My Experience at the Nozyk Shul

by Barb Miller

During my visit to the Nozyk Shul (when I chaperoned March of the Living with Sarah Warren as a student), I sat next to a young Polish woman in her early 20’s on a Shabbat morning. I asked her what brought her to the synagogue as I did not think she was Jewish. She told me a story typical of many who come to this shul: She said she had recently learned that her grandmother was Jewish. Her grandmother, who had survived the Holocaust and remained in Poland, then married a Polish man. However, her grandmother hid her Judaism to avoid any further anti-Semitic problems in post-holocaust Poland. Although the man she married was Catholic, with the rise of communism, no religion was practiced. During this time period they gave birth to the young woman’s mother. Her mother also married a Catholic man. Her mother and father, with the fall of Communism, raised her to be Catholic. However, when her grandmother was on her death bed, her grandmother confessed to the Catholic priest that she was a Jew. Halachically this meant that not only was her daughter a Jew but her granddaughter was too. Although the mother was not interested in pursuing her Jewish roots, this young girl seated next to me was. Rabbi Shudrich of the Nozyk Synagogue has outreached to many of these young people with similar stories. As a matter of fact, in Warsaw there not only is a functioning synagogue, but there is a thriving Jewish Day School known as the Lauder Jewish Day School.

A Story about the Lauder Jewish Day School:
“The woman was a survivor of ghettos, concentration camps, and death marches, but at the end of the war, she remained in Poland. Despite the hardships of Communism and despite the periodic anti-Semitic slurs, she was one of several thousand who stayed on. She never thought her sons and daughters would have a Jewish life, and indeed, few options were open to them as they grew up, married and had children of their own. But on a September morning in 1994 this elderly Holocaust survivor collected her grandchildren and took them across Warsaw to a modern building in the suburbs. Stepping inside, she placed them before the administrator and smiled. “I can hardly believe I am here,” she said. “A Jewish school in Poland; so I want to enroll these two—I want them to have the chance I could not give my children.”

The establishment of the Lauder Morasha School in Warsaw, the first Jewish school in Poland in more than a quarter of a century, marked a watershed in an extraordinary reawakening of Jewish life on Polish soil. Just a decade ago, a viable Jewish future seemed impossible to contemplate. With the loss of three million Polish Jews who were killed in the Holocaust, many observers believed that Poland’s thousand year Jewish History had come to an end.”

Thousands of young and not so young Poles are reclaiming their Jewish identity through a myriad of programs which the Ron Lauder (Estee Lauder) Foundation supports as does Rabbi Michael Shudrich of the Nozyk Shul. Many synagogues and Jewish sites in Poland that have been restored are because of the Lauder Foundation.