Prince Charles: goes looking for a mezuzah Prince Charles and Duchess Camilla arrived in Poland today to take part in the opening ceremony of a new Jewish community center in Krakow’s Kazimierz Jewish quarter. While the project was overseen by World Jewish Relief (a charity group based in London and credited with aiding Jewish children in escaping the Nazi regime during World War II), the inspiration for and funding of the center came directly from the Prince of Wales.

In 2002, Charles met with many of Krakow’s Holocaust survivors and was so moved by their stories that he decided to commit himself to the building of a community center. Many of the survivors he initially spoke with were present at today’s ceremony, including Ryszard Orowski, who lost all of his relatives in the Holocaust. Orowski expressed his joy and amazement over the project: "Never did we imagine that we would have a center, a home for the whole community of Krakow."

Prince Harry: fashion faux pasThe center will be used by about one thousand neighboring community members, ranging from elderly citizens to Polish students at Krakow University. It will be open to Jews and non-Jews alike for all sorts of social, religious, and educational activities.

As a token of gratitude, Prince Charles was given the honor of nailing the mezuzah on the front door of the center, making for one of a few rather excellent photo ops.

It is probably no coincidence that the opening of the center coincides with Yom Hashoah, and thus far plans have gone off without a hitch -- unlike three years ago when the British Royal family’s plans to commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day went Prince Charles Says: want to play torah slides and ladders?terribly awry after every tabloid from here to Tel Aviv had a photo of Prince Harry dressed as a Nazi soldier on its cover. Also notable is that the Prince and Duchess’s presence at the opening of the community center comes less than a month after the Jerusalem Post published an article exposing the United Kingdom as “the European center of anti-Semitism.” According to Oxford-educated Hebrew University Professor Robert S. Wistrich, anti-Semitism is so implicit in British culture – literary, political, and otherwise – that Brits can’t even recognize it anymore.

Not to belittle his efforts in Krakow, but maybe Prince Charles should take that kippah and hammer and head over to a synagogue in his own hometown.

Dear Jewcy Aficionados: Dzien dobry from the Krakow airport. I have just wrapped up an unofficial 72-hour Jewish immersion holiday and thought I would offer a few travel tips for those of you who plan on making a pilgrimage this summer. I’m guessing that many of you will be more familiar with the region’s Hebraic history before visiting Poland, but I thought you might still mildly benefit from the random observations of a lay lapsed Catholic American secularist:

• It would be facile (not to mention condescending) for me to comment on how soul-deadening it is to see Auschwitz firsthand, but I did want to share a couple of tidbits from our excellent, somber, forthright tour guide. After explaining that these weren’t my views, but that rather I had “written about Holocaust deniers” (scholarly, no…but still technically accurate), I asked if they’d ever encountered any on the tour. She said no, but added that there had been a couple of teenagers with a Scandinavian school group who espoused Nazi ideals. They were immediately sent home because it is illegal in Poland to express those views. Apparently, a professor was even fired from his job for translating a David Irving book, even after making it clear these weren’t his beliefs in the introduction. Considering the horrific immediacy of the surroundings, the free speech question never entered my mind, but I did find one thing the tour guide told me interesting. She said, “We aren’t bothered by the Holocaust deniers. We are scared by those who sympathize with the Nazis, especially amongst the young, because it is easy to influence their minds.” I guess it makes some sense, but it was striking to hear that Holocaust deniers are no big deal while walking alongside the Birkenau train tracks.

• Hot Dogs: at auschwitzI was stunned to learn that, thanks in large part to the efforts of those who been imprisoned there, the camps were opened to the public a mere two years after the liberation. Two years. So, let’s recap: In a poor, desolate country, physically destroyed by World War II, people who were left with nothing after surviving the Nazi nightmare got Auschwitz up and running by 1947 to bear witness to the atrocities they had just experienced. I think you know where I’m going with this…I realize it’s not apples-to-apples, but it sure makes the seven years of Ground Zero squabbles seem awfully small.

