WARSAW — They spent their childhoods in the rich, layered Jewish life of prewar Poland, then survived Adolf Hitler’s mission to use ghettos and gas chambers to wipe out European Jewry.
Now, men such as Tad Taube, Sigmund Rolat and Severyn Ashkenazy, after making fortunes in the U.S., have returned to Poland as philanthropists to nurture a grass-roots revival of Jewish life in their homeland.
Some Jews outside Poland cannot comprehend why the philanthropists would return to a land where their ancestors suffered such pain and loss. But members of Poland’s Jewish community praise the help as crucial to the small renaissance now under way.
“What the philanthropists have done — along with the importance of the material donation — is also empowered us, encouraged us, let us know we’re not alone,” said Poland’s chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, an Orthodox leader from New York. “That cannot be underestimated.”
After Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, about 3 million Polish Jews were murdered in Nazi-run death camps in occupied Poland. Of those who survived, many either immediately left for Israel or later fled anti-Semitic violence or repression from the Cold War-era communist regime.
Of those who remained, many suppressed their identities and intermarried with the Roman Catholic majority, making it difficult to say how many Jews live in this country of 38 million today. Some estimate between 10,000 and 30,000 Polish citizens have Jewish ancestry.
“The population doesn’t have a reasonable chance if there aren’t institutions in place to support them,” said Mr. Taube. He left Poland weeks before Hitler’s tanks rolled across the border in the attack that started World War II.
Cosmetics heir Ronald S. Lauder was among the first foreign philanthropists, in the late 1980s, to take an interest in rebuilding Jewish life in post-communist Eastern Europe. More recently, as the indigenous Jewish community has grown in the young democracy, more philanthropists have begun to help.
Since starting operations in Poland more than three years ago, Mr. Taube’s foundation has donated about $2 million annually and encouraged other donors to contribute another $8 million to help fund rabbis, educational programs, summer camps and day schools, as well as big-ticket items like the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and Warsaw’s landmark Museum of the History of Polish Jews, expected to open in 2009.
“The preoccupation of Jews in most of the diaspora is of Poland as a cemetery for Jews,” he said during a recent visit to Warsaw. But his philanthropy efforts are “about Jewish life in Poland, not Jewish death.”
Mr. Rolat, who closely cooperates with Mr. Taube and is involved in a host of similar projects, also works extensively in his hometown of Czestochowa to put its tiny surviving Jewish community back on its feet.
Mr. Ashkenazy survived the war in an underground bunker in the Polish city of Tarnopol, in what is now Ukraine. After the war he moved to France before settling in the U.S. where he, like Mr. Taube, made his fortune in real estate. Mr. Ashkenazy got involved in Poland in 1999, when he helped launch Beit Warszawa, Poland’s first Progressive, or Reform, Jewish community since World War II.
Beit Warszawa, which started as a clutch of foreigners meeting in their homes, now has some 200 active members, and its own center for Sabbath services, meals, bar mitzvahs and other events.
Rabbi Burt Schuman arrived last year, becoming the country’s first full-time Progressive rabbi since the Holocaust, and a second rabbi, Tanya Segal, a Russian-born Israeli who is the country’s first permanent woman rabbi, started this year.
“Someone needed to do it, and the perennial question is if not me, who, and if not now, when,” Mr. Ashkenazy said. “It needed to be done. It still needs to be done. It’s in its infancy, progressing, taking roots. We need support, we need help.”
Mr. Rolat, who worked as a slave laborer in camps near his hometown of Czestochowa during the war, left Europe for the U.S. in 1948 as the sole survivor of his family. He became wealthy running international finance companies.
He helps fund Warsaw rabbis, book publishing and educational programs to promote Jewish culture in Polish schools, but also makes a great effort to revive the Jewish community in Czestochowa. He is also involved in efforts to promote Polish-Jewish relations.
All three men speak openly of their love for Poland and stress that the country was a true home for Jews for a millennium, where their people achieved great things in the arts, sciences and politics.
“Poland really was more than just a country where Jews took refuge,” Mr. Rolat said in Warsaw. “Poland was really our home.”
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