Cardinal Hlond Correct Jewish Atheism Rejak

Jewish Identities in Poland and America: The Impact of the Shoah on Religion and Ethnicity, by Sebastian Rejak. 2011

Polish Cardinal Hlond Was Correct on Jews and Atheism. Holocaust Preeminence. German Guilt Diffusion and Blaming Christianity Instead

This book is really three books: 1) American Jews, 2) Post-WWII Polish Jews, and 3) Extensive interviews with American and Polish Jews, especially about whether the Holocaust and God are reconcilable. Because this work raises many different topics, I focus on information not commonly presented in books on the same subject. I study this overall subject in considerable detail, and de-emphasize areas of disagreement with the author.

Author Sebastian Rejak begins with various definitions of a Jew. For his purposes, self-defined Jews are Jews. (pp. 24-25). Later, he quotes various Jewish thinkers on the relevance or irrelevance of Jewish Chosenness.

Unlike those who would have us think that it did not exist, Rejak recognizes the challenge posed to Poland by Russified Jews (Litvaks, or Litwaks)(p. 243).

POLISH CARDINAL HLOND (1936) WAS RIGHT: RAMPANT ATHEISM AMONG JEWS

One prominent feature of American Judaism has been its secularism, going far back. In fact, YIDDISHKEIT itself had a pronounced secular bent [no doubt brought from Russia and Russian-occupied Poland] already among Jewish immigrants in the 1890’s. (p. 89). Secularism was notable among American Jews in the 1930’s. (p. 36). Even among observant Jews, as in the 1940’s and 1950’s, ostensibly religious practices tended to be culture-centered and community-centered rather than driven by religious conviction, and this was also true of much of the rabbinate. (p. 40).

God, when not abandoned or avoided, was (and is) often re-defined. (e. g, p. 308). Interestingly, in his detailed chapter on the Holocaust and theology, Rejak quotes Rabbi Avigdor Miller, who stated that God destroyed Poland’s Jews, through Hitler, because they had massively defected from the Torah and gone after materialism and Bundism (radical anti-religious socialism). (p. 122, Ref. 54, p. 173).

All of this helps illuminate Polish Cardinal Hlond’s much-quoted and much-condemned 1936 “Jews are freethinkers” statement.

THE EMERGENCE OF HOLOCAUSTIANITY

Rejak surveys the growth of Holocaust consciousness among American Jews, and shows that attention to it was more common before about 1960 than commonly supposed. He also suggests that the subsequent great increase in Holocaust consciousness among American Jews had less to do with the Eichmann trial and the June 1967 War than with the emerging politics of victimhood in the 1960’s. (p. 52).

The explosive growth of Holocaust museums was sometimes challenged in the Jewish community. Some felt that emphasis on the Holocaust reinforced it a substitute religion among Jews, and that it tended, in the eyes of the gentiles, to reduce Jews to little more than perpetual victims. Jacob Neusner objected to the marginalization of others’ genocides, such as that of the Armenians, and those of the Poles and other Slavs at the hands of the Nazis. (Reference 155, p. 104).

INSTITUTIONALIZED JEWISH SEPARATISM: THE ROLE OF THE KEHILLA

In Europe, the KEHILLAH (or KAHAL) functioned not only as a Jewish religious community, but also comprised many social institutions. It was a “state within a state”. (J. W. Woocher, Reference 27, p. 91). [This, of course, reinforced the fact of Jewish self-imposed apartheid [the “Otherization” of the Jew], for which nowadays only Poles are blamed.]

JEWS NOT “FORCED INTO COMMERCE” BY BEING PROHIBITED FROM ENGAGING IN AGRICULTURE

Approximately 1% of Poland’s pre-WWII Jews were farmers. (Reference 6, p. 32). The very fact of their existence refutes the misconception that Jews were forbidden by law to become farmers.

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACISM PROMOTED YET AGAIN

Nowadays, the usual Holocaust-related line is the one about Poland failing to emphasize the (presumed) specialness of the Jewish tragedy. Interestingly, right after the war, prominent Jewish editor Artur Rutkowski had advocated exactly that: Jewish and Polish suffering SHOULD be intertwined. (pp. 186-187). Rejak is unclear about the motive (p. 187) before falling back on anti-Semitism as a retroactive explanation. (p. 188). Note the irony: Jewish suffering must NOT be treated as special because there will be anti-Semitism, and, nowadays, Jewish suffering MUST be treated as special or else there will be anti-Semitism.

BLAME CHRISTIANITY, GERMAN GUILT DIFFUSION, YET AGAIN

The chapter on belief in God and the Holocaust is telling in a way. Many of the Polish Jewish and American Jewish interviewees ask how God could allow such a tragedy, but no one (or almost no one) asks how God could allow Germany to escape with so little punishment. Is this part of what looks like the overall tendency of Jews to downplay Germany’s guilt, and to displace it elsewhere (“centuries of prior anti-Semitism”, Christianity and its teachings about Jews, “man’s inhumanity to man”, Poles “not doing enough”, “an event totally beyond rational understanding”, etc.)?

SOME OF THE DEFICIENCIES IN THIS BOOK

Rejak presents Polish anti-Semitism as something severe and ubiquitous. It was not.
The author’s treatment of postwar killings of Polish Jews is deficient, and he exaggerates their numbers. He does not mention the extreme postwar shortage of housing as a factor behind Poles sometimes being unwilling to return the properties to the unexpectedly returning Jewish owners. However, he acknowledges that the Jewishness of the victims, as a motive for the killings, is suspected but not demonstrated. (p. 184).

Rejak repeats all the customary exculpations for the gross Jewish over-involvement in Communism (Zydokomuna). Interestingly, however, he cites the testimony of some Polish Jews who are ashamed of their parents’ role in the forced Communization of Poland, as exemplified by the dreaded U. B. (Bezpieka). (pp. 191-192).

The author tries to downplay the June 1967 War, and subsequent Soviet-imposed directives, for the events of 1968, and attributes it almost entirely to anti-Semitism. If the expulsion of Jews was long in the offing, as Rejak suggests, why did it wait until 1968 to happen, and then do so suddenly? In addition, considering the fact that the Soviet puppet state had now become “permanent”, and therefore “domiciled”, why is it surprising that “nationalistic” (read ethnic Polish) forms of Communism gained favor over the “internationalist” and “cosmopolitan” (read Jewish) ones?

More fundamentally, since Jewish Communists had knowingly joined an amoral movement based on power and duplicity (not only by Communists against non-Communists, but also by Communists against Communists, as exemplified by the turn against Trotsky and later against Khrushchev), why are they dismayed to be the eventual recipients of their own medicine? Is Communism just fine as long as it benefits the Jews (never mind the sufferings of the Poles), and then suddenly sours when it no longer benefits the Jews?