{"id":11656,"date":"2026-06-13T02:43:07","date_gmt":"2026-06-13T02:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/11656\/"},"modified":"2026-06-13T02:43:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-13T02:43:07","slug":"some-of-polands-13000-jews-driven-out-in-1968-return-to-tell-their-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/11656\/","title":{"rendered":"Some of Poland’s 13,000 Jews driven out in 1968 return to tell their story"},"content":{"rendered":"

In March 1968, Rachelle Halpern walked into her university in Szczecin, Poland<\/a>, and found a group of her classmates gathered around a newspaper. She asked what they were reading about. The answer came: \u201cZionists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Halpern didn\u2019t understand. Who were the Zionists<\/a>? One classmate said, \u201cThe Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I\u2019m a Jew,\u201d said Halpern. Her classmates looked at her in disbelief. She couldn\u2019t be, one said. She had no horns.<\/p>\n

Halpern was about to be swept up in a spiral of social and political crises in communist Poland, culminating in a government-sponsored antisemitic campaign<\/a> that stripped Jews of their jobs, schools, and citizenship, forcing some 13,000 to leave the country. Within months, Halpern would find herself renouncing her Polish nationality and leaving everything she knew for a new life in the United States.<\/p>\n

At that moment, when her classmates read the word \u201cZionists\u201d and looked up at her with horror, she felt a shift.<\/p>\n

\"RachelleRachelle Halpern, right, and other participants in the Miszpucha Foundation trip visit the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, Poland. (credit: Adam de Kaminski)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt sort of evoked a lot of distrust and fear, that somehow there were all these people around that were going to do some harm to the Polish people,\u201d Halpern told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.<\/p>\n

Now 79 years old, Halpern joined a group of Polish emigrants and their children who traveled to Poland in April to unwind the trauma of 1968. Their meeting was organized by the Engaged Memory Consortium, a collection of organizations dedicated to Polish Jewish heritage, and funded by Poland\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.<\/p>\n

First government-funded trip of its kind<\/p>\n

It was the first time that the government paid for a trip to reckon with the events of 1968 and invited the Jews whose lives were upended, according to the program\u2019s coordinator, Patrycja Do\u0142owy.<\/p>\n

The nine participants came from Sweden, Denmark<\/a>, and the United States. Over eight days, they visited Jewish sites and community groups in Warsaw, Wroc\u0142aw, and \u0141\u00f3d\u017a. These three areas hosted the largest groups of Jews who remained in Poland after the Holocaust, where they decided to rebuild – and where their communities were decimated again in 1968.<\/p>\n

Though the members of the trip had never met, their memories overlapped, patching together a dark, open wound in the history of Polish Jews.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a chapter that remains obscure among many Poles and Jewish communities around the world, partly because of a myth that Jewish life was wholly extinguished by the Holocaust, according to Karen Auerbach, a historian of Polish Jews at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s such limited understanding of the fact that there was a Jewish population in Poland after the Second World War, that this doesn\u2019t rise to the surface,\u201d said Auerbach.<\/p>\n

The Jewish flight of 1968 started with two words from W\u0142adys\u0142aw Gomu\u0142ka, then the leader of communist Poland. Days after Israel\u2019s victory over Soviet-supported Arab countries in the Six-Day War of 1967, Gomu\u0142ka said that Poland would not tolerate a \u201cfifth column\u201d of Polish Jews. The phrase signaled that Jews could be loyal to Israel and treasonous to Poland. Soon after, the communist secret police purged Jews from the state and party apparatuses, especially the army.<\/p>\n

This campaign exploded after Poland, like other countries across the globe, was rocked by youth uprisings in March 1968. Polish students demonstrated against state censorship and the growing restriction of their civil liberties under Gomu\u0142ka.<\/p>\n

Thousands were detained, expelled from universities, and dismissed from their jobs in the ensuing government crackdown. Some of the students were Jewish. That became the pretext for Polish authorities to accuse them of \u201cZionism,\u201d pinning the demonstrations on a global Jewish conspiracy.<\/p>\n

The government organized \u201canti-Zionist\u201d rallies and stoked fear of \u201cZionists\u201d in official propaganda, avoiding the word \u201cJew.\u201d Newspapers outed \u201cZionists\u201d to their neighbors. A new wave of purges expelled thousands of Jews from their jobs and exposed them to antisemitic attacks in their cities and towns. Jews were pressured to leave the country, and when they applied for exit documents, they were forced to renounce their Polish citizenship.<\/p>\n

Ordinary citizens purge Jews<\/p>\n

The purges were not only executed by government order, but also by ordinary Polish citizens who took advantage of the campaign and antisemitic sentiment to further their careers, said Dariusz Stola, director of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was opening opportunities for many people for advancement,\u201d said Stola. \u201cSay you compete for a position in your institution, and you have a Jewish colleague, why not accuse him of being a hidden Zionist? Or you have some accounts to settle from the past – you don\u2019t like someone – let\u2019s accuse him of Zionism, because the burden of proof he is not is on him.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the early 1970s, half the country\u2019s Jews were gone, crushing a community that was tenuously growing back decades after the Holocaust. The campaign effectively ended organized Jewish life in Poland.<\/p>\n

