted this to keep being my home,” said Jonas-Kowalik, a Jewish studies major at Warsaw University. “But this makes me very anxious. I don’t know what to expect.”

Poland’s Jewish community is the surviving remnant of a vibrant and diverse Polish- and Yiddish-speaking community that numbered 3.3 million on the eve of the Holocaust. Only 10 percent survived the German genocide, while postwar violence and persecution in the first decades of communist rule forced out many of the survivors.

Since communism’s collapse in 1989, Jewish life has been re-emerging, with young people feeling safe enough in Poland’s democracy to embrace a heritage their parents and grandparents had largely repressed.

Yet anxieties have been creeping in amid a global rise in xenophobia that was also felt in Poland.


https://www.apnews.com/0e54d2fa49b543c5afaf89493bf730f2/Polish-Jews-stunned,-scared-by-eruption-of-anti-Semitism

And people argue about their being a right for a Jewish state to exist?

So many times in history have Jews been castigated and discriminated as being outcasts in so many places.

Where they need a home to protect them as a people, as the world contionues to make the same hateful mistakes

Again we are sadly seeing the rise of antisemitism, from the left, right and religious.

History is sadly repeating itself