• Casting no aspersions on fellow tourists, but it is very strange to watch people take photos of themselves in front of the crematorium.
  

• They sell hot dogs at the Auschwitz snack bar. I’ll let that sink in for a moment... In fact, the only food available for lunch that can quickly be wolfed down before the bus to Birkenau is the hot dog. I can’t say with 100% certainty, but both my wife and I thought it was a traditional frankfurter. And we do enjoy our frankfurters. By the way, the hot dog? Delicious. It was served on this crunchy-on-the-outside-chewy-on-the-inside roll, it came with a homemade relish of big chunks of pickled onions and cabbage, and was topped off with killer tangy ketchup. From the center of Krakow, the Auschwitz tour is an all-day deal, so the sale of nourishing non-kosher concentration camp hot dogs sure seemed like one final twist of the knife.

• Krakow’s old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz has been reborn since the fall of the Commies. It’s bustling with coffee shops, restaurants, hipster hotels, bookstores, boutiques, etc., and we were told that a lot of the entrepreneurs are the grandchildren of those who were persecuted by the Nazis. That seemed reassuring. However, we stopped into an art gallery with an exhibit--a modern art black-and-white-photos-covered-in-spray-paint collage kind of thing. The picture in the window had two topless women, and the head of a bald man had been pasted over one of the ample-bosomed bodies. The proprietor told us it was a nationalistic Polish priest with a popular radio program (probably Father Tadeusz Rydzyk) who shovels “anti-Semitic propaganda.” This was not reassuring.

• Ostoya Palace Hotel: where the maids are hotWord on the Euro street is that Krakow is the hotspot for stag parties and that the town has a thriving sex trade. I didn’t notice an excess of strip bars or sex shops, but then again, we spent most of our time in the Medieval castles-and-churches section. After all, it’s an anniversary trip, and I’m old. What I can attest to, is that Krakow has an incredibly high number of beautiful, beautiful, beautiful women, including our maid at the Ostoya Palace hotel. Fellas, the dollar still owns the zloty, so you may want to take that into consideration before booking Vegas this summer.

• If you are the kind of person who can power through a full day of sightseeing, I recommend taking the Wieliczka Salt Mines tour as rejuvenation after getting your spirit crushed at Auschwitz. Basically, you walk down a labyrinth of wooden stairs (reaching some 440 feet) into a massive mine filled with statues made of salt, walls made of salt (I licked them for proof) and an enormous chapel with a giant chandelier that hosts weddings, concerts and Sunday mass. There’s even a salt lake where a bunch of drunken Austrians capsized a boat and suffocated to death a century ago. There’s also a health center on the grounds for the traditional salt bath. Salt isn’t like coal or copper: It's good for the system, and great for the lungs. Plus, it’s always a balmy 55-60 degrees in the mine, so the dudes that toiled down there were healthier than the general populace. The Nazis took Wieliczka over and used it as a munitions factory (I think that’s what our guide said) and it was the only time slave labor was ever used in the mine. During World War II, people from the nearby Plaszow camp were brought over to work in the mines. Consider this if you will: you’re a Jewish factory worker reassigned to Wieliczka in say 1940. You bust your hump in the mines for the next few years, which ironically helps with the old lifespan. And for argument’s sake, let’s assume you’re down in the middle of the Earth without much access to the goings on at the extermination camps a few miles away. I’m not saying they’re lucky; they were slaves to the Nazis, after all. However, the mine job with the clean air and the comfortable temperature had to lead to one hell of a whopping guilt complex in the Krakow daylight.

• Oldsmobil: krakow's american-themed car barI lied. Salt mines won’t do the trick. Might I suggest the “Wodka Sampler” at the U.S. car-themed bar, Oldsmobil. I don’t know what happened to the “e,” but the six shots are smooth and clean. And the owner does a great impression of an American that didn’t sound like any American I’ve ever met. Much needed jocularity, though. Na zdrowie!

