c. 1997 Religion News Service

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

UNDATED _ Communism’s collapse lifted a yoke from millions of people in Eastern Europe and brought them into closer contact with the rest of the world. It was as if long-time prisoners were liberated from a dungeon and haltingly walked into the unfamiliar sunlight of democracy.

This was especially true for the devastated post-Holocaust Jewish community of Poland. In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Jews numbered 3.3 million, 10 percent of Poland’s population. After the Nazi mass murders and the communist campaigns of anti-Semitism in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of identified Jews shrank to less than 10,000, many of them elderly.

Because of these harrowing figures, many observers wrote off Jewish life in Poland, believing the country was a”land without Jews.”But a recent visit to Warsaw happily revealed the falseness of that statement.

While it is premature to speak of a renaissance of Jewish life in today’s Poland, a visitor soon recognizes the growth of new institutions and programs in a country that was once a great center of Jewish culture and religion.

And a dynamic couple from the United States is part of this amazing phenomenon. Yale Reisner and his wife, Helise Lieberman, moved to Warsaw a few years ago with their young daughter, Nitzan, as part of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation’s efforts to reconstruct Jewish life in Poland.

Reisner, a trained historian and archivist, devotes much of his energy to a genealogy project at Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute. There is an urgent need to identify and catalogue thousands and thousands of unprocessed documents before they disintegrate. And what started out as a dry and sterile project for Reisner quickly became something quite different.

He casually showed me and my wife original pages of Oskar Schindler’s famous list containing the names of Jews saved by Schindler during the Holocaust. It’s just one of many documents housed in the incredible archives in Warsaw.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, many terrified Jewish parents turned over their most precious possession, their young children, to Catholic families for safekeeping.

Thousands of such children were hidden in haylofts or in apartment walls. Some survived the war by living in convents and orphanages, and many of these”hidden children”were baptized and raised as Catholics. They eluded the death camps because of false identity papers that were provided by their adoptive Catholic parents.

But in the terrifying maelstrom of the Holocaust, Jewish parents were killed and their children frequently never learned who they really were. They grew up without even knowing their real names.

Now more than 50 years later, as the adoptive parents grow old, they tell what really happened so long ago. Stunned, the”hidden children”search for their personal histories among the Jewish archives. Reisner often acts as a compassionate guide in their fervent quest to learn the truth about themselves.

Using long-hidden records and his own intuition, Reisner helps the”hidden children”close painful psychic wounds, and he even, at times, leads them to discover previously unknown siblings, nieces, nephews, and cousins. In some cases,”hidden children”return to Judaism.

As the director of Warsaw’s only Jewish elementary school, Helise Lieberman tirelessly works at the other end of the age scale. The Lauder Morasha (Hebrew for”spiritual inheritance”) School extends through grade five and now has 66 pupils. The Lauder Foundation also sponsors a preschool with 35 youngsters.

The nurturing school environment is filled with colorful signs and posters in Polish, English, and Hebrew. In addition to the basic academic courses, Morasha’s students participate in a weekly Sabbath ceremony that reinforces their Jewish class studies. Music, art, dance, and traditional food are an integral part of the school.

As enrollment continues to climb, new grades are being added, and a search is currently under way in Warsaw to find a suitable location for Morasha’s growing needs. Lieberman is hopeful about the future even though it was once a death sentence to be a Jewish child in Nazi-occupied Poland, and even though it was frequently politically dangerous to be a Jew under communism.

I asked Reisner and Lieberman why they choose to utilize their exceptional talents in Warsaw since each one could have opted for less demanding and more comfortable professional positions in the United States.

Instead of complicated and self-absorbed responses, Reisner and Lieberman spoke only of their deep convictions to serve a battered and broken remnant community that was once the glory of Jewish life. And, of course, that is reason enough.

MJP END RUDIN