Poland`s Jews Launch First Rabbi Group Since WWII

Poland's Jewish community said Sunday it had launched the first nationwide association of rabbis since World War II, a highly symbolic step in a country that once was Europe's Jewish heartland.

"It's a historic event," said Symcha Keller, head of the Jewish community in the city of Lodz where the Rabbinical Association of Poland will be based.

"The creation of the council marks the return to the good old ways of governing the Jewish community in Poland," Keller said after Saturday's ceremony, which was attended by chief Ashkenazi rabbi Yona Metzger of Israel.

"There were always rabbi councils," said Keller. "The war put an end to them. Afterwards, the rabbis tried to group together but the authorities have forbidden Jewish organisations."

The new association will be a shadow of the pre-war version, gathering just eight rabbis from a handful of Poland's big cities.

But the limited scale is itself an illustration of the small steps being taken to revive Jewish life in Poland, driven largely by "new Jews": Poles of Jewish origin who are returning to their cultural roots.

According to various estimates, Poland counts just 3,500 to 15,000 people who identify themselves as Jewish, out of a total population of 38 million people, more than 90 percent of whom are Catholic.

A small but growing number of young Polish Jews are opting to step out of the long shadow cast by pre-war prejudice, the Nazi Holocaust, and post-war Communist anti-Semitism to gradually reach back to their roots.

Before World War II, Warsaw was home to 400,000 Jews, making it the largest Jewish city in Europe and the second in the world after New York.

A swathe of the city was turned into a ghetto by the Nazis after their 1939 invasion of Poland, and destroyed after a failed uprising in 1943.

Half of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis were Polish, and most died in Nazi German concentration camps set up in occupied Poland, such as the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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