c. 1998 Religion News Service

RYCHWALD, Poland _ Zbigniew Siwinski never understood why, as a boy, the Polish Catholic woman who raised him taught him Jewish folklore and Hebrew. It could be useful someday, she would say.

But she never told him what he was too young to remember: Siwinski had been rescued from a Jewish ghetto to shelter him from the ravages of the Holocaust.”Everyone around me knew but me,”said Siwinski, now 57 and living in Bialystok in eastern Poland.

Siwinski was well into his adult years before he learned the truth behind the vague hints about his roots. The discovery left him traumatized. But it also prompted Siwinski to embark on a voyage of discovery that led him to embrace Judaism.”I have the religion of my forefathers, and the whole culture,”he said here at an annual summer camp devoted to helping Jews adjust to their new-found identities.

More than 300 Jews came to this rural area in southern Poland this summer over a six-week period. Staying at a rustic old estate called Dwor Rychwald, they participated in lectures, services, and rousing, table-pounding songfests after each meal. They spent time conversing in the shade or studying the Talmud, the authoritative body of Jewish law.

At the climactic Sabbath service, they dressed sharply and sang and danced with the zest of converts, for until recently, many did not know they were Jewish.

Their families kept their identities secret for an understandable reason: Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocaust suffered years of communist persecution in Poland.”The real discovery began after 1989 with the collapse of communism,”said Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the camp’s director.”Anyone who was 4 or 5 (during World War II) can remember they were Jewish. Anyone who was younger discovered after the war. Some discovered right after the war and some as recently as two years ago,”he said.

Some are discovering their families were Jewish and had assimilated into Polish society through deathbed confessions, accidental remarks or old family photographs.

Premek Jasionek, 23, of Warsaw, discovered a document two years ago showing his late grandmother’s real name, which was Jewish. He began exploring his roots and will begin studies this fall at a yeshiva, or Jewish religious academy, in Krakow.

Of the 3.3 million Jews living in Poland before World War II, an estimated 90 percent perished in the Holocaust. Most subsequently emigrated.

Communist leaders periodically used their own power struggles to scapegoat Jews as”Zionists,”or disloyal outsiders, capitalizing on the anti-Semitism that persisted in Poland. In 1968, when Jews were purged from jobs and party posts, many thousands left the country.

Most of those who remained assimilated.

As director of the Polish section of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation, Schudrich, an energetic, charismatic New Yorker, has during the past eight years lectured in Warsaw and run camp programs such as the one here. The New York-based foundation helps rebuild Eastern European Jewish communities shattered by the Holocaust and repressed by communism.

The Dwor Rychwald camp provides an opportunity for Poles with Jewish roots to taste and experience Judaism in a relaxed, open environment, said Schudrich.

Zofia Radzikowska of Krakow looks forward all year to the summer camps.

Like Siwinski, she was sheltered from the Holocaust and raised by a non-Jewish Polish family. Radzikowska was old enough to remember her Jewish roots, but it wasn’t until the early 1990s that she began attending Jewish services, chanting prayers and studying Hebrew.”Slowly, I got a feeling that something is in it,”she recalled.”I said to God, `Yes.'” Leslaw Piszewski, 40, also of Warsaw, had early hints of his roots: His father had Semitic features and used to sing him a Jewish lullaby. Others in his small town guessed the family’s identity and called Piszewski anti-Semitic names, but his father denied being Jewish.”I think he tried to forget about what happened during the war,”which he survived in hiding, Piszewski said. His father subsequently assimilated into Polish society and married a non-Jew who had the children baptized Roman Catholic. Piszewski went to church until his teens.

As a young father of 23, he pressed his own father,”What can I tell my child about her heritage?”The question upset his father, but”slowly, slowly he started to talk.” Eventually he persuaded his father to show him the scenes of his childhood in Warsaw, and Piszewski started going to programs on Jewish culture. But he wanted a more religious approach and began attending Schudrich’s lectures.

One year at Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year celebration, he looked into a synagogue and saw, in the candlelight, the shadows of Jews bowing and swaying in prayer. He realized,”I was not a part of this group, but inside I was a part of this people. I decided, I must find a way to get closer.” He did, and later officially converted to Judaism. Now he is president of the Jewish Community of Warsaw and also an official with the Lauder Foundation.

Piszewski’s decision to convert formally was his own. While traditional Jewish law dictates that only those with a Jewish mother are Jewish, Schudrich said his group makes no background checks on those wanting to attend the camps.”It’s open to anybody with Jewish roots. We don’t attempt to define it,”he said.

Poland currently has several Orthodox synagogues, but Schudrich shuns denominational labels. Still, the camp follows some bedrock Jewish principles.

For example, the kitchen is kosher, the Sabbath is honored and the makeshift synagogue segregates men and women, though they are divided evenly down the middle with the sheerest of curtains. Many old synagogues in Eastern Europe seat women in the back or the side.

Not everyone who attends the camp is particularly attracted to the religious element.”It’s part of my personality that I’m Jewish. It’s not everything,”said Alex Wasowicz, 21, of Warsaw, who discovered his roots when his mother explained why she wasn’t enrolling him in Catholic education courses at his public primary school.

Wasowicz later studied at a New York yeshiva, but lost interest in Judaism until two years ago when he began working at the Lauder Foundation office.”I’m not religious,”he said, his fluent English traced with a Brooklyn accent,”but somehow my job makes me religious … and I even like it.” When he’s with other Jews, he honors the Sabbath, helps fill the quota of 10 men traditionally needed for many Jewish worship services, and covers his head _ not with a skull cap, but with a Nike baseball cap.

The experience has increased his confidence in his identity.”I can say that I’m Jewish now, and not (just) to my friends, but I can do something much more difficult, I can say to me that I’m Jewish.”

IR END SMITH