Fifty-eight years later, Do\u0142owy guided Polish emigrants and their descendants through cultural institutions that have emerged since the fall of the Soviet Union to preserve Jewish history, culture, and communal life, from the Polin Museum in Warsaw to the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a. She also introduced them to Jews, like herself, whose families remained in Poland after 1968.<\/p>\n

Do\u0142owy is the former head of Warsaw\u2019s Jewish Community Center and the founder of the Miszpucha Foundation. A part of the Engaged Memory Consortium, this foundation aims to strengthen ties between Jews in Poland and Jews who left, particularly those driven out in 1968.<\/p>\n

Do\u0142owy arranged meetings between the emigrants and Jews who stayed in Poland – artists from the Kultur-Lige network in Wroc\u0142aw, cultural event organizers for the nonprofit HaKoach in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a, and Jews in Warsaw who ranged from academics to entrepreneurs to JCC coordinators.<\/p>\n

In 1968, Do\u0142owy\u2019s father was expelled from his university and lost permission to continue his PhD. The question of whether to stay or leave Poland split her parents from their families and friends. Half the Jews they knew chose to leave, dividing what she called the \u201cmiszpucha\u201d – the Polish spelling of the Hebrew \u201cmishpacha\u201d and the Yiddish \u201cmishpokhe,\u201d meaning \u201cfamily.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite this rupture, Do\u0142owy said she rarely saw the antisemitic campaign reflected in Polish history, beyond the hushed stories in Jewish families. Shame and confusion swirled around the events of 1968 for many Jews who considered themselves Polish, but were told by their government and their neighbors that they were not.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe that this generation\u2019s story is still something really silenced,\u201d said Do\u0142owy. \u201cWe don\u2019t really talk about 1968, or if we talk about it, we don\u2019t really know the words to describe what actually happened to us, to our community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Halpern was 22 when her family left in December 1968 to join a relative in Boston. Despite the Soviet propaganda that said Polish Jews harbored a suspicious bond to Israel, only some 3,000 actually went there. Most of the 13,000 emigrants fled to Sweden, Denmark, and the United States, where Cold War-era programs welcomed political refugees from the communist bloc.<\/p>\n

Waves of Polish Jewish survivors had migrated to Israel after the Holocaust. But many of those who remained by 1968 were secular and committed to life in Poland, with dwindling ties to Jewish religion, Israel, and Zionism, according to Stola. Many were dedicated communists or socialists.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that only a minority of them went to Israel, despite attempts to convince them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

To obtain exit permits, Halpern and other Jews were forced to declare the intention of going to Israel. Then they received a travel document that rendered them stateless.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt looked like a regular identity document – a photograph, first name, family name, date of birth,\u201d said Stola. \u201cAnd the most important part of the document was letters at the bottom of the page saying, \u2018The bearer of this document is not a citizen of the Polish People\u2019s Republic.\u2019 To my knowledge, this is the only identity document that says who you are not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Halpern gave up her Polish nationality, along with her sister’s, at an emigration office. She remembers everything as \u201cgray\u201d – the day, the Polish official, and the room with a small window.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were looked at as if we were hostile people, enemies,\u201d she said. \u201cWe had to stand there, and you had to raise your hand and say that you are renouncing your Polish citizenship. We cried and cried and cried.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, Halpern almost stayed in Poland. Just before her family left Szczecin on an overnight train to Warsaw for the first leg of their journey, she ran away. Seized by fear and anxiety about losing the world she knew, she slept at a friend\u2019s house that night.<\/p>\n

She woke up in the early hours with the realization that she had nothing left in Poland – no citizenship, no money, no university, and no family. She caught up with her parents just before their next train departed from Warsaw to Vienna.<\/p>\n

Halpern went to medical school in Boston and built her career as a doctor in California and later in Colorado. She did not visit Poland again until 2007, nearly 40 years later.<\/p>\n

Other young Jews leaped at the opportunity to leave in 1968. Wladimir Mietek Szpirt, another participant in the Miszpucha Foundation trip, was just starting medical school in Szczecin at 18. He found the university environment hostile. When he heard Gomu\u0142ka threaten the \u201cfifth column,\u201d he decided to apply for asylum in Denmark. For him, leaving the Soviet Union meant the chance to study medicine freely, develop his career, and build a stable life.<\/p>\n

\"WladimirWladimir Mietek Szpirt at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland. (credit: Shira Li Bartov\/JTA)<\/p>\n

But Szpirt\u2019s parents were stuck. They lost their jobs as accountants at state institutions, and authorities said they knew too much state information to leave the country. Szpirt emigrated alone, uncertain when he would see his parents again. Nearly two years later, they managed to follow him to Denmark.<\/p>\n

