Early history: 966–1385

The first Jews arrived in the territory of modern Poland in the 10th century. By travelling along the trade routes leading eastwards to Kiev and Bukhara, Jewish merchants (known as Radhanites) crossed the areas of Silesia. One of them, a diplomat and merchant from the Moorish town of Tortosa in Spanish Al-Andalus, known under his Arabic name of Ibrahim ibn Jakub, was the first chronicler to mention the Polish state under the rule of prince Mieszko I. The first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the 11th century. It appears that Jews were then living in Gniezno, at that time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty. The first permanent Jewish community is mentioned in 1085 by a Jewish scholar Jehuda ha-Kohen in the city of Przemyśl.

The first extensive Jewish emigration from Western Europe to Poland occurred at the time of the First Crusade in 1098. Under Boleslaus III (1102–1139), the Jews, encouraged by the tolerant regime of this ruler, settled throughout Poland, including over the border in Lithuanian territory as far as Kiev. Boleslaus III for his part recognized the utility of the Jews in the development of the commercial interests of his country. The Jews came to form the backbone of the Polish economy and the coins minted by Mieszko III even bear Hebraic markings. Jews enjoyed undisturbed peace and prosperity in the many principalities into which the country was then divided; they formed the middle class in a country where the general population consisted of landlords (developing into szlachta, the unique Polish nobility) and peasants, and they were instrumental in promoting the commercial interests of the land.

The tolerant situation was gradually altered by the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand, and by the neighboring German states on the other. There were, however, among the reigning princes some determined protectors of the Jewish inhabitants, who considered the presence of the latter most desirable as far as the economic development of the country was concerned. Prominent among such rulers was Boleslaus the Pious of Kalisz, Prince of Great Poland. With the consent of the class representatives and higher officials, in 1264 he issued a General Charter of Jewish Liberties, the Statute of Kalisz, which granted all Jews the freedom of worship, trade and travel. During the next hundred years, the Church pushed for the persecution of the Jews while the rulers of Poland usually protected them.

In 1334, King Casimir III the Great (1303–1370) amplified and expanded Bolesław's old charter with the Wiślicki Statute. Casimir, who according to a legend had a Jewish lover named Esterka from Opoczno was especially friendly to the Jews, and his reign is regarded as an era of great prosperity for Polish Jewry, and was nicknamed by his contemporaries "King of the serfs and Jews." Under penalty of death, he prohibited the kidnapping of Jewish children for the purpose of enforced Christian baptism. He inflicted heavy punishment for the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. Nevertheless, while for the greater part of Casimir’s reign the Jews of Poland enjoyed tranquility, toward its close they were subjected to persecution on account of the Black Death. In 1347, the first blood libel accusation against Jews in Poland was recorded, and in 1367 the first pogrom took place in Poznań. Later the pogroms occurred at Kalisz, Kraków, and other cities along the German frontier, and it is estimated that 10,000 Jews were killed. Compared with the pitiless destruction of their coreligionists in Western Europe, however, the Polish Jews did not fare badly; and the Jewish masses of Germany fled to the more hospitable cities in Poland.

The early Jagiellon era: 1385–1505

As a result of the marriage of Wladislaus II to Jadwiga, daughter of Louis I of Hungary, Lithuania was united with the kingdom of Poland. Although, in 1388, rights were extended to Lithuanian Jews as well, it was under the rule of Wladislaus II and those of his successors that the first extensive persecutions of the Jews in Poland commenced, and the king did not act to stop these events. There were accusations of blood libel and riots against the Jews, and persecution gradually increased, especially as the clergy pushed for less tolerance. Hysteria caused by Black Death led to additional 14th-century outbreaks of violence against the Jews. Traders and artisans fearing Jewish rivalry supported the harassment.

The decline in the status of the Jews was briefly checked by Casimir IV the Jagiellonian (1447–1492), but soon the nobility forced him to issue the Statute of Nieszawa. Among other things it abolished the ancient privileges of the Jews "as contrary to divine right and the law of the land." Nevertheless, the king continued to offer his protection to the Jews. Two years later Casimir issued another document announcing that he could not deprive the Jews of his benevolence on the basis of "the principle of tolerance which in conformity with God's laws obliged him to protect them". The policy of the government toward the Jews of Poland oscillated under Casimir's sons and successors, John I Olbracht (1492–1501) and Alexander the Jagiellonian (1501–1506). The latter expelled the Jews from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1495 when he was the Grand Duke of Lithuania but reversed the law in 1503 shortly after becoming King of Poland. A year later he issued a proclamation in which he stated that a policy of tolerance befitted "kings and rulers".

Center of the Jewish world: 1505–72

Alexander became more tolerant just as the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, as well as from Austria, Hungary and Germany, thus stimulating Jewish immigration to the much more tolerant Poland. Indeed, with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Poland became the recognized haven for exiles from western Europe; and the resulting accession to the ranks of Polish Jewry made it the cultural and spiritual center of the Jewish people.

The most prosperous period for Polish Jews began following this new influx of Jews with the reign of Zygmunt I (1506–1548), who protected the Jews in his realm. His son, Zygmunt II August (1548–1572), mainly followed in the tolerant policy of his father and also granted autonomy to the Jews in the matter of communal administration and laid the foundation for the power of the Qahal, or autonomous Jewish community. This period led to the creation of a proverb about Poland being a "heaven for the Jews". According to some sources, about three-quarters of all Jews lived in Poland by the middle of the 16th century. In the middle of the 16th century, Poland welcomed the Jewish newcomers from Italy and Turkey, mostly of Sephardi origin, however some of the immigrants from the Ottoman Empire are still claimed to be Mizrahim. Jewish religious life thrived in many Polish communities. In 1503, the Polish monarchy appointed Rabbi Jacob Polak, the official Rabbi of Poland, marking the emergence of the Chief Rabbinate. By 1551, Jews were given permission to choose their own Chief Rabbi. The Chief Rabbinate held power over law and finance, appointing judges and other officials. Some power was shared with local councils. The Polish government permitted the Rabbinate to grow in power, to use it for tax collection purposes. Only 30% of the money raised by the Rabbinate served Jewish causes, the rest went to the Crown for protection. In this period Poland-Lithuania became the main center for Ashkenazi Jewry and its yeshivot achieved fame from the early 16th century.

Moses Isserles (1520–1572), an eminent Talmudist of the 16th century, established his yeshiva in Kraków. In addition to being a renowned Talmudic and legal scholar, Isserles was also learned in Kabbalah, and studied history, astronomy, and philosophy.

The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: 1572–1795

The Warsaw Confederation

Following the childless death of Zygmunt II, the last king of the Jagiellon dynasty, Polish and Lithuanian nobles (szlachta) gathered at Warsaw in 1573 and signed a document of limited toleration in which representatives of all the major religions pledged each other mutual support and tolerance. The edict did not include the Polish Brethren, an anti-Trinitarian that would later become known as Socinians, who formed roots for the modern Unitarian church in the US.

The Cossack uprising and the Deluge

In 1648 the Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its population (over three million people), and Jewish losses were counted in the hundreds of thousands. The first of these was the Chmielnicki Uprising, in which Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). Khmelnytsky riled up the people by telling them that the Poles had sold them as slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews". The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that period is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and jasyr (captivity in the Ottoman Empire). The Jewish community suffered greatly during the 1648 Cossack uprising which had been directed primarily against the Polish nobility. The Jews, perceived as allies of the nobles, were also victims of the revolt, during which about 20% of them were killed.

Then the incompetent politics of the elected kings of the House of Vasa brought the weakened state to its knees, as it was invaded by the Swedish Empire in what became known as The Deluge. The kingdom of Poland proper, which had hitherto suffered but little either from the Chmielnicki Uprising or from the recurring invasion of the Russians, Crimean Tatars and Ottomans, now became the scene of terrible disturbances (1655–1658). Charles X of Sweden, at the head of his victorious army, overran Poland; and soon the whole country, including the cities of Kraków and Warsaw, was in his hands. The Jews of Great and Little Poland found themselves torn between two sides: those of them who were spared by the Swedes were attacked by the Poles, who accused them of aiding the enemy. The Polish general Stefan Czarniecki, in his flight from the Swedes, devastated the whole country through which he passed and treated the Jews without mercy. The Polish partisan detachments treated the non-Polish inhabitants with equal severity. Moreover, the horrors of the war were aggravated by pestilence, and the Jews and townsfolk of the districts of Kalisz, Kraków, Poznań, Piotrków, and Lublin perished en masse by the sword of the besieging armies and the plague.

