The Jerusalem Post interviewed Israeli Rabbi Rafi Ostroff, who returns to his former home country of Poland two or three times a year to serve as a tour guide and Head of the Gush Etzion religious Council. This year, he took a group of students on a Holocaust education tour. However, Rabbi Ostroff and his group encountered several instances of anti-Semitism, including hateful insults and being spat on.
“If you try and compare Poland to other countries in Europe it’s much better; you can walk around with Jewish signs. I’ve never felt any threat.”
He recalled an interview with Israeli media where the interviewer said, ‘We all know Poles are antisemites,’ something Ostroff dismissed. “There always was and may always be antisemitism in Poland,” he told the Post, “But I meet and work with a lot of Polish people and I call them the guardians of Jewish history.”
However, this changed last week.
“Either the situation with the war has deteriorated so badly, or it’s that anti-Semites now feel there is a legitimacy to their anti-Semitism and are now letting it rise to the surface.” In any case, Ostroff experienced anti-Semitism several times during the trip.
While Rabbi Ostroff and his group of students were in Krakow during Shabbat, people shouted anti-Semitic slurs at them from passing cars. In Warsaw, a local woman called them “murderers.”
One particular incident, also in Warsaw, stays with Rabbi Ostroff. An elderly woman in the marketplace approached him and spat on him without a word. In all these incidents, the group wasn’t wearing the traditional garb of religious Jews or had anything that would have indicated they were Jewish.
After these terrible incidents, Rabbi Ostroff says that the relationship between the Jewish and Polish people is ready for renewal. His Holocaust education tours to Poland are not just about spreading awareness of the horrors of that terrible chapter in history, but also showing what was lost in Jewish life and culture since then. While World War II-era Poland proved not to be an ally of the Jewish people, he insists that it’s never too learn from the lessons of history.
