As if this story isn’t far-fetched enough. I first read this paragraph in a NY Times profile of Pawel, a former Polish skinhead turned Orthodox Jew:
Pawel’s metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.
And then the closing paragraph of the story, which indicates that the reporter and perhaps Pawel himself, have a sense of humor–dark, perhaps, and definitely Jewish, but a sense of humor nevertheless:
…Now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. “I am good with knives,” he explained.
Let it not be said that the Times doesn’t have a sense of humor.
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A couple of lines I didn’t like–
“Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews “our elder brothers,” had finally entered the public consciousness.”
I don’t think the struggle to eradicate anti-semitism should be linked to being “the most pro-Israel country in the European Union”, not when Israel behaves like apartheid South Africa.
“Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered..”
What should have been shattered is the notion that one can line up ethnic groups into a category of “good” and “bad”, along with the notion that being a victim necessarily means you are incapable of committing or supporting atrocities yourself.
Millions of Poles died in WWII apart from the Holocaust, so it’s possible the majority of Poles lost someone close. So many of them might be victims and anti-semites simultaneously.
“I am good with knives”
Hilarious. Surely a Polish Purim Joke?