As soon as the disturbances had ceased, the Jews began to return and to rebuild their destroyed homes; and while it is true that the Jewish population of Poland had decreased and become impoverished, it still was more numerous than that of the Jewish colonies in Western Europe; and Poland remained as the spiritual center of Judaism, and through 1698, the Polish kings generally remained supportive of the Jews, despite a hostile clergy and nobility. It also should be noted that while Jewish losses in those events were high, estimated by some historians to be close to 500,000, the Commonwealth lost one third of its population — approximately three million of its citizens.

Decline under the Saxon dynasty

With the accession to the throne of the Saxon dynasty the Jews completely lost the support of the government. The szlachta and the townsfolk were increasingly hostile to the Jews, as the religious tolerance that dominated the mentality of the previous generations of Commonwealth citizens was slowly forgotten. In their intolerance, the citizens of the Commonwealth now approached the "standards" that dominated most of the contemporary European countries, and many Jews felt betrayed by the country they once viewed as their haven. In the larger cities, like Poznań and Kraków, quarrels between the Satins (ref?) and the Jewish inhabitants were of frequent occurrence. Attacks on the Jews by students, the so-called Schüler-Gelauf, became everyday occurrences in the large cities, the police regarding such scholastic riots with indifference. In the 16th and 17th centuries Jews were expelled from a number of Polish towns, and victimized by pogroms usually organized by local merchants and artisans. By 1764, there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The worldwide Jewish population was estimated at 1.2 million.

Disorder and anarchy reigned supreme in Poland during the second half of the 18th century, from the accession to the throne of its last king, Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski (1764–1795). In 1772, in the aftermath of the Confederation of Bar, the outlying provinces of Poland were divided among the three neighboring nations, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Jews were most numerous in the territories that fell to the lot of Austria and Russia.

The permanent council established at the instance of the Russian government (1773–1788) served as the highest administrative tribunal, and occupied itself with the elaboration of a plan that would make practicable the reorganization of Poland on a more rational basis. The progressive elements in Polish society recognized the urgency of popular education as the very first step toward reform. The famous Komisja Edukacji Narodowej ("Commission of National Education"), the first ministry of education in the world, was established in 1773 and founded numerous new schools and remodeled the old ones. One of the members of the commission, kanclerz Andrzej Zamoyski, along with others, demanded that the inviolability of their persons and property should be guaranteed and that religious toleration should be to a certain extent granted them; but he insisted that Jews living in the cities should be separated from the Christians, that those of them having no definite occupation should be banished from the kingdom, and that even those engaged in agriculture should not be allowed to possess land. On the other hand, some szlachta and intellectuals proposed a national system of government, of the civil and political equality of the Jews. This was the only example in modern Europe before the French Revolution of tolerance and broadmindedness in dealing with the Jewish question. But all these reforms were too late: a Russian army soon invaded Poland, and soon after a Prussian one followed.

A second partition of Poland was made on July 17, 1793. Jews, in a Jewish regiment led by Berek Joselewicz, took part in the Kościuszko Uprising the following year, when the Poles tried to again achieve independence, but were brutally put down. Following the revolt, the third and final partition of Poland took place in 1795. The great bulk of the Jewish population was transferred to Russia, and thus became subjects of that empire, although in the first half of the 19th century some semblance of a vastly smaller Polish state was preserved, especially in the form of the Congress Poland (1815–1831).

Jews were represented in the November Insurrection (1830–1831), the January Insurrection (1863), as well as in the revolutionary movement of 1905. Many Polish Jews were enlisted in the Legions, commanded by , which fought for the Polish independence finally achieved in 1918.

The culture and intellectual output of the Jewish community in Poland had a profound impact on Judaism as a whole. Some Jewish historians have recounted that the word Poland is pronounced as Polania or Polin in Hebrew, and as transliterated into Hebrew, these names for Poland were interpreted as "good omens" because Polania can be broken down into three Hebrew words: po ("here"), lan ("dwells"), ya ("God"), and Polin into two words of: po ("here") lin ("[you should] dwell"). The "message" was that Poland was meant to be a good place for the Jews. During the time from the rule of Sigismund I the Old until the Nazi Holocaust, Poland would be at the center of Jewish religious life.

Yeshivot were established, under the direction of the rabbis, in the more prominent communities. Such schools were officially known as gymnasiums, and their rabbi principals as rectors. Important yeshivot existed in Kraków, Poznań, and other cities. Jewish printing establishments came into existence in the first quarter of the 16th century. In 1530 a Hebrew Pentateuch (Torah) was printed in Kraków; and at the end of the century the Jewish printing houses of that city and Lublin issued a large number of Jewish books, mainly of a religious character. The growth of Talmudic scholarship in Poland was coincident with the greater prosperity of the Polish Jews; and because of their communal autonomy educational development was wholly one-sided and along Talmudic lines. Exceptions are recorded, however, where Jewish youth sought secular instruction in the European universities. The learned rabbis became not merely expounders of the Law, but also spiritual advisers, teachers, judges, and legislators; and their authority compelled the communal leaders to make themselves familiar with the abstruse questions of Jewish law. Polish Jewry found its views of life shaped by the spirit of Talmudic and rabbinical literature, whose influence was felt in the home, in school, and in the synagogue.

In the first half of the 16th century the seeds of Talmudic learning had been transplanted to Poland from Bohemia, particularly from the school of Jacob Pollak, the creator of Pilpul ("sharp reasoning"). Shalom Shachna (c. 1500–1558), a pupil of Pollak, is counted among the pioneers of Talmudic learning in Poland. He lived and died in Lublin, where he was the head of the yeshivah which produced the rabbinical celebrities of the following century. Shachna's son Israel became rabbi of Lublin on the death of his father, and Shachna's pupil Moses Isserles (known as the ReMA) (1520–1572) achieved an international reputation among the Jews as the co-author of the Shulkhan Arukh, (the "Code of Jewish Law"). His contemporary and correspondent Solomon Luria (1510–1573) of Lublin also enjoyed a wide reputation among his co-religionists; and the authority of both was recognized by the Jews throughout Europe. Heated religious disputations were common, and Jewish scholars participated in them. At the same time, the Kabbalah had become entrenched under the protection of Rabbinism; and such scholars as Mordecai Jaffe and Yoel Sirkis devoted themselves to its study. This period of great Rabbinical scholarship was interrupted by the Chmielnicki Uprising and The Deluge.

The rise of Hasidism

The decade from the Cossacks' uprising until after the Swedish war (1648–1658) left a deep and lasting impression not only on the social life of the Polish-Lithuanian Jews, but on their spiritual life as well. The intellectual output of the Jews of Poland was reduced. The Talmudic learning which up to that period had been the common possession of the majority of the people became accessible to a limited number of students only. What religious study there was became overly formalized, some rabbis busied themselves with quibbles concerning religious laws; others wrote commentaries on different parts of the Talmud in which hair-splitting arguments were raised and discussed; and at times these arguments dealt with matters which were of no practical importance. At the same time, many miracle workers made their appearance among the Jews of Poland, culminating in a series of false "Messianic" movements, most famously as Sabbatianism was succeeded by Frankism.