• One last note for my fellow American travelers. We aren’t as popular these days, as I was reminded late one night in the land of my ancestors. A sousy Irish bride told me she had never been to “the States” and didn’t care if she ever did. Then she snarled, “Thanks for George W. Bush.” And this was the day after she got married. And this was after a friendly half-hour chat with her husband about New York City architecture and the Philadelphia Eagles. And the Irish are suppose love us. (Note to the County Cork gent who inquired: No, Bill Clinton is not generally regarded as one of the five greatest Presidents of all time.)

So, to the kid from the Oregon private school on the World War II trip--the one in the Jewish bookstore in Kazimierz who insisted on hectoring the young sales girl with variations of, “When the Nazis came, why didn’t they just pretend they weren’t Jews?” You know who you are. The clerk patiently responded about the importance of religion, the poor uneducated populace, the powerlessness… She was being sincere. You were being a dick. That ain’t helping our cause. From one former punk teen to another, you’re better than that.

And she was hot. You sniveling little fuck.

From Cracovia with love,

Patrick J. Sauer

Related: The Connoisseur's Guide to Internet Anti-Semitism

A Washington Post article about the revival of interest in exorcisms in Eastern Europe made us wonder whether Judaism has any similar traditions. The answer is surprising!

In the article, one Polish Catholic reverend discussed his plans to build a “spiritual oasis" that will serve as Europe's only center dedicated to performing exorcisms. He’s got the support of the Vatican, and last year Poland hosted the fourth International Congress of Exorcists, which attracted over 300 exorcism practitioners from around Europe.
Exorcism: it ain't pretty
Exorcisms these days aren’t like what you see in the movies, but they’re not exactly pleasant, either. The WaPo article goes on to explain:

Exorcists said the people they help can be in the grip of evil to varying degrees. Only a small fraction, they said, are completely possessed by demons -- which can cause them to display inhuman strength, speak in exotic tongues, recoil in the presence of sacred objects or overpower others with a stench.

In those cases, the exorcists must confront the devil directly, using the power of the church to order it to abandon its host. More often, however, priests perform what some of them refer to as "soft exorcisms," using prayer to rid people of evil influences that control their lives.

It still sounds pretty crazy, and you may be patting yourself on the back for not being a part of such a wacky religion, but it turns out Jews have been doing our own version of exorcisms for centuries.
Dybbuks: circumcised demons, basically
Apparently we’re not so concerned about evil spirits. It’s the souls of the dead that cause problems for us Jews. An article from ghostvillage.com explains:

A human being that is possessed by a spirit or some otherworldly creature is a phenomenon found in a myriad of cultures and religions. Jewish folklore calls the spirit that causes this rare but remarkable occurrence a "dybbuk."

A dybbuk (pronounced "dih-buk") is the term for a wandering soul that attaches itself to a living person and controls that person's behavior to accomplish a task. The word "dybbuk" is the Hebrew word for "cleaving" or "clinging.

Rabbi Gershon Winkler has been studying Jewish folklore, spirituality, and its shamanic roots for more than 25 years. He has written books covering the Jewish perspective on ghosts, apparitions, magic, and reincarnation, including a book titled Dybbuk. I spoke to Rabbi Winkler about dybbuk from his office at the Walking Stick Foundation in the wilderness of New Mexico.

Rabbi Winkler said, "[Jews] don't believe in demonic possession. We believe that, on very rare occasions, there can be a possession of a living person by the soul of one who has left the body, but not the world, and they're seeking a body to possess to finish whatever they need to finish."

Winkler explained how stories of dybbuk go back to ancient scriptures. In the Old Testament of the Bible, in the Book of Samuel (18:10), a bad spirit is briefly described as attaching itself to King Saul, the first king elected chieftain of the ancient tribes of Israel: "And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul..." Later in the Bible, in the Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah is possessed by the spirit of a dead man who is trying to get the prophet to trick the King into going to war when he wasn't supposed to. Winkler said, "You have stories like that, that just nonchalantly mention spirits of people who have left us coming down to effect some change, some phenomenon in this world."