Szpirt recently retired from his long career as a doctor in Copenhagen. Like Halpern, he returned in April to the place where the first chapter of his life closed. Now in his later years, Szpirt reflected on growing closer to his origins by leaving them behind.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Denmark, I was always accepted as a Pole,\u201d said Szpirt. \u201cThe funny thing is that for the first 18 years of my life, I was not accepted as a Pole in Poland. But in Denmark, I became a doctor who was born in Poland. I was not a Jew from Poland.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many Jews never went back to Poland after the antisemitic campaign. Eliza Fishenfeld grew up in New York City with parents who fled in 1969 and 1974. The Miszpucha Foundation offered her first trip to Poland as the child of emigrants who were \u201cvery angry and very hurt,\u201d she said. They decided not to return.<\/p>\n

Fishenfeld lived in a displaced Polish Jewish world in New York. All of her parents\u2019 friends were other Polish Jews affected by 1968, she said. They connected through the network of Jewish schools and camps from their childhood in Poland.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know they loved Poland before \u201868, because they told me so many stories about it and they were always so happy, and all their friends were from Poland,\u201d said Fishenfeld. \u201cOur community was the Polish Jewish emigr\u00e9 community.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fishenfeld said that arriving in Poland felt like a \u201chomecoming of sorts,\u201d though it was nothing like the communist country her parents remembered. She called them daily to describe the trip, but at their age now, she said they no longer travel.<\/p>\n

The campaign didn\u2019t only destroy Jewish communities. It also hollowed out Poland\u2019s cultural and intellectual life, as Jews disappeared from universities, medical schools, and hospitals, according to Joanna Podolska, the former director of the Marek Edelman Dialogue Center in \u0141\u00f3d\u017a. She said their absence left visible holes in the city.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t have so many well-educated people, so it was a difficult moment,\u201d said Podolska. \u201cYoung people who could work for the city, for Poland, became citizens of other countries. They were doctors, filmmakers, advocates, chemists, researchers, and artists. Probably, Poland would be much richer as a country, more importantly, with these people who left.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades after the 1968 campaign, it remains a sensitive subject in Polish politics. From 2015 to 2023, Poland was governed by the nationalist-conservative Law and Justice party, which promised to revive Poland\u2019s pride in its past and eradicate what officials called a \u201cpedagogy of shame.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrative stifled research into Poland\u2019s Holocaust history, particularly concerning instances of Polish antisemitism and Polish people who killed Jews or cooperated with the Nazi regime. Poland passed a law in 2018 that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes.<\/p>\n

But the government also lashed out at a 2018 exhibition about 1968 in the Polin Museum. The exhibition called \u201cEstranged\u201d closed with a wall of quotes, which combined antisemitic and xenophobic statements from 1968 and 2018. Though the quotes were unattributed, two belonged to members of the ruling party.<\/p>\n

The exhibition infuriated government officials, and former culture minister Piotr Gli\u0144ski accused Stola of imposing \u201cvery aggressive politics\u201d on the museum. Stola was pushed out as the director in 2019 despite winning a competition to extend his tenure (in March, he was reinstated under Poland\u2019s new government, led by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk).<\/p>\n

Anat Plocker, a historian of Eastern Europe at Stanford University\u2019s Taube Center for Jewish Studies, said that Polish officials in 1968 defined a form of antisemitic rhetoric that echoes among Polish nationalist politicians to this day.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way they talk about the memory of the Holocaust, Jewish power, questions of who is really behind what\u2019s going on in Poland – it\u2019s really the Jews, or it\u2019s really a conspiracy of the West against Poland – all of this discourse became so important in Polish politics in \u201868,\u201d said Plocker. \u201cSo what we see is that politicians are repeating, really sometimes word by word, the same phrases that were used against Jews in \u201968.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eight years after the backlash to \u201cEstranged,\u201d Do\u0142owy said she was proud to have garnered funding from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She hopes to arrange more trips for 1968 emigrants, so they can share their long-obscured stories while they still have the chance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese emigrants from 1968 became the generation of grandparents, so this is actually a very good moment for them to tell the story to be listened to by our children,\u201d said Do\u0142owy.<\/p>\n

In 2007, Halpern learned about the Jewish Culture Festival in Krak\u00f3w and went to Poland for the first time since leaving home. She has returned since then to attend the festival and Holocaust commemoration events, but she found that most of the other attendees were also visiting from abroad. \u201cThey are not people that are actually being Jews here,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

That was why Halpern joined the Miszpucha Foundation trip. She was not interested in rehashing her parents\u2019 Holocaust survival or reliving her own loss in 1968. Instead, she wanted to meet people like Do\u0142owy – the other half of the \u201cmiszpucha\u201d who stayed and created new lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t really want to repeat the story of what happened to my mother, what happened to my father, what happened to the families,\u201d said Halpern. \u201cIt was all more walking on people\u2019s destroyed lives. So I wanted to see what is alive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In March 1968, Rachelle Halpern walked into her university in Szczecin, Poland, and found a group of her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1376,1488,6164,74,1526,9],"class_list":["post-11656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-poland","tag-antisemitism","tag-antizionism","tag-diaspora","tag-europe","tag-jews","tag-poland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}