In this time of mysticism and overly formal rabbinism came the teachings of Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov, or BeShT, (1698–1760), which had a profound effect on the Jews of Eastern Europe and Poland in particular. His disciples taught and encouraged the new fervent brand of Judaism based on Kabbalah known as Hasidism. The rise of Hasidic Judaism within Poland's borders and beyond had a great influence on the rise of Haredi Judaism all over the world, with a continuous influence through its many Hasidic dynasties including those of Chabad-Lubavitch, Aleksander, Bobov, Ger, Nadvorna, among others. More recent rebbes of Polish origin include Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn (1880–1950), the sixth head of the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic movement, who lived in Warsaw until 1940 when he moved Lubavitch from Warsaw to the United States. See also: List of Polish Rabbis

Official Russian policy would eventually prove to be substantially harsher to the Jews than that under independent Polish rule. The lands that had once been Poland were to remain the home of many Jews, as, in 1772, Catherine II, the tzarina of Russia, instituted the Pale of Settlement, restricting Jews to the western parts of the empire, which would eventually include much of Poland, although it excluded some areas in which Jews had previously lived. By the late 19th century, over four million Jews would live in the Pale.

Initially, Russian policy towards the Jews of Poland was confused, alternating between harsh rules and somewhat more enlightened policies. In 1802, the Tsar established the Committee on the Improvement of the Jews in an attempt to develop a coherent approach to the Empire's new Jewish population. The Committee in 1804 suggested a number of steps that were designed to encourage Jews to assimilate, though it did not force them to do so. It proposed that Jews be allowed to attend school and even to own land, but it restricted them from entering Russia, banned them from the brewing industry, and included a number of other prohibitions. The more enlightened parts of this policy were never fully implemented, and the conditions of the Jews in the Pale gradually worsened. In the 1820s, the Cantonist Laws passed by Tsar Nicolas kept the traditional double taxation on Jews in lieu of army service, while actually requiring all Jewish communities to produce boys to serve in the military, where they were often forced to convert. Though the Jews were accorded slightly more rights with the emancipation reform of 1861, they were still restricted to the Pale of Settlement and subject to restrictions on ownership and profession. The status quo was however shattered with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, an act falsely blamed upon the Jews.

The assassination prompted a large-scale wave of anti-Jewish riots, called pogroms, throughout 1881–1884. In the 1881 outbreak, pogroms were primarily limited to Russia, although in a riot in Warsaw two Jews were killed, 24 others were wounded, women were raped and over two million rubles worth of property was destroyed. The new czar, Alexander III, blamed the Jews for the riots and issued a series of harsh restrictions on Jewish movements. Pogroms continued until 1884, with at least tacit government approval. They proved a turning point in the history of the Jews in partitioned Poland and throughout the world. The pogroms prompted a great flood of Jewish immigration to the United States, with almost two million Jews leaving the Pale by the late 1920s, they also set the stage for Zionism.

An even bloodier wave of pogroms broke out from 1903 to 1906, and at least some of the pogroms are believed to have been organized or supported by the Tsarist Russian secret police, the Okhrana. Some of the worst of these occurred on Russian occupied Polish territory, where the majority of Jews lived, and included the Białystok pogrom of 1906, in which up to a 100 Jews were murdered and many more wounded

Haskalah and Halakha

The Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah, began to take hold in Poland during the 19th century, stressing secular ideas and values. Champions of Haskalah, the Maskilim, pushed for assimilation and integration into Russian culture. At the same time, there was another school of Jewish thought that emphasized traditional study and a Jewish response to the ethical problems of anti-Semitism and persecution, one form of which was the Musar movement. Polish Jews generally were less influenced by Haskalah, rather focusing on a strong continuation of their religious lives based on Halakha ("rabbis's law") following primarily Orthodox Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, and also adapting to the new Religious Zionism of the Mizrachi movement later in the 19th century.

By the late 19th century, Haskalah and the debates it caused created a growing number of political movements within the Jewish community itself, covering a wide range of views and vying for votes in local and regional elections. Zionism became very popular with the advent of the Poale Zion socialist party as well as the religious Polish Mizrahi, and the increasingly popular General Zionists. Jews also took up socialism, forming the Bund labor union which supported assimilation and the rights of labor. The Folkspartei (People's Party) advocated for its part cultural autonomy and resistance to assimilation. In 1912, Agudat Israel, a religious party, came into existence.

Many Jews took part in the Polish insurrections, particularly against Russia (since the Tsars discriminated heavily against the Jews). The Kościuszko Insurrection, January Insurrection (1863) and Revolutionary Movement of 1905 all saw significant Jewish involvement in the cause of Polish independence.

By the end of the 19th century, 14% of Polish citizens were Jewish. Jews participated in their religious communities, as well as local and federal government. There were several prominent Jewish politicians in the Polish Sejm, such as Apolinary Hartglass and Yitzhak Gruenbaum. Many Jewish political parties were active, representing a wide ideological spectrum, from the Zionists, to the socialists to the anti-Zionists. One of the largest of these parties was the Bund, which was strongest in Warsaw and Lodz.

In addition to the socialists, Zionist parties were also popular, in particular, the Marxist Poale Zion and the orthodox religious Polish Mizrahi. The General Zionist party became the most prominent Jewish party in the inter war period and in the 1919 elections to the first Polish Sejm since the partitions, gained 50% of the Jewish vote.

In 1914, the German Zionist Max Bodenheimer founded the short-lived German Committee for Freeing of Russian Jews, with the goal of establishing a buffer state (Pufferstaat) within the Jewish Pale of Settlement, composed of the former Polish provinces annexed by Russia, being de facto protectorate of the German Empire that would free Jews in the region from Russian oppression. The plan, known as Judeopolonia, soon proved unpopular with both German officials and Bodenheimer's colleagues, and was dead by the following year.

Interwar period 1918–1939

While many other non-Polish minorities were ambivalent or neutral to the idea of a Polish state, Jews played a role in the fight for Poland's independence in 1918, a significant number joining Józef Piłsudski. In the wake of World War I and the ensuing conflicts that engulfed Eastern Europe — the Russian Civil War, Polish-Ukrainian War, and Polish-Soviet War — many pogroms were launched against the Jews by all sides. As a substantial number of Jews were perceived to have supported the Bolsheviks in Russia, they came under frequent attack by those opposed to the Bolshevik regime. Just after the end of World War I, the West became alarmed by reports about alleged massive pogroms in Poland against Jews. Pressure for government action reached the point where U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sent an official commission to investigate the matter. The commission, led by Henry Morgenthau, Sr., concluded in its report that the reports of pogroms were exaggerated, but also noted that the violence against Jews had been produced by a "widespread anti-semitic prejudice against Jews" (see: Morgenthau Report). It identified eight major incidents in the years 1918–1919, and estimated the number of victims at 280. Four of these were attributed to the actions of deserters and undisciplined individual soldiers; none were blamed on official government policy. Among the incidents, in Pińsk a commander of a local Polish military garrison accused a group of Jewish civilians of plotting against the Poles (a claim the Morgenthau report found "devoid of foundation") and ordered the execution of thirty-five Jewish men, women and children. (See Pinsk massacre). In Lviv (then Lemberg) in 1918, after the Polish Army captured the city, the report concluded that 64 Jews had been killed (other accounts put the number at seventy-two Jews who were killed by officers and soldiers of the Blue Army).^[43][44] In Warsaw, soldiers of Blue Army assaulted Jews in the streets, but were punished by military authorities. Many other events in Poland were later found to have been exaggerated, especially by contemporary newspapers such as The New York Times, although serious abuses against the Jews, including pogroms, continued elsewhere, especially in Ukraine. Anti-Jewish atrocities committed by the Polish army and its allies during the 1920 invasion into Ukraine and Belarus had a profound impact on the perception of Polish state among the local Jews. The result of the concern over the fate of Poland's Jews was a series of explicit clauses in the Versailles Treaty protecting the rights of minorities in Poland. In 1921, Poland's March Constitution gave the Jews the same legal rights as other citizens and guaranteed them religious tolerance.

The number of Jews immigrating to Poland from Ukraine and the Soviet Russia during the interwar period grew rapidly. According to Polish national census of 1921, there were 2,845,364 Jews living in the Second Polish Republic; but, by late 1938 that number has grown by over 16% to approximately 3,310,000. The average rate of permanent settlement was about 30,000 per annum. At the same time, every year around 100,000 Jews were passing through Poland in unofficial emigration overseas. Between the end of the Polish–Soviet War and late 1938, the Jewish population of the Republic has grown by over 464 thousands.