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• The year's best picture books, including this photo from "A Celebration of Black Fatherhood," by Carol Ross. [The Washington Post]

• Peter Schjeldahl reviews "The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture," by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. [The New Yorker]

• In "AK47: The Story of the People's Gun," Michael Hodges traces the history of the "Coca-Cola of firearms" from the adolescence of Mikhail Kalashnikov to the Peole's Liberation Front in Vietnam. The review reads, "The book works thanks to some spectacular reportage and because its author traces, without glorification, how the appliance of science kills human beings, building the narrative around people like those kids in sub-Saharan Africa where the AK 'moved from being a tool of the conflict to the cause of the conflict.'" [The Guardian]

• An economist leaves western Pennsylvania and road trips it with his wife around the U.S.A. But instead of just passing through the Middle of Nowhere, they stop, stay and take jobs like desk clerk and waitress. The result: Michael Yates's "Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: An Economist's Travelogue." [Z Magazine]

• The poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, one of the most important figures in postwar Polish literature. [The New York Times]

• Ron Currie Jr. quotes Nietzsche for the title and sets his collection of stories, "God is Dead," in Darfur. [The San Francisco Chronicle]

The New York Times, proud of its centuries-long tradition of reporting on "trends" years after their expiration dates, was contemplating what to cover in July 2007. The up-and-coming Lower East Side? Nah, better wait five years. The East Coast-West Coast hip hop rivalry? That could be good. How about that new personal computing trend of using so-called "floppy disks" to store kilobytes of information from the computer? Genius!

But in the end, the Paper of Record bought a ticket abroad to see what life was like for Jews in post-Jewish Eastern Europe. Thus it came up with a piece on Krakow's Festival of Jewish Culture, citing a phenomenon as "beginning" when it's been happening for almost two decades. The article could easily have been written in 1995. In fact, it sort of was.

Here's The New York Times, July 12, 2007:

KRAKOW, Poland — There is a curious thing happening in this old country, scarred by Nazi death camps, raked by pogroms and blanketed by numbing Soviet sterility: Jewish culture is beginning to flourish again.

"Jewish style" restaurants are serving up platters of pirogis, klezmer bands are playing plaintive Oriental melodies, derelict synagogues are gradually being restored. Every June, a festival of Jewish culture here draws thousands of people to sing Jewish songs and dance Jewish dances. The only thing missing, really, are Jews.

... with relatively few Jews, Jewish culture in Poland is being embraced and promoted by the young and the fashionable.

..."You cannot have genocide and then have people live as if everything is normal," said Konstanty Gebert, founder of a Polish-Jewish monthly, Midrasz. "It's like when you lose a limb. Poland is suffering from Jewish phantom pain."

Here's The International Herald Tribune, July 17, 1995:

... Throughout the festival week, the old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, and other parts of the city were the scene of concerts, theatrical performances, exhibitions, films, street happenings and workshops rooted in Jewish heritage.

... The irony of staging a Jewish festival for a predominantly non-Jewish audience, in what essentially is a Jewish ghost town, has been apparent from the beginning.

... In addition, chic new Jewish style restaurants, cafes, bookstores, and galleries have been opened. There is a new Jewish Culture Center, and a local travel agency specializes in tours of sites related to Steven Spielberg's movie "Schindler's List," which was shot in Krakow.

...fascination with the Jewish world destroyed by the Holocaust has grown among many non-Jews in the region.

New Jewish museums, study programs and seminars abound, and Jewish books proliferate even in countries where few Jews remain.

... It's as if the vacuum created by the Holocaust physically demands to be filled — whether or not there are Jews to fill it.

Next up, The Times plans to send a reporter to Afghanistan to report on the growing use of "Mujahideen" to combat Soviet troops.

Wprost coverWprost is a weekly Polish newsmagazine known for its conservative and anti-German sentiments. Check out this cover, photoshopped in response to clashes with Germany over the new EU treaty at the European Union Summit last week. The BBC reports:

The mocked up image shows Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, nuzzling at [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel's chest.

Germany's Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called the image "tasteless".

