“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 not to use his last name for fear that his former neo-Nazi friends could target him or his family.
Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of a Jewish revival under way in Poland in which 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.
Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews; more than 90 percent of them were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. A majority of those who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many either abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.
But Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, noted that 20 years after the fall of Communism, a historical reckoning was finally taking place.
He said Pawel’s metamorphosis illustrated just how far the country had come. “Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, ‘I am a Jew,’ ’’ he said. “But today, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland.’’
Five years ago, the rabbi noted, there were about 250 families in the Jewish community in Warsaw; today there are 600. During that period, the number of rabbis serving the country has grown from one to eight.
Pawel’s transformation from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s. Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism and an extreme right-wing ideology. They shaved their heads, carried knives, and greeted each other with the Nazi salute.
Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said, he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His staunchly Catholic father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.
“One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, ‘If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!’ ’’
Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed at 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel’s maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her grandparents.
When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they told him the truth: that his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery.
Shaken by the knowledge of his Jewish roots, Pawel said he decided to go see Schudrich, who gave him a copy of the Hebrew Bible. At 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an Orthodox Jew.
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