Priests and parishes in Poland have been urged to do more to maintain their country’s estimated 1,000 Jewish synagogues and cemeteries, still surviving 70 years after the Holocaust.
“History’s tragic events have meant the Jewish space in Poland virtually no longer exists. Although it faced extermination during the Second World War, it is nevertheless a vital component of Jewish and Polish memory,” the Polish bishops’ Commission for Dialogue with Judaism said in a statement.
“We often don’t realise that, in our localities and neighbourhoods, Jews lived, worked and created as our elder brothers in faith and our co-citizens. Our duty as Christians is to nurture and safeguard their memory and pass it on to our children and grandchildren.”
The appeal was issued during the Church’s annual Judaism Day in Poland, which is now home to just 10,000 Jews, compared to 3.5 million before the 1939-45 Nazi occupation. It said Jews from around Europe had found refuge in Poland for 1,000 years, and helped create “a unique culture and spiritual climate”, despite periods of “distrust, accusation and conflict”.
“Let this common memory be a call to preserve these traces of the Polish-Jewish past,” said the Commission, headed by Bishop Mieczyslaw Cislo, a Lublin auxiliary."
“Perhaps an old synagogue, Jewish cemetery or mass grave of Holocaust victims hasn’t faded entirely from memory and can still be restored – let’s not allow these signs of life and faith to disappear from the face of the earth,” the commission said.
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