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Warsaw Jewish cemetery director fired amid clash over who controls the preservation of Poland’s Jewish past
The director of Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery has been fired following a dispute over restoration projects on the site, which he said too often excluded local Jews.
Witold Wrzosinski, the Jewish director, said he was pushed out on Dec. 10 after seeking a new contract with the Polish Cultural Heritage Foundation, which controls public funds for works in the cemetery. The cemetery languished in neglect for decades after World War II, only recently becoming the center of efforts to preserve the history of Poland’s Jews.
Wrzosinski manages the cemetery’s operating budget for the local Jewish community board, but many restoration projects there also depend on public funds invested by the Cultural Heritage Foundation.
The foundation is led by Michał Laszczkowski, who has ties to the right-wing Law and Justice party that governed Poland from 2015 to 2023 and backed Poland’s newly elected president, a Holocaust revisionist. The party promotes historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism.
Wrzosinski alleges that the current contract between the foundation and the Jewish community board is “abusive,” limiting the influence of local Jews over projects in their own cemetery.
“The whole composition of the contract left us with no power to control the priorities of the foundation,” said Wrzosinski. “We think, as the Jewish community that owns the cemetery, we should have a say.”
Some 200,000 Jews are buried at the cemetery on Okopowa Street in the heart of Poland’s capital. Founded in 1806, it is one of Europe’s largest Jewish cemeteries and holds generations of cultural luminaries, rabbis and activists, along with about 50,000 Jews who were killed by the Nazis and consigned to two mass graves. One portion remains active for the small Jewish community still living in Warsaw today.
In a meeting with the foundation, Wrzosinski said he presented a new arrangement that would safeguard the Jewish community’s input in restoration and conservation projects.
But he said Laszczkowski rejected the arrangement and said the “mental wellbeing of the members of the Jewish community is not a factor” to him.
Laszczkowski did not reply to requests for comment from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The Cultural Heritage Foundation has a stated mission to “protect and promote the national heritage of Poland.” Though it is not specifically dedicated to Jewish heritage, restoring some of Poland’s 1,200 Jewish cemeteries has fallen under its purview. In 2017, the Polish government pledged $28 million to renovate Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery and put the Cultural Heritage Foundation in charge of the funds.
At the time, Warsaw’s Jewish community board was happy to sign this agreement, said Wrzosinski.
“Everybody was so excited that so much money was being pumped into the cemetery that they allowed the foundation to have everything,” he said.
After Laszczkowski rejected Wrzosinski’s proposed new contract, Wrzosinski said the Jewish community would end its agreement with the foundation. Laszczkowski in turn threatened to sue and cut off public funds from the cemetery if Wrzosinski stayed at the helm.
Tombstones at the Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw, Poland. (Bildagentur-online/Schoening/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Then the Jewish board turned on Wrzosinski, with four out of seven members voting to remove him. They also suspended his member rights and blocked him from communal Hanukkah celebrations, though that ban has already been reversed after a backlash. Wrzosinski said his fellow board members were intimidated by Laszczkowski’s legal threats.
Wrzosinski has directed the Jewish cemetery since 2020, becoming a key figure behind its renovations and rising profile. He began working at the largely abandoned cemetery in 2006, when it looked more like a forest, and led an effort to clean, decode and index the tombstones. He and his colleagues are documenting the graves in an online database, allowing descendants around the world to trace where their family members rest. Wrzosinski has found seven of his own relatives among the graves.
Wrzosinski said the Cultural Heritage Foundation could fall vulnerable to outside forces, including nationalist political leaders, since it was not contractually accountable to local Jews.
He pointed to a 2018 project under the Law and Justice government, which directed the foundation to build the Mausoleum of Jewish Fighters for the Independence of Poland — a reconstruction of a structure originally planned in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. Many local Jews see the mausoleum as a political design. It features a large Polish eagle and a Star of David, appearing to intertwine Polish nationalism with Jewish memory.
“People didn’t really feel it’s natural, or that it meets any actual need of the community. It just feels artificial and sent from above,” said Wrzosinski.
That same year, the Law and Justice government passed a notorious law that banned accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.
The mausoleum was built on a part of the cemetery that hosted some of its oldest graves. During construction, the tombstones were removed and stored in a back area. Wrzosinski said the foundation promised to return them, but after years of pressure from the Jewish community, the stones remain out of sight.
“This is wrong according to the halacha, according to the Jewish law,” he said. “If you know where tombstones are coming from, you shouldn’t keep them far away from that place, and you shouldn’t keep them in mud, somewhere in the back, if you took them from the actual area of the cemetery where people are buried.”
Wrzosinski’s dismissal has ignited a fierce outcry among Polish Jewish historians and museum professionals. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the chief curator of Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, circulated a petition to reinstate him. Within a few days, it has amassed nearly 700 signatures from across the globe.