The newly independent Second Polish Republic had a large and vibrant Jewish minority– by the time World War II began, Poland had the largest concentration of Jews in Europe although many Polish Jews had a separate culture and ethnic identity from Catholic Poles. Some authors have stated that only about 10% of Polish Jews during the interwar period could be considered "assimilated" while more than 80% could be readily recognized as Jews.

According to the 1931 National Census there were 3,130,581 Polish Jews measured by the declaration of their religion. Estimating the population increase and the emigration from Poland between 1931 and 1939, there were probably 3,474,000 Jews in Poland as of September 1, 1939 (approximately 10% of the total population) primarily centered in large and smaller cities: 77% lived in cities and 23% in the villages. They made up about 50%, and in some cases even 70% of the population of smaller towns, especially in Eastern Poland. Prior to World War II, the Jewish population of Łódź numbered about 233,000, roughly one-third of the city’s population. The city of Lwów (now in Ukraine) had the third largest Jewish population in Poland, numbering 110,000 in 1939 (42%). Wilno (now in Lithuania) had a Jewish community of nearly 100,000, about 45% of the city's total. In 1938, Krakow's Jewish population numbered over 60,000, or about 25% of the city's total population. In 1939 there were 375,000 Jews in Warsaw or one third of the city's population. Only New York City had more Jewish residents than Warsaw.

The major industries in which Polish Jews were employed were manufacturing and commerce. In many areas of the country the majority of retail businesses were owned by Jews who were sometimes among the wealthiest members of their communities. Many Jews also worked as shoemakers and tailors, as well in the liberal professions; doctors (56% of all doctors in Poland), teachers (43%), journalists (22%) and lawyers (33%).

Jewish youth and religious groups, diverse political parties and Zionist organizations, newspapers and theatre flourished. Jews owned land and real estate, participated in retail and manufacturing and in the export industry. The religious beliefs spanned the range from Orthodox Hasidic Judaism to Progressive Judaism.

Polish language instead of Yiddish was increasingly used by the young Warsaw Jews who did not have a problem in identifying themselves fully as Jews, Warsavians and Poles. Jews such as Bruno Schulz, were entering the mainstream of Polish society, though many thought of themselves as a separate nationality within Poland.

Children were mainly enrolled in religious Jewish schools which limited their ability to speak Polish. As a result, according to the 1931 census, 79% of Jews gave Yiddish as their first language and only 12% listed Polish, with the remaining 9% being Hebrew. In contrast, the overwhelming majority of German-born Jews of this period spoke German as their first language. During the school year of 1937–1938 there were 226 elementary schools  and twelve high schools as well as fourteen vocational schools with either Yiddish or Hebrew as the instructional language. The YIVO (Jidiszer Wissenszaftlecher Institute) Scientific Institute was based in Wilno before transferring to New York during the war. Jewish political parties, both the Socialist General Jewish Labour Bund (The Bund), as well as parties of the Zionist right and left wing and religious conservative movements, were represented in the Sejm (the Polish Parliament) as well as in the regional councils.

The Jewish cultural scene  was particularly vibrant in pre-World War II Poland with numerous Jewish publications and over 116 periodicals. Yiddish authors, most notably Isaac Bashevis Singer, went on to achieve international acclaim as classic Jewish writers, and in Singer's case, win the 1978 Nobel Prize. Other Jewish authors of the period, like Janusz Korczak, Bruno Schulz, Julian Tuwim, Jan Brzechwa (a favorite poet of Polish children) and Bolesław Leśmian were less well-known internationally, but made important contributions to Polish literature. Singer Jan Kiepura, born of a Jewish mother and Polish father, was one of the most popular artist of that era and pre-war songs of Jewish composers like Henryk Wars or Jerzy Petersburski are still widely known in Poland today.

Scientist Leopold Infeld, mathematician Stanislaw Ulam or professor Adam Ulam contributed to the world of science. Others are Moses Schorr, Ludwik Zamenhof - the creator of Esperanto, Georges Charpak, Samuel Eilenberg, Emanuel Ringelblum, Arthur Rubinstein just to name a few from the long list of Polish Jews who are known internationally. The term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar. Leonid Hurwicz was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economics. The Scientific Institute YIVO was first organized in Wilno. In Warsaw, important centers of Judaic scholarship, such the Main Judaic Library and the Institute of Judaic Studies were located, along with numerous Talmudic Schools (Jeszybots), religious centers and synagogues, many of which were of great architectural quality. Yiddish theatre also flourished; Poland had fifteen Yiddish theatres and theatrical groups. Warsaw was home to the most important Yiddish theater troupe of the time, the Vilna Troupe, which staged the first performance of The Dybbuk in 1920 at the Elyseum Theatre.

Some future Israeli leaders studied at University of Warsaw - Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir.

There also were several Jewish sports clubs, with some of them, such as Hasmonea Lwow and Jutrzenka Kraków, winning promotion to the Polish First Football League. A Polish-Jewish footballer, Józef Klotz, scored the first ever goal for the Poland national football team. Another athlete, Alojzy Ehrlich, won several medals in the table-tennis tournaments.

Growing anti-Semitism

An ever-increasing proportion of Jews in interwar Poland lived separate lives from the Polish majority. In 1921, 74.2% of Polish Jews listed Yiddish or Hebrew as their native language; the number rose to 87% by 1931, resulting in growing tensions between Jews and Poles. Jews were often not identified as Polish nationals; a problem caused not only by the reversal of assimilation shown in national censuses between 1921 and 1931, but also by the influx of Russian Jews escaping persecution especially in Ukraine, where up to 2,000 pogroms took place during the Civil War and an estimated 30,000 Jews were massacred directly and a total of 150,000 died. A large number of Russian Jews emigrated to Poland, as they were entitled by the Peace treaty of Riga to choose the country they preferred. Several hundred thousand refugees joined the already numerous Jewish minority of the Polish Second Republic. The resulting economic instability was mirrored by anti-Jewish sentiment in some of the media, discrimination, exclusion, and violence at the universities, and the appearance of "anti-Jewish squads" associated with some of the right-wing political parties. These developments contributed to a greater support among the Jewish community for radical Zionist and socialist ideas, coupled with attempts at further migration, curtailed only by the British government. Notably, the "campaign for Jewish emigration was predicated not on anti-semitism but on objective social and economic factors". However, regardless of these changing economic and social conditions, the increase in antisemitic activity in prewar Poland was also typical of anti-semitism found in other parts of Europe at that time, developing within a broader, continent-wide pattern with counterparts in every other European country.

The matters improved for a time under the rule of Józef Piłsudski (1926–1935), who opposed anti-Semitism. Piłsudski countered Endecja's 'ethnic assimilation' with the 'state assimilation' policy: citizens were judged by their loyalty to the state, not by their nationality.^[65] The years 1926–1935 were favourably viewed by many Polish Jews, whose situation improved especially under the cabinet of Pilsudski’s appointee Kazimierz Bartel. However a combination of various reasons, including the Great Depression, meant that the situation of Jewish Poles was never too satisfactory, and it deteriorated again after Piłsudski's death in May 1935, which many Jews regarded as a tragedy.

With the influence of the Endecja party growing, antisemitism gathered new momentum in Poland and was most felt in smaller towns and spheres in which Jews came into direct contact with Poles, such as in Polish schools or on the sports field. Further academic harassment, such as the introduction of ghetto benches, which forced Jewish students to sit in section of the lecture halls reserved exclusively for them, anti-Jewish riots, and semi-official or unofficial quotas (Numerus clausus) introduced in 1937 in some universities halved the number of Jews in Polish universities between independence and the late 1930s. The restrictions were so inclusive that, while Jews made up 20.4% of the student population in 1928, by 1937 their share was down to only 7.5%.

Although many Jews were educated, they were excluded from most of the relevant occupations, including the government bureaucracy. A good number therefore turned to the liberal professions, particularly medicine and law. In 1937 the Catholic trade unions of Polish doctors and lawyers restricted their new members to Christian Poles (in a similar manner the Jewish trade unions excluded non-Jewish professionals from their ranks after 1918). A series of professional and trade unions, including those for lawyers and physicians, enacted "Aryan clauses" expelling Polish Jews from their ranks. The bulk of Jewish workers were organized in Jewish trade unions under the influence of the Jewish Labor Bund, which recognized the special cultural needs of the Jewish population, as well as special conditions arising from official discrimination against Jews in certain professions. Jews were virtually excluded from Polish government jobs during this period.

