Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Zelva Memorial Book, by Yerachmiel Moorstein (ed.) 1981, 1992. Zelva Committee in Israel, New Jersey

Communist Sympathies a Significant Force Among Poland’s Pre-WWII Jews

The town of Zelva is located near Grodno, in present-day Belarus. It had been part of the Russian-occupied Kresy (eastern Poland) since the Partitions, and was returned to Poland after 1918. This yizkor (yizker) book largely focuses on local and community matters, but does contain a revealing set of statements, which I quote below.

JEWISH SEPARATISM PERSISTED DESPITE POLISH OVERTURES

Yerachmiel Moorstein writes about some of the changes that occurred in the wake of the resurrection of Poland in 1918, “The new Polish regime began to establish itself. Among its directives was the adoption of the Polish language. A public school was opened that accepted students free of tuition. The Jews, however, did not accept this development enthusiastically, and continued to send their children to Heder.” (p. 14. Italics in original).

BEYOND COMMUNIST SYMPATHIES: COMMUNISM WAS A SIGNIFICANT INTELLECTUAL MOVEMENT AMONG THE JEWS OF PRE-WWII POLAND

Moorstein comments, “So my town of Zelva stands out, first and foremost in my mind, as a place where the Zionist movement dominated, and stood out over the other intellectual movements that pervaded the Jewish communities of Poland, that also found expression there, such as the Bundists, Communism, and Yiddishism.” (p. 18. Emphasis added).

Obviously, Moorstein does not think that Communism among Jews was insignificant, as argued by Zydokomuna denialists. For more on the fact that Communism was in no sense tangential to Jews and Judaism, see, for example:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/zydokomuna-deep-jewish-roots-shulman/