“The abrupt dismissal is both incomprehensible and deeply troubling,” said the letter. “The preservation of Jewish heritage and memory — especially in a place so profoundly marked by history — requires expertise and knowledgeable leadership. Such leadership should be protected and supported, not discarded.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next?
(JTA) — Jewish institutions are responding to a boycott of Israeli products at a Brooklyn grocery store by buying up Bamba.
Four thousand free bags of the Israeli peanut butter-flavored snack made their way Sunday along the Celebrate Israel Day Parade route up Fifth Avenue, passed around by volunteers with UJA-Federation of New York.
It was the organization’s first response to a contentious election result at the Park Slope Food Coop, the members-only Brooklyn grocery store that last week voted to boycott Israeli products. Bamba is one of the products no longer sold at the coop as a result of the boycott and a symbol of the Israeli snack food industry.
The Bamba distribution was coordinated by UJA, which was a sponsor of the parade, and the nonprofit group Met Council, which will also be distributing bags across their network of food pantries. (An initial purchase of 20,000 bags was made by UJA in the wake of the coop vote last week.) The snacks were brought to UJA’s office by truck on Friday.
The Met Council will distribute the remaining Bamba to the hundreds of food pantries who receive its food deliveries, including the 14 it owns and operates, by next week, CEO David Greenfield told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“They smartly decided to make lemonade out of lemons,” Greenfield said of the UJA initiative. (Some of the pantries, he noted, may decline the Bamba anticipating clients with peanut allergies.)
The Bamba will be added as an additional free snack item to pantry clients’ usual takeaways. Some of it will also be delivered directly to Holocaust survivors within the Met Council’s network.
Sunday’s parade was a respite for members of the Jewish community who say they felt alienated in the wake of the coop vote Tuesday night. But it was also controversial due to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision not to attend — a mayoral first — and the surprise appearance of far-right Israeli Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich.
But why purchase the popular Israeli snack in bulk, as opposed to encouraging local grocery stores to stock up on it and other Israeli items?
“There are a bunch of ideas on the table,” Hindy Poupko, senior vice president of the UJA-Federation told JTA. “We wanted to do something in the immediate aftermath of the boycott to demonstrate solidarity with the anti-boycott members of the coop, and all the work that they put into it. We wanted to immediately demonstrate to our community that we are able to respond quickly when these things happen, and also demonstrate that we will always be on the side of coops working together — not engaging in boycotts.”
One option UJA is floating, Poupko said, is an Israeli fair at a number of Jewish community centers where visitors can purchase Israeli goods.
Some advocates have even begun taking legal action against the coop, hoping to see the items restored to the shelves.
A group of pro-Israel activists filed a cease and desist motion in response to the boycott, alleging that the boycott itself is illegal and discriminatory.
CUNY law professor Jeffrey Lax announced in a post on X Wednesday that he had filed a New York State Division of Human Rights complaint on behalf of his Jewish advocacy group alleging that the boycott violates a state law that prevents the boycott or blacklist of products based on protected classes, including national origin.
“Instead of bringing neighbors together, this community institution chose to alienate many of its longtime Jewish members and their allies by banning a handful of Israeli products,” the ADL of New York/New Jersey said in a Thursday statement on X. “This move does nothing to advance peace in the Middle East; instead, the heinous rhetoric about Israel and Jews invoked in the process to ban these products contributes to the intense climate of antisemitism in NYC.”
The coop itself has not responded to JTA’s requests for comment. Activists aligned with the boycott, which passed with a 67% majority, referred JTA back to a press release distributed immediately following the vote last week.
“Tonight’s win is proof that cooperative movements are powerful models for exercising solidarity and participatory democracy,” coop board candidate Taylor Pate said in the May 26 statement.
In addition to Bamba, a variety of bell pepper sold only in the winter, persimmons, olive oil, sesame products, and Dorot frozen herb cubes are affected by the Park Slope Food Coop boycott. Two of the brands, Al Arz Tahini and Equal Exchange olive oil, are made at least in part by Arab-Israelis.
Asked for comment in regards to the coop vote results, Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Mark Treyger, through a spokesperson, referred JTA to a May 9 sermon by Congregation Beth Elohim senior Rabbi Rachel Timoner, in which she called it “the hyper local example of a proxy war.”
“If the boycott was designed to change Israel’s policies or to create a Palestinian state, or if it had the goal of safety, freedom, and equality for both Israelis and Palestinians, many of us would support it,” Timoner added. “But the BDS movement is not that.”
Timoner clarified her stance on the boycott at the coop in a sermon days after the vote.
“I do think that there is a lot of antisemitism threaded through the entire conversation about Israel,” Timoner said in the May 29 sermon. “But the vast majority of people who voted for that boycott were simply trying to say that what is happening to the Palestinians is wrong.”
A representative for Nestlé, the parent company of Osem, which manufactures Bamba, did not respond to a request for comment about the boycott.