Complex and long history shaped Polish attitudes towards the Jews and Jewish attitudes towards the Poles, but the anti-Jewish sentiment in Poland had reached its zenith in the years leading to the Second World War.

Between 1935 and 1937 seventy-nine Jews were killed and 500 injured in anti-Jewish incidents. National policy was such that jobless Jews, who largely worked at home or in small shops due to discrimination in employment, were excluded from welfare benefits.

The national boycott of Jewish businesses and advocacy for their confiscation was promoted by the Endecja party, which introduced the term "Christian shop". A national movement to prevent the Jews from kosher slaughter of animals, with animal rights as the stated motivation, was also organized. Violence was also frequently aimed at Jewish stores, and many of them were looted. At the same time, persistent economic boycotts and harassment, including property-destroying riots, combined with the effects of the Great Depression that had been very severe on agricultural countries like Poland, reduced the standard of living of Poles and Polish Jews alike to the extent that by the end of the 1930s, a substantial portion of Polish Jews lived in grinding poverty.^[76] As a result, on the eve of the Second World War, the Jewish community in Poland was large and vibrant internally, yet (with the exception of a few professionals) also substantially poorer and less integrated than the Jews in most of Western Europe.

The main strain of anti-semitism in Poland during this time was motivated by Catholic religious beliefs and centuries-old myths such as the blood libel. This religious-based anti-semitism was sometimes joined with an ultra-nationalistic stereotype of Jews as disloyal to the Polish nation. On the eve of World War II, many typical Polish Christians believed that there were far too many Jews in the country and the Polish government became increasingly concerned with the "Jewish Question". Some politicians were in favor of mass Jewish emigration from Poland.

By the time of the German invasion in 1939, antisemitism was escalating, and hostility towards Jews was a mainstay of the right-wing political forces post-Piłsudski regime and also the Catholic Church. Discrimination and violence against Jews had rendered the Polish Jewish population increasingly destitute, as was the case throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe. Despite the impending threat to the Polish Republic from Nazi Germany, there was little effort seen in the way of reconciliation with Poland's Jewish population. In July 1939 the pro-government Gazeta Polska wrote, "The fact that our relations with the Reich are worsening does not in the least deactivate our program in the Jewish question--there is not and cannot be any common ground between our internal Jewish problem and Poland's relations with the Hitlerite Reich." Escalating hostility towards Polish Jews and an official Polish government desire to remove Jews from Poland continued until the German invasion of Poland.

The Polish September campaign

The number of Jews in Poland on September 1, 1939 amounted to about 3,474,000 people.

One hundred thirty thousand soldiers of Jewish descent served in the Polish Army at the outbreak of the Second World War, thus being among the first to launch armed resistance against the Nazi Germany. It is estimated that during the entirety of World War II as many as 32,216 Polish-Jewish soldiers and officers died and 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans; the majority did not survive. The soldiers and non-commissioned officers who were released ultimately found themselves in the ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians.

In 1939 Jews constituted 30% of Warsaw's population. With the coming of the war, Jewish and Polish citizens of Warsaw jointly defended the city, putting their differences aside.

Polish Jews later served in almost all Polish formations during the entire World War II, many were killed or wounded and very many were decorated for their combat skills and exceptional service. Jews fought with the Polish Armed Forces in the West, in the Soviet formed Polish People's Army as well as in several underground organizations and as part of Polish partisan units or Jewish partisan formations.

Territories annexed by the USSR (1939-1941)

On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany entered into a Nonaggression Pact, so-called Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with a secret protocol providing the partition of Poland. Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939 and the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939. In newly partitioned Poland 61.2% of Polish Jews found themselves under German occupation while 38.8% were in the Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union. Based on population migration from West to East during and after the Invasion of Poland the percentage of Jews in the Soviet-occupied areas was probably higher than that of the 1931 census.

The Soviet annexation was accompanied by the widespread arrests of government officials, police, military personnel, border guards, teachers, priests, judges etc., followed by executions and massive deportation to the Soviet interior or forced labour camps were as a result of the harsh conditions many people died. Of the approximately 1.450 million Polish citizens living in the region deported by the Soviets, (63.1%) were ethnic Poles but Jews represented 7.4% of all the prisoners.

Jewish refugees from Western Poland who registered for repatriation back to the German zone (people in the Soviet occupation zone had little knowledge of what was going on in the German occupation zone since the Soviet media did not report on their Nazi ally's misdeeds), wealthy Jewish capitalists, prewar political and social activists were labelled "class enemies" and deported for that reason. Jews caught for illegal border crossings or engaged in illicit trade and other "illegal" activities were also arrested and deported. Several thousand, mostly captured Polish soldiers were executed on the spot, some of them were Jewish.

All private property and crucial to Jewish economic life private businesses were nationalized, political activity was illegal and thousands of people were jailed, many of whom were later executed. Zionism, which was designated by the Soviets as counter-revolutionary was also forbidden. Within one day all Polish and Jewish media was shut down and replaced by the new Soviet press, which conducted mainly political propaganda but also was attacking religion, including the Jewish faith. Synagogues and Churches were not yet closed but heavily taxed. The Soviet ruble of little value was immediately equalized to the much higher Polish zloty and by the end of 1939, zloty was abolished.

Most economic activity was subject to central planning and restrictions and a lot of private property nationalized. Because Jewish communities tended to rely on commerce and small scale businesses, the nationalization affected some of them to a greater degree than the general populace. The Soviet system resulted in different economic arrangements which were characterized by low wages and frequent shortages of goods and materials. As a result, Jews, like many other inhabitants of the region, saw a fall in their living standards.

Under Soviet policy, Poles were denied access to positions in the civil service and former Polish senior officials and notable members of the community were arrested and exiled to remote regions of Russia together with their families. At the same time the Soviet authorities encouraged Jews to fill in the newly emptied government and civil service jobs.

While most Poles of all ethnicities had anti-Soviet and anti-communist sentiments, a portion of the Jewish population, along with ethnic Belorussians, Ukrainians and few communist Poles had initially welcomed invading Soviet forces. The general feeling amongst Polish Jews was a sense of relief in having escaped the dangers of falling under Nazi rule, as well as from the overt policies of discrimination against Jews which had existed in the Polish state, including discrimination in education, employment and commerce, as well as antisemitic violence that in some cases reached pogrom levels. The Polish poet and former communist Aleksander Wat has stated that Jews were more inclined to cooperate with the Soviets  Norman Davies claimed that among the informers and collaborators, the percentage of Jews was striking, and they prepared lists of Polish "class enemies", while other historians have indicated that the level of Jewish collaboration could well have been less than that of ethnic Poles. Holocaust scholar Martin Dean has written that "few local Jews obtained positions of power under Soviet rule."

The issue of Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation remains controversial. Some scholars note that while not pro-communist, many Jews saw the Soviets as the lesser threat compared to the German Nazis. They stress that stories of Jews welcoming the Soviets on the streets, vividly remembered by many Poles from eastern part of the country are impressionistic and not reliable indicators of the level of Jewish support for the Soviets. Additionally, it has been noted that some ethnic Poles were as prominent as Jews in filling civil and police positions in the occupation administration, and that Jews, both civilians and in the Polish military, suffered equally at the hands of the Soviet occupiers. Whatever initial enthusiasm for the Soviet occupation Jews might have felt was soon dissipated upon feeling the impact of the suppression of Jewish societal modes of life by the occupiers.The tensions between ethnic Poles and Jews as a result of this period has, according to some historians, taken a toll on relations between Poles and Jews throughout the war, creating until this day, an impasse to Polish-Jewish rapprochement.

