c. 1998 Religion News Service

RYCHWALD, Poland _”Can’t you see I’m busy?”Rabbi Michael Schudrich shouted with mock alarm. He was actually busy filling a squirt gun before diving back into battle with young people at the summer camp here for Jews exploring their identities.

In a CD-ROM dictionary, a video clip of Schudrich could illustrate the definition of tireless. All day _ every day _ here, he chanted prayers at services, gave lectures, cheered at games and led after-meal songfests with his strong nasal baritone.

At lectures, Schudrich paced animatedly. One moment he would squint intensely, furrowing his brow; the next he would break out laughing, his face all dimples and crow’s feet.

This New York rabbi may have seemed in his element, except here he was in rural Poland, where roadside shrines every couple hundred yards attest to the overwhelming Catholic majority.

Schudrich, 43, first came to Poland with a youth group in 1973, when whatever Judaism survived here was almost completely underground. But even after communist persecution had forced most Jews who had escaped the Holocaust to either emigrate or assimilate, Schudrich suspected there was Jewish life remaining here that no one talked about.”This was the center of (European) Jewish life before (the Holocaust). It didn’t make sense that you could wipe out all Jewish life that easily,”he said.

Schudrich returned several times in the 1970s. In 1990, the year before communism fell, he arrived to work for the New York-based Ronald S. Lauder Foundation and help Jews understand their often-shrouded identities.

He believes Poland currently has about 15,000 to 20,000 Jews, higher than most estimates. Prior to World War II, some 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland _ making it the second largest Jewish community in the world at the time. About 90 percent died in the Holocaust.

His experience here gave him a new appreciation of his own Jewish identity.”I found it extremely moving how dedicated people have become,”he said.”For someone who grew up always having that identity, never being challenged, enjoying it and cherishing it, to see people make that kind of change is nothing short of miraculous.”

IR END SMITH