Zydokomuna Deep Jewish Roots Jacobs

Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland, by Jack Jacobs. 2009

Polish Cardinal August Hlond (1936) Was Right: Poland’s Jews Were Steeped in Communism, and Were Otherwise Hostile to the Polish Nation. Jewish Disloyalty in 1920 War

Although this work does not approach the Bund from the viewpoint of its impact on Jewish-Polish relations, I do so in this review.

COMMUNISM PERMEATED MUCH OF PRE-WWII JEWISH POLITICAL LIFE

The General Jewish Workers’ Bund, originally founded in 1897 in tsarist Russia, eventually became the most powerful Jewish political party in Poland on the eve of WWII. (p. 1). It was Yiddishist, anti-Zionist, and secular. (p. 20). Jacobs adds: “Though the Bund was staunchly anti-Zionist, both it and the Left Poalei Zion were not only Yiddishist but also Marxist and secularist.” (p. 51). [The ability of the Zydokomuna (Bolshevized Judaism) to appear in quite a few different guises and under different political labels makes folly of those who try to marginalize the Zydokomuna as only Jews in the tiny Communist Party.]

The Bundist youth organization Tsukunft was directly descended from the illegal Communist SDKPiL (p. 8), which had been active in the 1905 Russian Revolution. Although the Bund, as a whole, was not Communist, it employed repackaged Communist concepts (e. g., “revolutionary socialism”: p. 5, 20; the “capitalist world”: p. 43) and its ranks swelled after the Comintern disbanded the Communist Party of Poland in 1938. (p. 4).

VIRTUALLY THE ENTIRE PRE-WWII JEWISH LEFT WAS AT ENMITY WITH THE POLISH NATION

The Bund’s infection with Communist-like ideation led to manifestations of hostility to Poland. For instance, SKIF, one of the Bundist youth movements, adopted contempt for the Scouting movement as “bourgeois”, rejected the teaching of Polish patriotism to Jewish children in favor of teaching them internationalism, and embraced such Communist concepts as, “strivings of the working class”, “feelings of collectivism and solidarity”, etc., to instill in Jewish youth. (pp. 41-42).

The broad-based and ostensibly mainstream nature of the Bund in no sense prevented it from acting against Polish interests. During the pivotal 1920 Polish-Soviet War, during which the fate of the newly resurrected Polish state (and possibly the freedom of Europe), were uncertain, the Bund displayed overt disloyalty to the Polish cause by adopting an antiwar stance. (p. 9, 144).

The Bund’s strong commitment to Yiddish accentuated divisions not only between Poles and Jews, but also between Jews themselves. For instance, Morgnshtern, the Bundist-sponsored physical-education society, tended to despise its Zionist counterpart, the Maccabi, in large part because of its linguistic Polonization. (p. 54).

INSTILLING ATHEISM IN JEWISH CHILDREN: THE SMOKING GUN

In 1936, Cardinal August Hlond made a much-quoted and much-condemned statement about “Jews as freethinkers.” Although Jacobs does not mention Hlond, he makes it obvious that Hlond’s characterization had much validity. In fact, Leyvik Hodes, the leader of Poland’s SKIF, explicitly said that Jews are, or should be, freethinkers. “The SKIF, he (Hodes) proposed, ought to counter the spirit of religiosity with a spirit of anticlericalism. Children from more traditional homes participating in SKIF activities should be handled with care and not belittled, but their views should be countered by stressing internationalism, and the spirit of SKIF ought to be that of freethinkers.” (p. 42).

Jacobs discusses the internationally acclaimed Medem Sanatorium in Warsaw as a major Bundist achievement. It had no religious instruction or prayer services for the Jewish children, and observed Jewish holidays only as cultural events. (p. 74)

Without doubt, freethinkers constituted a significant fraction of pre-WWII Polish Jews. Surveys show that, among members of SKIF (the Bundist organization for children aged 12-16, too young for Tsukunft), 18-30% reported that they never prayed. (p. 112). It is possible that some respondents pretended to be secularists in order to conform to the aggressive secularism of their Bundist youth leaders and role models, but it is also possible that some of those who engaged in prayer did so not out of religious conviction, but in order to harmonize their conduct with that of their religious parents and other religious members of their community. (p. 11).

UNDERMINING OF TRADITIONAL MORALITY

In 1934-1935, Sophia Dubnow-Erlich, a prominent Bundist, undermined traditional sexual mores. (pp. 21-on). Writing in a widely-read Bundist youth publication, she painted a rosy picture of Soviet women (p. 24), and, attacking Catholic teachings, advocated easy divorce, legalized prenatal infanticide (a. k. a. abortion), free sex, etc. (p. 23). Members of the Tsukunft, according to Jacobs, reacted in different ways to her suggestions. (p. 27). The traditionalist Catholic Polish society must have found her views repulsive. Was Cardinal Hlond’s 1936 statement about Jews, though not all of them, having a “fatal effect” on morals at least partly a response to this sexual libertinism?

SOME NUMBERS

On another subject, Jacobs cites various sources to arrive at the following estimates of the membership of Jewish youth organizations. (p. 116). The Bundist Tsukunft had 12,300 members in 1939 relative to a total projected Jewish population in Poland of 3,460,000, of which 500,000 were Jewish school-aged children, at least 80% of whom went to Polish-language public schools. (p. 137). The Bundist SKIF purportedly grew to over 10,000 members in 1939. (p. 46, 98). Hashomer Hatsair (Hashomer Hatzair), which Jacobs describes as having a leftist Zionist orientation (p. 18), purportedly had 21,000 members, in the areas delineated by Congress Poland alone, in 1938. (p. 116). Yungt, the youth movement of the Left Poalei Zion, had about 8,000 members in 1938. (p. 19).