Even though only a small percentage of the Jewish community had been members of the Communist Party of Poland during the inter-war era, they had occupied an influential and conspicuous place in the party's leadership and in the rank and file in major centres, such as Warsaw, Lodz and Lwow. A larger number of younger Jews, often through the pro-Marxist Bund or some Zionist groups, were sympathetic to Communism and Soviet Russia, both of which had been enemies of the Polish Second Republic. As a result of these factors they found it easy after 1939 to participate in the Soviet occupation administration in Eastern Poland, and briefly occupied prominent positions in industry, schools, local government, police and other Soviet-installed institutions. The concept of "Judeo-communism" was reinforced during the period of the Soviet occupation (see Żydokomuna).

There were also Jews who demonstrated loyalty toward Poland, assisting Poles during brutal Soviet occupation. Among thousands Polish officers killed by the Soviet NKVD in the Katyń massacre there were 500–600 Jews. From 1939 to 1941 between 100,000 and 300,000 Polish Jews were deported from Soviet-occupied Polish territory into the Soviet Union. Some of them, especially Polish Communists (e.g. Jakub Berman), moved voluntarily; however, most of them were forcibly deported or imprisoned in Gulag. Small numbers of Polish Jews (about 6,000) were able to leave the Soviet Union in 1942 with the Władysław Anders army, among them the future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin. During the Polish army's II Corps' stay in the British Mandate of Palestine, 67% (2,972) of the Jewish soldiers deserted, many to join the Irgun. General Anders decided not to prosecute the deserters and emphasized that the Jewish soldiers who remained in the Force fought bravely. Cemetery of Polish soldiers who died during the Battle of Monte Cassino contains also headstones bearing a Star of David.

The Holocaust: German-occupied Poland

The Polish Jewish community suffered the most in the Holocaust. About six million Polish citizens perished during the war,^[104] half of them (three million) Polish Jews—all but about 300,000 of the Jewish population—who were killed at the German Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibór, Chełmno or died of starvation in ghettos.

Poland was where the German Nazi program for the extermination of Jews, the "Final Solution" was implemented, since this was where the majority of Europe's Jews lived at the time (excluding the Soviet Union).

In 1939 several hundred synagogues were blown up or burnt by the Germans who sometimes forced the Jews to do it themselves. In many cases Germans turned the synagogues into factories, places of entertainment, swimming-pools or prisons. By the end of the war, almost all of the synagogues in Poland have been destroyed. rabbis were ordered to dance and sing in public with their beards cut or torn. Some rabbis were set on fire or hanged.

Germans ordered registration of all Jews and a word “Jude” was stamped in their identity cards. Numerous restrictions and prohibitions targeting Jews were introduced and brutally enforced. For example, Jews were forbidden to walk on the sidewalks, use public transport, enter places of leisure, sports arenas, theaters, museums and libraries. On the street, Jews had to lift their hat to passing Germans. By the end of 1941 all Jews in German occupied Poland, except the children, had to wear an identifying badge with a blue Star of David.The Germans made almost no attempt to set up a collaborationist government in Poland, "disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate", nevertheless, Polish language rags ran by them routinely published antisemitic articles that urged local people to adopt an attitude of indifference towards the Jews.

Following Operation Barbarossa, many Jews in what was then Eastern Poland fell victim to Nazi death squads called Einsatzgruppen, which massacred Jews, especially in 1941. Some of these German-inspired massacres were carried out with help from, or active participation of Poles themselves: for example, the massacre in Jedwabne, in which between 300 (Institute of National Remembrance's Final Findings) and 1,600 Jews (Jan T. Gross) were tortured and beaten to death by members of the local population. The full extent of Polish participation in the massacres of the Polish Jewish community remains a controversial subject, in part due to Jewish leaders' refusal to allow the remains of the Jewish victims to be exhumed and their cause of death to be properly established. The Polish Institute for National Remembrance identified twenty-two other towns that had pogroms similar to Jedwabne. The reasons for these massacres are still debated, but they included anti-Semitism, resentment over alleged cooperation with the Soviet invaders in the Polish-Soviet War and during the 1939 invasion of the Kresy regions, greed for the possessions of the Jews, and of course coercion by the Nazis to participate in such massacres.

Some historians have written of the negative attitudes of some Poles towards persecuted Jews during the Holocaust. While members of Catholic clergy risked their lives to assist Jews, these efforts were made in the face of strong anti-semitic attitudes from the Polish Catholic Church hierarchy. Anti-Jewish attitudes also existed in the London-based Polish Government in Exile.

Holocaust survivors's views of Polish behavior during the War span a wide range, depending on the personal experiences of the person. Some are very negative, based on the view of Christian Poles as passive witnesses who failed to act and aid the Jews as they were being persecuted or liquidated by the Nazi Germans. Poles, who were also victims of Nazi crimes, were often afraid for their and their family's lives themselves and this fear prevented many of them from giving aid and assistance, even if some of them felt sympathy for the Jews. Emanuel Ringelblum, a Polish-Jewish historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, wrote in 1944 in his Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War of the indifferent and sometimes joyful responses in Warsaw to the destruction of Polish Jews in the Ghetto. However despite that, as another scholar (Gunnar S. Paulsson) in his work on the Jews of Warsaw has demonstrated, Polish citizens of Warsaw managed to support and hide the same percentage of Jews as did the citizens of cities in Western European countries.

Ghettos and death camps

The German Nazis established six extermination camps throughout Poland by 1942. All of these - at Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz (Oswiecim) - were located on the rail network so that the victims could be easily transported to them. The system of camps was expanded over the course of the German occupation of Poland and their purposes were diversified; some served as transit camps, some as forced labor camps and some as death camps. While in the death camps, the victims were usually killed shortly after arrival, in the other camps able-bodied Jews were worked and beaten to death.

The operation of concentration camps depended on Kapos, collaborator-prisoners. Some of these Kapos were Jewish themselves, and their prosecution after the war created an ethical dilemma.

Ghettos were also created for the confinement of Jews. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000. Other Polish cities with large Jewish ghettos included Białystok (Białystok Ghetto), Częstochowa, Kielce, Kraków (Kraków Ghetto), Lublin, Lwów (Lviv Ghetto), and Radom. Ghettos were also established in smaller settlements. Living conditions in the Ghettos, most hermetically sealed and without ability to leave, were terrible. Overcrowding, dirt, lice, lethal epidemics such as typhoid and hunger resulted in countless deaths.

Many Jews tried to escape from the ghetto in the hope of finding a place to hide outside of it, or of joining the partisan units. When this proved difficult escapees often returned to the ghetto on their own. If caught, Germans would murder the escapees and leave their bodies in plain view as a warning to others. Despite these terror tactics attempts at escape from ghettos continued up until their liquidation.

Since Nazi terror reigned throughout the Aryan districts, the chances of remaining successfully hidden undoubtedly depended on a fluent knowledge of the language and on having close ties with the community. Many Poles were not willing to hide Jews who might have escaped the ghettos or who might have been in hiding due to fear fo their own life and that of their family. The Germans would often murder non-Jewish Poles for small misdemeanors and execution for help rendered to Jews, even the most basic kinds, was automatic. Poles often refused to help, but the general reason for that was that they feared for their own lives since in any apartment block or area where Jews were found to be harboured, everybody in the house would be immediately shot by the Germans. While the German policy towards Jews was ruthless and criminal, their policy towards Christian Poles who helped Jews was very much the same. Thousands of non-Jewish Poles were executed for helping Jews.Hiding in a Christian society to which the Jews were only partially assimilated to was a daunting task. They needed to quickly acquire not only a new identity, but a new body of knowledge. Many Jews spoke Polish with an accent, used different nonverbal language, different gestures and facial expressions. Jews with the specific physical characteristics were particularly vulnerable.

Some individuals took advantage of a hiding person's desperation by collecting money, then reneging on their promise of aid—or worse, turning them over to the Germans for an additional reward. Individuals who turned in Jews in hiding to the Gestapo received a standard payment consisting of some cash, liquor, sugar and cigarettes.

Many Jews were robbed and handed over to the Germans by "szmalcownik"s many of whom practiced blackmail as an "occupation". Those criminals were condemned by the Polish Underground State and a fight against these informers was organized by Armia Krajowa (Underground State's military arm), with the death sentence being meted out on a scale unknown in the occupied countries of Western Europe.

