Can These Bones Live?

He stood before an open valley, strewn with mutilated bodies and the broken shards of the ruined Temple. He was suddenly addressed by an anguished voice:

“Son of man, can these bones live?” The Prophet Ezekiel answered, “God — you alone know.” 

Then God turned Ezekiel toward the vision of desiccated skeletons, and declared,

“Prophesy over these bones. You, dry bones, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live again. I will put sinews upon you and cover you with flesh. I will spread skin over you and you shall live again. I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live again. Come, O breath, from the four winds and breathe into their slain, that they live again.”

I read from the prophesy of Ezekiel — of the sixth century B.C.E., in the shadow of the First Temple in Jerusalem — and my mind reaches out to the Poland of the 21st century. My family has ancestral roots in Poland: My mother was born in Czechonava, her parents in Neshelsk, my father and his family born and raised in Warsaw. In my parents’ home, they spoke nothing of Poland. Poland, once the largest concentration of Jews in Europe — and a vital culture, religious and secular — had become a charnel house for 3 million of our people; a cemetery designed and designated by Nazi Germany to be the slaughterhouse of the final solution. 

Can theses bones live again? Can there be a whisper of life for Jews in Poland after the consuming fires of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek and Chelmno have turned life into ash? Who dares prophesy over these bones?

In the last years, bittersweet ironies spring from Polish soil, invisible seedlings breaking through the cemented pavements. Stories, anecdotes, newspaper articles tell tales of this worldly resurrection. Jewish children once hidden by their parents in stables, cellars, sewers, monasteries of Christian Poles, today slowly climb out of the caves of their concealment, eager to recover their buried identity.

Strange, slow transformations appear before our eyes. Poland is now acknowledged to be the most proactive ally of the Jewish State of Israel: establishing diplomatic relations with Israel; purchasing $350 million of anti-tank missiles from Israel; allocating land and $26 million to construct a Jewish Museum in Warsaw; and issuing rulings that regard denials of Holocaust as “hate crimes.” 

I meet with Jews born in Poland, living in our own Los Angeles community, who have established a significant liberal synagogue in Warsaw called Beit Warshava, people such as Severyn Ashkenazy and Alex Lauterbach who refuse to surrender Jewish life to the killers of the dream. I hear and read testimony of Jewish summer schools and adult classes in Judaism and Hebrew, of a Jewish center opened in Krakow, of Lauder-Morash, a Jewish day school founded in Warsaw. I meet with rabbis and cantors bearing witness to the burgeoning of the Jewish will to live and thrive. 

Caution. Hold on. Some tell me, also, that the contempt of Jews and Judaism in Poland is far from extinguished. I believe them, too. But to sustain hope and the promise of renewal is not to deny the disappointing data of residual anti-Semitism. Yet I will not allow the memory of evil to eclipse the evidence of goodness. 

I am surprised by the signs of renewal, but I have reason to be surprised. I know the resilience of our people and the dearth of Christian rescuers of our people. But I know as well the tens of thousands of Polish Christians and non-Jewish rescuers — farmers, peasants, nuns — who risked their lives and the lives of their families to save sons, daughters, fathers, mothers of our people from the predatory claws of Nazis and the blackmailers and informers, the infamous “shmalzovniks.” I know of the many Jewish children saved from extinction because of the heroic work of the Zegota, the Polish underground. And I know that the overwhelming majority of Christians who rescued Jews are documented and honored for their sacrifice at Yad Vashem, and that they were Polish. 

Hope is open to surprise. I will not forget the “Polish Pope of Surprise,” John Paul II, the first pope ever to pray in a synagogue wearing a white robe and a white zucchetto, a skullcap, the first pope to establish a full diplomatic relationship with the State of Israel, the first pope to exchange ambassadors between Israel and the Vatican, the first pope to arrange a papal concert in the Vatican and to request a chazzan to sing the liturgy. 

I have reason to be surprised, and I have reason to hope in the possibility of the rebirth of Jewish life in Poland. I am buoyed by the touching remarks spoken by John Paul II in March 2000, at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. There, he addressed Christian conscience and the conscience of the world: 

“Men, women and children cry out to us from the depths of the house that they knew. How can we fail to heed their cry? No one can forget or ignore what happened. No one can diminish its scale. We wish to remember. But we wish to remember for a purpose, namely to ensure that never again will evil prevail. I fervently pray that our sorrow for the tragedy which the Jewish people suffered in the 20th century will lend a new relationship between Christians and Jews. Let us build a new future.” 

That future we owe to our parents and grandparents, who sang with faith, “We shall live and not die.” That future we owe to our children and grandchildren whom we have taught to remember the sorrow of the past but to never surrender the future.

On Wednesday, May 26 at 7 p.m., Valley Beth Shalom and The Schulweis Institute in Encino and the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, Los Angeles, will offer an evening of personal testimony from Polish guests Andrzej Folwarczny, founder and president of the Forum for Dialogues among Nations, headquartered in Warsaw, and former member of the Polish Parliament; Rabbi Burt Schuman, the American Reform Rabbi who now heads Beit Warzawa, Poland’s liberal Jewish synagogue; and Joanna Kozinska-Frybes, consul general of the Republic of Poland, Los Angeles. There will also be a photographic exhibition, “Polish Heroes: Those Who Rescued Jews.”

Harold Schulweis is rabbi at Congregation Valley Beth Shalom in Encino and founder of Jewish World Watch.