Jews have been in Poland for 10 centuries.

Jews have been living working and coexisting ideas in Poland for centuries. It was at one point, one of the only European places that welcomed Jews, when they were persecuted elsewhere.

Poland was once a Jewish home shelter, known as Po-lin, or “here I rest”. Prior to World War II there were 3.2 million Jews in Poland, that’s a very big number. That was about 10% of the total population and the largest Jewish diaspora in Europe. That situation changed with deteriorating fortunes of the country, the emergence of anti-Semitism and finally Holocaust. What’s happened during the Holocaust, most of Polish Jewry were murdered.

After the war it is estimated that around 300,000 Jewish people return to Poland or survived in Poland. Many of them returned just for a very brief period of time and when elsewhere for all kinds of reasons. Mostly they returned to check for survivors and because they had the opportunity to emigrate they did. Later a lot of them left Poland after the first post War Jewish pogroms and after anti-Semitic purge in March 1968 organize by Polish Communist party.

Currently there’s around just under 10,000 Polish Jewish people in Poland so not very many. Nowadays is a kind of a revival of Jewish life. Some people perceive it as a beach fake other people really embrace it and one of the ones that really embraces it. I think it’s a wonderful thing to be able to reclaim that space where there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish people going in on trips on holidays to Poland every year. Many of them do settle in Poland interestingly, Poland and Israel do a lot of business today.