The belief that the experienced suffering was preordained and that it would result in the coming of the Messiah also existed among some religious Jews.

To discourage Poles from giving shelter to Jews, the Germans often searched houses and introduced ruthless penalties. Poland was the only occupied country during World War II where the Nazis formally imposed the death penalty for anybody found sheltering and helping Jews.

The penalty applied not only to the person who did the helping, but also extended to his or her family, neighbors and sometimes to an entire village. In this way Germans applied the principle of collective responsibility whose purpose was to encourage neighbors to inform on each other in order to avoid punishment. The nature of these policies was widely known and visibly publicized by the Nazis who sought to terrorize the Polish population.

Food rations for Poles were very small (669 kcal per day in 1941) and black market prices of food were high, factors which made it difficult to hide people and almost impossible to hide entire families, especially in the cities. Despite these draconian measures imposed by the Nazis, Poland has the highest number of Righteous Among The Nations awards at the Yad Vashem Museum (6,195).

The Polish Government in Exile was the first (in November 1942) to reveal the existence of Nazi-run concentration camps and the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, through its courier Jan Karski and through the activities of Witold Pilecki, a member of Armia Krajowa who was the only person to volunteer for imprisonment in Auschwitz and who organized a resistance movement inside the camp itself.^[140] One of the Jewish members of the National Council of the Polish government in exile, Szmul Zygielbojm, committed suicide to protest the indifference of the Allied governments in the face of the Holocaust in Poland. The Polish government in exile was also the only government to set up an organization (Żegota) specifically aimed at helping the Jews in Poland.

—Jürgen Stroop Stroop Report 1943
 

The Warsaw Ghetto and its uprising in 1943 represents what is likely the most known episode of the wartime history of the Polish Jews. The ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. Moved from all parts of Warsaw, almost 140,000 Jews lived in the ghetto in the beginning at the same time approximately 110,000 Poles had been forcibly moved out of the area. The Germans selected Adam Czerniakow to take charge of 24 other Jewish men who formed Jewish Council called Judenrat which was to organize the labor battalions to be used by the Germans as well as Jewish Ghetto Police which would be responsible for maintaining order within the Ghetto walls. A number of Jewish policemen were corrupt and immoral. Soon the Nazis demanded even more from the Judenrat and the demands were much more cruel. Death was the punishment for the slightest indication of noncompliance by the Judenrat. Sometimes the Judenrat refused to collaborate in which case its members were consequently executed and replaced by the new group of people. Adam Czerniakow who was the head of the Warsaw Judenrat committed suicide when he was forced to collect daily lists of Jews to be deported to Treblinka extermination camp.

At this time, the population of the ghetto reached 380,000 people, about 30% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 2.4% of the size of Warsaw. The Germans then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world, on November 16 of that year, building a wall around it. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages were brought into the Warsaw Ghetto, while diseases (especially typhoid) and starvation kept the inhabitants at about the same number. Average food rations in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw were limited to 253 kcal, and 669 kcal for Poles, as opposed to 2,613 kcal for Germans. On July 22, 1942, the mass deportation of the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; during the next fifty-two days (until September 12, 1942) about 300,000 people were transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp. The deportations were carried out by fifty German SS soldiers, 200 soldiers of the Latvian Schutzmannschaften Battalions, 200 Ukrainian Police, and 2,500 Jewish Ghetto Police. Employees of the Judenrat, including the Ghetto Police, along with their families and relatives, were given immunity from deportations in return for their cooperation. Additionally, in August 1942, Jewish Ghetto policemen, under the threat of deportation themselves, were ordered to personally "deliver" ghetto inhabitants to the Umschlagplatz train station. On January 18, 1943, a number of Ghetto militants led by the right leaning ŻZW, including some members of the left leaning ŻOB rose up in a first uprising. Both organizations resisted, with arms, German attempts for additional deportations to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

The final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto came four months later after the crushing of one of the most heroic and tragic battles of the war, the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising led by the ŻOB, and the ŻZW. The ŻZW was the better supplied in arms. The ŻOB had more than 750 fighters, but lacked weapons: they had only 9 rifles, 59 pistols and several grenades. A developed network of bunkers and fortifications were formed. The Jewish fighters also received support from the Polish Underground (Armia Krajowa). The German forces, which included 2,842 Nazi soldiers and 7,000 security personnel, were not capable of crushing the Jewish resistance in open street combat and after several days, decided to switch strategy by setting buildings on fire in which the Jewish fighters hid. The commander of the ŻOB, Mordechai Anielewicz died fighting on May 8, 1943 at the organization's command centre on 18 Mila Street.

It took the Germans twenty seven days to put down the uprising, after some very heavy fighting. The German general Jürgen Stroop, in his report, stated that his troops had killed 6,065 Jewish fighters during the battle. After the uprising was already over, Heinrich Himmler had the Great Synagogue on Tlomack Street (outside the ghetto) destroyed as a celebration of German victory and a symbol that the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw was no longer.

A group of fighters escaped from the ghetto through the sewers and reached the Lomianki forest. About 50 ghetto fighters were saved by the Polish "People's Guard" and later formed their own partisan group, named after Anielewicz. Even after the end of the uprising there were still several hundreds of Jews who continued living in the ruined ghetto. Many of them survived thanks to the contacts they managed to establish with Poles outside the ghetto

The Uprising inspired Jews throughout Poland. Many Jewish leaders who survived the liquidation continued underground work outside the ghetto. They hid other Jews, forged necessary documents and were active in the Polish underground in other parts of Warsaw and surrounding area.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was followed by other Ghetto uprisings in many smaller towns and cities across German occupied Poland. Many Jews were found alive in the ruins of the former Warsaw Ghetto during the 1944 general Warsaw Uprising when the Poles themselves rose up against the Germans. Some of the survivors of 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, still held in camps at or near Warsaw, were freed during 1944 Warsaw Uprising, led by the Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa, and immediately joined Polish fighters. Only a few of them survived. The Polish commander of one Jewish unit, Waclaw Micuta, described them as some of the best fighters, always at the front line. It is estimated that over 2,000 Polish Jews, some as well known as Marek Edelman or Icchak Cukierman, and several dozen Greek,^[152] Hungarian or even German Jews freed by Armia Krajowa from Gesiowka concentration camp in Warsaw, men and woman, took part in combat against Nazis during 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Some 166,000 people lost their lives in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the AK or had been discovered in hiding (see: Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński and Stanisław Aronson). Warsaw was razed to the ground by the Germans and more than 150,000 Poles were sent to labor or concentration camps. On January 17, 1945, the Soviet Army entered destroyed and nearly uninhabited Warsaw. Some 300 Jews were found hiding in the ruins in the Polish part of the city (see: Wladyslaw Szpilman).

The fate of the Warsaw Ghetto was similar to that of the other ghettos in which Jews were concentrated. With the decision of Nazi Germany to begin the Final Solution, the destruction of the Jews of Europe, Aktion Reinhard began in 1942, with the opening of the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka, followed by Auschwitz-Birkenau where people were killed in gas chambers and mass executions (death wall). Many died from hunger, starvation, disease, torture or by pseudo-medical experiments. The mass deportation of Jews from ghettos to these camps, such as happened at the Warsaw Ghetto, soon followed, and more than 1.7 million Jews were killed at the Aktion Reinhard camps by October 1943 alone.

Postwar

Between 40,000 and 100,000 Polish Jews survived the Holocaust in Poland by hiding or by joining the Polish or Soviet partisan units. Another 50,000–170,000 were repatriated from the Soviet Union and 20,000–40,000 from Germany and other countries. At its postwar peak, there were 180,000–240,000 Jews in Poland mostly in Warsaw, Łódź, Kraków, Wrocław and Lower Silesia, e.g., Legnica, Dzierżoniów and Bielawa.

The character of Poland had changed however. In spite of the major Polish contribution to World War II, Poland was placed under direct Soviet control due to British and the US dependence on the Soviet military commitment to the defeat of Hitler and Franklin D. Roosevelt's unwillingness to confront Stalin over his future plans for Poland. The Soviet style communism was established and the borders of Poland were moved west. The Soviet Union annexed the eastern regions, which had many ethnic minorities including Jewish shtetl communities.