Social Democrat Markus Meckel, head of the German-Polish parliamentary group, said: "It is quite unbelievable. Poland has lost so many friends over the past weeks and months. It should really think hard in the future about how it hopes to win them back."

Who comes up with these cover schemes? I know Europeans are pretty cool with boobs but I agree Frank-Walter Steinmeier. It can't help but wonder how this country would react if, say, Newsweek or Time put boobs on their covers. They'd probably sell more issues than ever and then be relegated to "satellite". Now there's one for all you techies to figure out...

The good will of "New Europe" is no more, thanks to the bumbling of President Bush, says Anne Applebaum:

Putin's Cold War rhetoric is beginning to worry people all across the continent; he must be counting it a huge success. Yet it seems no one in the Pentagon ever imagined that anyone might object to the project, or that the locals might want some extra reassurance, or that a bit of judicious diplomacy might have smoothed the way in advance. According to some, the State Department didn't even know the missile shield was going ahead until the Pentagon had already made the decision. Sound familiar?

The only quibble I have with Applebaum's argument is that it doesn't take into account how amenable Old Europe has once more become to American interests. France and Germany now have heads of state with a professed tendency toward Washington, made ever starker by the possible vacancy in the role of world partner that will attend the resignation of Tony Blair in Britain.

Though there's every reason to suspect that David Cameron or Gordon Brown would be more reliable Atlanticists than they let on to their constituencies: Sarkozy and Merkel get away with snuggling up to Washington because their countries both opposed the one U.S. foreign policy decision credited with blackening our reputation: the war in Iraq.

Of course, that the administration has chosen now to press for the installation of the missile shield is telling in another way. It suggests that Bush has learned little since 2000, when an anti-nuclear defense system was a point in his virgin presidential campaign. (Instead of a "freedom doctrine" or nation-building, zapping rockets from outer space was on chief security concern of the GOP candidate.)

So the rationale that such a shield is designed to protect the United States from Iran and North Korea--regimes which have not yet got missiles that can reach the United States and certainly didn't have them in 2000--is transparently false. However, Applebaum is quite right to stress that Kremlin knows that the shield is not designed to antagonize Russia, which still ranks at the largest owner of nuclear warheads on the planet.  Recall that the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld had signaled China as the most exigent  military threat to the U.S. in the 21st century. China is the likelier target for such a hapless deterrent. 

Of course, it scarcely helps that Moscow and Beijing are bosom buddies on everything from human rights abuses to kleptocratic third world oil deals to squashing any attempt to bring justice to the criminal state murders of democratic reformists like Rafiq Hariri.

Welcome to the New World Order. Same as the old, really. 

Irena SandlerA 97-year-old Polish woman was honored today for saving 2500 Jews during the Holocaust. In the ceremony at Parliament, the Polish President Lech Kacyzinski said that Irena Sandler deserved a Nobel Peace Prize. (if for nothing else than being able to keep count of all those she saved, no doubt)

Sandler, who lives in a nursing home was too frail to attend the ceremony, but received major commendation from all.

“I think she's a great lady, very courageous, and I think she's a model for the whole international community,” Israeli Ambassador David Peleg said after the ceremony. “I think that her courage is a very special one.”

In 1965, Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial awarded Sendler one of its first medals given to people who saved Jews, the so-called “Righteous Among the Nations.”

She was given the honor in 1983, after Poland's Communist authorities finally agreed to allow her to travel abroad.

Money grubbing Jews as depicted by Lodz artists.The Jewish Theater of New York's season debut, "Last Jew in Europe" opened yesterday. The play is described as a tragicomedy and follows the story of one interfaith couple in Lodz, Poland on the road to wedded bliss. The comedic part ensues when the couple, a Polish Jew and his Catholic fiancee, meet a Mormon who has come to Lodz (which also happens to be the anti-semitic capital of the world in this play) to reveal the town's Jewish families. As the husband-to-be has concealed his religion from his fiancee, you can see where all of this convoluted, foiled plot is headed.

