Poland, the country where I was born and where I live and work today, has suddenly found itself at the center of a major internal and international crisis that is deeply rooted in historical tragedy, competing narratives and questions of identity.
Today, AJC maintains a formal partnership agreement with the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, and AJC’s Warsaw-based Shapiro Silverberg Central Europe Office and Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute engage regularly with Polish officials.
I am not naive about the complex history of Polish-Jewish relations, or the accusations emanating from both sides. Yet I believe, as the son of parents who suffered at the hands of both Berlin and Moscow, that what we share in common far exceeds what divides us. And those commonalities are profoundly important in our contemporary world.
For those of us, and I include the American Jewish Committee (AJC) centrally here, who have struggled to write a bright new chapter in Polish-Jewish relations, this is a key moment. We dare not lose the momentum gained in recent years.
More 2.2 million Ukrainians have entered Poland, and 300,000 of them are here in our capital city, Warsaw, which had a pre-invasion population of 1.8 million. The impact on our daily lives is palpable. Poland’s ethnic and cultural landscape is changing from what until recently was a mostly monoethnic society. The public education system is preparing for Ukrainian kids comprising 30% of Warsaw’s students.