The Jewish survivors found it practically impossible to reconstruct their earlier lives as they were before in pre-war Poland. Jewish communities and rich Jewish life ceased to exist. People who somehow survived the Holocaust and who returned to their town or villages often discovered that their homes had been looted or destroyed. Some homes had new repatriated inhabitants who at times were very unhappy to see returning Jewish survivors.

Polish Jews began to leave Poland soon after the Second World War ended for variety of reasons. Many left because Poland became a communist country they did not want to live in, or because all private property has been confiscated by the new communist government. Some left because they did not want to live where their family members were murdered and instead chose to live with relatives in different countries. Many wanted to go to British Mandate of Palestine soon to be new state of Israel, especially after Gen. Spychalski signed a decree allowing Jews to leave Poland without visas or exit permits. Yet others left because many Poles viewed Jews with hostility due to anti-Semitic prejudice.

Anti-Jewish riots broke out in several Polish cities and hundreds of Jews were murdered in anti-Jewish violence (see: Anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944-1946). The best-known case is the Kielce pogrom of 1946, in which thirty seven Jews were brutally murdered. Kielce anti-Semitic riot, amidst the raging civil war in postwar Poland, discouraged many survivors from rebuilding their lives there and convinced them to emigrate.

Irrespective of their status, the communist government's response to the Kielce atrocities was rapid. Special investigators were dispatched and military tribunals formed. Acitivities of the local authorities were investigated. However, only the local commander of Milicja Obywatelska was found guilty of inaction. Nine direct participants of the pogrom were sentenced to death; three were given lengthy prison sentences. Debate in Poland continues today whether the murderers were leftists or rightists. Who inspired the killings is not agreed upon or known.

Between 1945 and 1948, 100,000–120,000 Jews left Poland. Their departure was largely organized by the Zionist activists in Poland such as Adolf Berman and Icchak Cukierman under the umbrella of a semi-clandestine organization Berihah ("Flight"). Berihah was also responsible for the organized emigration of Jews from Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia totaling 250,000 (including Poland) Holocaust survivors.

A second wave of Jewish emigration (50,000) took place during the liberalization of the communist regime between 1957 and 1959. After 1967 Six Day War, in which the Soviet Union supported the Arab side, Polish communist party adopted anti-Jewish course of action which in the years 1968-69 provoked the last mass migration of Jews from Poland.

The Bund took part in the post-war elections of 1947 on a common ticket with the (non-communist) Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and gained its first and only parliamentary seat in its Polish history, plus several seats in municipal councils. Under pressure from Soviet-installed communist authorities, the Bund's leaders 'voluntarily' disbanded the party in 1948–1949 against the opposition of many activists. Stalinist Poland was basically governed by the Soviet NKVD which was against the renewal of Jewish religious and even cultural life. In the years 1948-49 all remaining Jewish schools were nationalized by the communists and Yiddish was replaced with Polish as a language of teaching.

For those Polish Jews who remained, the rebuilding of Jewish life in Poland was carried out between October 1944 and 1950 by the Central Committee of Polish Jews (Centralny Komitet Żydów Polskich, CKŻP) which provided legal, educational, social care, cultural, and propaganda services. A countrywide Jewish Religious Community, led by Dawid Kahane, who served as chief rabbi of the Polish Armed Forces, functioned between 1945 and 1948 until it was absorbed by the CKŻP. Eleven independent political Jewish parties, of which eight were legal, existed until their dissolution during 1949–50. Hospitals and schools were opened in Poland by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and ORT to provide service to Jewish communities. Some Jewish cultural institutions were established including the Yiddish State Theater founded in 1950 and directed by Ida Kaminska, the Jewish Historical Institute, an academic institution specializing in the research of the history and culture of the Jews in Poland, and the Yiddish newspaper Folks-Shtime ("People's Voice").

Following liberalization after Joseph Stalin's death, in this 1958-59 period, 50,000 Jews emigrated to Israel. A significant number of Polish communists were of Jewish descent and actively participated in the establishment of the communist regime in the People's Republic of Poland. Between 1944 and 1956, they held, among others, prominent posts in the Politburo of the Polish United Worker's Party (e.g., Jakub Berman, Hilary Minc– responsible for establishing a Communist-style economy), and the security apparatus Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB) and in diplomacy/intelligence. After 1956, during the process of destalinisation in Poland under Władysław Gomułka's regime, some Urząd Bezpieczeństwa officials including Roman Romkowski (born Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel), Jacek Różański (born Jozef Goldberg), and Anatol Fejgin were prosecuted for "power abuses" including the torture of Polish anti-communists (among them, Witold Pilecki), and sentenced to long prison terms. A UB official, Józef Światło, (born Izaak Fleichfarb), after escaping in 1953 to the West, exposed through Radio Free Europe the methods of the UB which led to its dissolution in 1954. Solomon Morel a member of the Ministry of Public Security of Poland and commandant of the Stalinist era Zgoda labour camp, fled Poland for Israel to escape prosecution for genocide. Helena Wolińska-Brus, a former Stalinist prosecutor, who emigrated to England in the late 60's, was fighting being extradited to Poland on charges related to the execution of a Second World War resistance hero August Fieldorf. Wolinska died in London in 2008.

1967–1989

In 1967, following the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab states, communist Poland broke off diplomatic relations with Israel. The Israeli victory over the Soviet backed Arab states in 1967 was greeted by Poles with a slogan; "Our Jews beat the Soviet Arabs" (Nasi Żydzi pobili ruskich Arabów)

The vast majority of the 40,000 Jews in Poland by the late 1960s were completely assimilated into the broader society. However, this did not prevent them from becoming victims of a campaign, centrally organized by the Polish Communist Party, with Soviet backing, which equated Jewish origins with "Zionism" and disloyalty to a Socialist Poland.

In March 1968 student-led demonstrations in Warsaw (see Polish 1968 political crisis) gave Gomułka's government an excuse to try and channel public anti-government sentiment into another avenue. Thus his security chief, Mieczysław Moczar, used the situation as a pretext to launch an anti-Semitic press campaign (although the expression "Zionist" was officially used). The state-sponsored "anti-Zionist" campaign resulted in the removal of Jews from the Polish United Worker's Party and from teaching positions in schools and universities. In 1967–1971 under economic, political and secret police pressure, over 14,000 Polish Jews were forced to leave Poland and relinquish their Polish citizenship . The leaders of the communist party tried to stifle the ongoing protests and unrest by scapegoating the Jews. At the same time there was an ongoing power struggle within the party itself and the anti-semitic campaign was used by one faction against another. The so called "Partisan" faction blamed the Jews who had held office during the Stalinist period for the excesses that had occurred, but the end result was that most of the remaining Polish Jews, regardless of their background or political affiliation, were targeted by the communist authorities.

There were several outcomes of the March 1968 events. The campaign damaged Poland's reputation abroad, particularly in the U.S. Many Polish intellectuals, however, were disgusted at the promotion of official anti-Semitism and opposed the campaign. Some of the people who emigrated to the West at this time founded organizations which encouraged anti-communist opposition inside Poland.

First attempts to improve Polish-Israeli relations began in the mid seventies. Poland was the first of the Eastern Bloc countries to restore diplomatic relations with Israel after these have been broken off right after the Six Day's War. In 1986 partial diplomatic relations with Israel were restored, and full relations were restored in 1990 as soon as communism fell.

During the late 1970s some Jewish activists were engaged in the anti-communist opposition groups. Most prominent among them, Adam Michnik (founder of Gazeta Wyborcza) was one of the founders of the Workers' Defence Committee (KOR). By the time of the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, only 5,000–10,000 Jews remained in the country, many of them preferring to conceal their Jewish origin.

With the fall of communism in Poland, Jewish cultural, social, and religious life has been undergoing a revival. Many historical issues, especially related to World War II and the 1944–89 period, suppressed by communist censorship have been re-evaluated and publicly discussed (like the Massacre in Jedwabne, the Koniuchy Massacre, the Kielce pogrom, the Auschwitz cross, and Polish-Jewish wartime relations in general).