The boycott means Brooklynites will have one fewer place to buy Bamba, the now ubiquitous snack that has been sold at Trader Joe’s for the last decade and is credited with reducing the prevalence of peanut allergies in Israel.
There’s at least one other place in New York City where Bamba was once available and no longer is. In March 2021, at the opening of baseball season, Bamba and the New York Mets announced a partnership in which the snack would be sold at the stadium in the main snack kiosks. The following year, the baseball team and the snack launched a sweepstakes for children to win free tickets to a game.
Since a March 2023 announcement that the brands would partner again for the season, Bamba has not publicly commented on their partnership. The Mets did not respond to a request for comment.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Bamba blankets NYC after Park Slope Food Coop vote to boycott Israeli products. What’s next? appeared first on The Forward.
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Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel
(JTA) — Hezbollah appears to have rejected a ceasefire that the United States brokered between Israel and Lebanon, where the Iranian proxy is based.
The deal reportedly would have allowed Israel to remain in southern Lebanon, where it has established a buffer zone, but not permit any attacks in Beirut unless Hezbollah attacked Israel within its own borders. It would also have required Hezbollah fighters to leave the buffer zone.
A top Hezbollah leader said accepting a demand to leave southern Lebanon would amount to “surrender” for the group.
“What we are concerned about is an end to the aggression, ceasefire and Israel’s withdrawal,” Secretary-General Naim Qassem said in a televised statement on Thursday, the Associated Press reported. “We did not make any commitment to any party to stop resisting as long as there is occupation.”
Dozens of Israeli soldiers have died in the fighting, which Hezbollah is increasingly prosecuting with the use of drones.
The rejection comes as the U.S. House of Representatives voted to rebuke President Donald Trump and his war on Iran on Wednesday, narrowly passing a resolution that limits Trump’s power to continue the war without congressional approval.
Four Republicans voted with Democrats on the bill, in a sign of how opposition to the war, which Trump launched jointly with Israel in February, is crossing party lines ahead of high-stakes midterm elections in the United States.
The bill would not require presidential signoff but is seen as unlikely to substantively change Trump’s handling of the war, which he has insisted does not require congressional approval.
Trump called the vote “meaningless” in a post on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
“Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing.”
The bill now goes to the Senate, where a similar measure has advanced in recent weeks, also with support from a handful of Republicans. It comes at a delicate time, as an uncertain ceasefire struck in early April has now stretched on without a resolution for longer than active hostilities unfolded. Trump has failed to achieve the terms for a deal to permanently end the war that he said he wanted, and this week said he thought the constant negotiations had grown “very boring.” Hezbollah’s apparent rejection of a ceasefire deal is another setback.
Iran has continued to battle during its ceasefire with the United States, though not against Israel: On Wednesday, it struck Kuwait’s main airport, killing one and injuring 60.
Also on Wednesday, Trump confirmed reports that he had called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “f—ing crazy” during a call on Monday in which Trump pressed Netanyahu to strike a ceasefire with Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon. Trump told a New York Post podcast that he was “a little perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon” but that he liked Netanyahu and worked well with him.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Hezbollah rejects US-brokered ceasefire deal struck by Lebanon and Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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A Yiddish favorite is among the top baby names in New York
Each year around this time, the Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular baby names for the past year. This year, New York state’s list includes the Yiddish name Gitty, as well as five other traditional Ashkenazi names: Chana, Chaya, Rivka, Chaim and Moshe.
According to this interactive list in the Times Union, 43 of every million babies in the U.S. were given the name Gitty in the past six years.
The vast majority of these babies were apparently born in either Yiddish-speaking Hasidic families or in non-Yiddish speaking Haredi families (often referred to as “Yeshivish”) who maintain the tradition of giving their children Biblical and other traditional Jewish names, often after a deceased relative.
Although some people may be surprised to hear a Yiddish name like Gitty making the list, it lines up with the most recent statistics on language use. According to this study, in households with children aged 5 and under, Yiddish ranks as the third most common home language in New York (spoken by roughly 3% of young children), trailing only English and Spanish.
It also makes sense in light of the most recent demographic breakdown of Jewish families in the New York area. According to this 2023 UJA study, Orthodox families represent about 19% of Jewish households (approx. 430,000 individuals, including children) — a group that’s growing rapidly due to higher birth rates and younger average ages, with about two-thirds identifying as Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) and the rest as Modern Orthodox.
The name Gitty is a variant of the name Gitl, which means “good” in Yiddish. Why then are these babies called Gitty instead of Gitl? This is part of a trend that began years ago, when Haredi children’s names adopted a “y” at the end, apparently mimicking the old American tradition of ending children’s names with a “y” (think Tommy instead of Thomas). As a result, Rivka became Rivky; Moshe (or Moishe) became Moishy and Gitl became Gitty.
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