c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s recent offer of membership to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary, followed by President Clinton’s visit to Warsaw, has focused attention again on Eastern European history and politics.

This renewed interest pleases me because I have read nearly every book, watched every TV program, and seen countless films about World War II and the Holocaust. For me, and for many of my generation, the terrible events of 1939-45 represent one of the defining moments of the troubled and bloody century now ending.

But my interest in that region far transcends questions of international relations and NATO membership. At the center of my obsession _ for that is what it is _ is my religious identity, and at the center of that identity stands Poland.

Clearly etched in my mind are the frightening black-and-white newsreels that convey Poland’s agony when it was invaded by Nazi Germany in September 1939. The sound of Chopin’s Polonaise always stirs me because it was the last music heard on Warsaw radio before the Germans captured the city. And I was raised on the heroism of the young Jewish fighters who fought Nazi SS troops during the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

But when the war ended in 1945, Poland fell under a cruel communism until 1989. Because Poland suffered a half century of Nazism and communism, it virtually disappeared from the public consciousness of most Americans. But not for me. It was Poland again and again and again.

Why this obsession? After all, I was born in the safety of the United States, and my hometown of Alexandria, Va., had no Polish-speaking community. I do not read or speak Polish. My university education did not concentrate on Polish history, and I served as a U.S. Air Force chaplain in Japan and Korea _ thousands of miles from Poland.

The answer to this preoccupation stems from being a Jew who proudly traces his family roots to Poland. Like so many other American Jews, two of my grandparents were born in Poland and spent their childhood years there before emigrating to the United States.

For nearly a millennium, generations of Jews made Poland their home, even in the face of severe anti-Semitism. And, in 1939, 3.5 million Jews lived there, nearly 10 percent of Poland’s pre-war population. Poland was a great center of Jewish life, with a history rich in achievement, remarkably diverse and magnificently creative.

But tragically, more than half of the 6 million victims murdered during the Holocaust were Polish Jews. Their annihilation in death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec destroyed the extraordinary Polish-Jewish civilization that had developed for 1,000 years.

Today, one simply cannot be a faithful and knowledgeable Jew anywhere in the world without first encountering the bright lights and the dark shadows of Jewish life in Poland. And so, connected by the eternal ties of faith and family, I was inextricably linked to Poland long before I ever made the first of my dozen visits there.

When I first arrived in Poland in October 1989, following the collapse of communism, I had a kind of religious epiphany. The names of the cities and towns were so familiar to me. The Polish words that had become part of the Yiddish language over the centuries were known to me. Even the street names in Warsaw and Krakow echoed in my head when I first walked upon them.

It wasn’t that I had come home. Not at all. Rather, I had come back to the home of my grandparents and all those in my family who had lived before them. As I walked the darkened streets during my first night in Warsaw, I realized I could not understand myself as a human being, as a Jew, or even as an American, without first understanding Poland and what it has meant in Jewish history.

But my epiphany’s second part has profoundly shaped my life:

If in a century that has witnessed two world wars, weapons of mass destruction, Nazism, communism, fascism and the Holocaust; if in such a century Jews and Christians could begin to build mutual respect and understanding in Poland, yes, in Poland, a country with an unusually complex and painful history; then it could be done anywhere in the world.

MJP END RUDIN