What makes the play all the more surreal is that is based on a true story. I'm assuming liberties were taken with the Mormon subplot, but perhaps not in the disclosure of the play's location.

The Jewish Theater of New York invites New Yorkers on a trip, lasting one-hour, twenty-five minutes, to a city that’s an anti-Semite’s Paradise, existing today, and located right in the middle of the EU. Welcome to Lodz, Poland, where anti-Jewish declarations are graphically exhibited in almost every street corner and calls for sending Jews back to the gas chambers go unchallenged.

Our Self-Imposed GhettoA booklet entitled "Civilizations At War In Europe" distributed by Polish MEP Maciej Giertych to the European Parliament is sparking its share of concern. The 32-page brochure outlines the Jewish peoples' desire of separateness as the root of ghetto culture.

In his brochure, published in Strasbourg last week, he wrote of Jewish people: "It is a civilization of programmed separateness, of programmed differentiation from the surrounding communities ... By their own will, they prefer to live a separate life, in apartheid from the surrounding communities ... They form the ghettos themselves ..."

An EU spokesperson said that they don't condone this behavior or any act of "anti-Semitism, xenophobia, or racism."

In related news, distribution of the blood libel book was halted...for now.

Secret Agent Monsignor: Stanislaw WieglusThe history of Catholic opposition to Communism has been greatly exaggerated. "How many divisions has the pope," Stalin, in one of his frequent fits of hubrisitic stupidity, once remarked, thus arming half a century's worth of cold warriors -- and the now the mournful obituarists of Pope John Paul II -- with their favorite irony. Never mind that Communism had begun rotting from within well before the Georgian monster regurgitated a small fraction of the blood he'd sucked out of Russia and Eastern Europe. The best leftist response to the triumphalist credit still being awarded to les clercs for bringing down the Berlin Wall came from the brilliant Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who, tweaking Timothy Garton Ash, asked, "How many masses has Kremlin?"

Graham Greene split his loyalties between Rome and Moscow and may have once been approached by a charismatic whorehouse-frequenting KGB agent in Estonia to do some "dry work" in England and elsewhere. The same liturgical socialism infected, to varying degree, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, who remains fond enough of the totalitarian mindset to place the crown of thorns upon the heads of Al-Qaeda and compare suicide bombers to Rosa Luxemburg in the pages of the Guardian.

I bring this up because it appears that Holy Mother Church is intent on replaying a miniature in-house version of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The divine election of a pope who was once a member of the Nazi Youth was first; now comes the news that the Archbishop of Warsaw was an informant for Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (S.B.), Poland's Communist secret police apparat:

Archbishop Wielgus acknowledged today that in 1978, he signed a cooperation statement with the secret police — under pressure, he said, from a “brutal intelligence officer” — when he was seeking permission to travel to Munich, Germany. He insisted that the only cooperation he ever gave was to inform the secret police of his agenda during foreign academic meetings and to promise not to take part in anti-Communist activities.

“That was my moment of weakness,” he wrote in his statement today.

The documents published by Rzeczpospolita and other newspapers suggest a much greater role for Father Wielgus. They indicated that he was recruited by the S.B. more than a decade earlier — in 1967, when he was a philosophy student at the University of Lublin in eastern Poland. It cited other documents in which the S.B. claimed Father Wielgus gave them information about activities at the university, where he later taught medieval philosophy.

The newspapers claimed that some of the documents refer to Father Wielgus by the code names Grey, Adam and Adam Wysocki. They said he received training from the S.B. and was rewarded for his collaboration with a grant to study in Munich.

Whoops.

Right-wing Catholic nutters are trying to pass legislation that would make Jesus "king" of Poland:

If the bill becomes law, Jesus will follow the path of the Virgin Mary, who was declared honorary queen of Poland by King John Casimir 350 years ago.

The motion has been backed by MPs from the far right League of Polish families (LPR), the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and the Peasants' Party (PSL).

Now if Mary is queen and Jesus is king, doesn't that make their mother-son court more appropriate to Vienna than Warsaw?