karlschatz.com

aboutphotographybuy a printeditinglinksemail


A JEWISH SCHOOL IN WARSAW

A Jewish School in Warsaw
click the images to view








































In spring of 1994 I spoke with friends Yale Reisner and Helise Leiberman, who had just relocated to Warsaw, Poland. I had met Yale and Helise in Moscow, where Yale was the resident director of the YIVO college and Russian Humanities University Jewish archivists program. Helise was the resident advisor to the American Council on Soviet Jewry.

Now they were working for the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation which was planning to open Warsaw's first Jewish day school in 45 years. The last Jewish school in Poland shut it's doors in 1969. They invited me to come to Warsaw to see with my own eyes this exciting moment in Polish and Eastern European Jewish History.

In just three weeks I witnessed an empty building just outside the center of Warsaw transformed into a complete Jewish day school. The eighteen 1st graders in the school studied a Polish curriculum as well as Jewish history and culture, English and a few Hebrew words, too.

Finding students for the school was no easy task. Anti-semitism was still alive in Poland, and parents feared the ghetto mentality a seperate school for Jewish children might create.

In the end, the school's first class was filled out by the enrollment of several non-Jewish students. Unhappy with the education their children would be getting in the state-run (Catholic) schools, they hoped a private school would provide their children with both a strong education and an learning environment stressing tolerance and acceptance.


back to top

back to stories menu






































karlschatz.com

aboutphotographybuy a printeditinglinksemail