WELT ONLINE: Pawel war ein polnischer Skinhead. Bis er und seine Frau ihre jüdischen Wurzeln entdeckten. Erst waren sie schockiert, dann konvertierten sie. "Ich kämpfe jeden Tag, um meine alten Ideen loszuwerden", sagt der 33-Jährige heute. Sein Weg zeigt auch die erstaunliche Renaissance des Judentums in Polen.
Wenn Pawel in den Spiegel schaut, sieht er manchmal immer noch einen Neonazi-Skinhead zurückstarren. Den Mann, der Pawel war, bevor er seinen rasierten Kopf mit einer Kippa bedeckte, seine faschistische Ideologie für die Thora über Bord warf und Gewalt und Hass gegen die Gnade Gottes tauschte.
„Ich kämpfe immer noch jeden Tag, um meine alten Ideen loszuwerden“, sagt Pawel, ein 33-jähriger ultraorthodoxer Jude und ehemaliger Lkw-Fahrer. Und er merkt ein wenig ironisch an, dass er aufhören musste, Juden zu hassen, um einer zu werden. „Wenn ich ein altes Bild von mir als Skinhead sehe, schäme ich mich“ sagt er. „Jeden Tag, jede Minute. Es gibt eine Menge nachzuholen.“
Pawel, der sich hebräisch Pinchas nennt, hat darum gebeten, seinen Nachnamen nicht zu veröffentlichen. Aus Angst davor, dass seine alten Neonazi-Freunde ihn oder seine Familie ausfindig machen könnten. Unglaubliche Rückbesinnung zum Judentum >>> Von Dan Bilefsky | Montag, 01. März 2010
THE NEW YORK TIMES: WARSAW — When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.
“I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,” said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. “When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. “Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.”
Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.
Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.
Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.
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.
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.
“Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ” Rabbi Schudrich said. “But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn’t correspond to the Poland of 2010.”
The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II. >>> Dan Bilefsky | Saturday, February 27, 2010
