Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

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Copyright © 2009 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5160

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2009

09 10 11 12 13 14          6 5 4 3 2 1

Published in cooperation with The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3226-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jacobs, Jack Lester, 1953–

Bundist counterculture in interwar Poland / Jack Jacobs. — 1st ed.

p. cm. — (Modern Jewish History)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-3226-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Jews—Poland—Social conditions—20th century. 2. Jewish youth—Poland—Societies and clubs—History—20th century. 3. Jewish socialists—Poland—History—20th century. 4. Poland—Ethnic relations. 5. Ogólny Zydowski Zwiazek Robotniczy Bund w Polsce—History. I. Title.

DS134.55.J33 2009

305.892’4043809042—dc22

2008051730

Manufactured in the United States of America

To my mother, Hinda Jacobs

Jack Jacobs is acting associate provost and dean for academic affairs at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, a member of the doctoral faculty of the Graduate Center’s Program in Political Science, and professor of government at CUNY’s John Jay College. He is the author of On Socialists and the Jewish Question after Marx (1992) and the editor of Jewish Politics in Eastern Europe: The Bund at 100 (2001).

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.The Youth Bund Tsukunft

2.SKIF: The Bundist Children’s Movement

3.Morgnshtern

A Bundist Movement for Physical Education

4.The Medem Sanatorium

5.The Bundist Women’s Organization

Conclusion

Notes

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.An issue of Yugnt-veker published on May Day, 1926

2.Poster, created by H. Cyna in 1936, reading Into the ‘Tsukunft’

3.Presidium of the first countrywide SKIF conference, Warsaw, October, 1936

4.Anna Heller Rozental, a leading member of the Bund, addressing children and youth at a SKIF-sponsored summer camp, 1937

5.Morgnshtern membership booklet of Eljasz Kulkes, Vilna, 1927

6.The managing committee of the Warsaw Morgnshtern, 1937

7.Gymnasts of the Warsaw Morgnshtern

8.Costume ball and carnival in the Medem Sanatorium

9.Naptime at the A. Litvak Day Care Center, which was run by YAF, Vilna, 1934

Acknowledgments

MY THANKS TO Prof. Henry Feingold, whose encouragement greatly facilitated publication of this book. My thanks as well to the late Abraham Brumberg, the late Victor Erlich, Solomon Krystal, Yitskhok Luden, and the late David Rogoff, all of whom lived in interwar Poland and commented on various portions of my work.

Motl Zelmanowicz, who also lived in interwar Poland, and who grew up in the Bundist counterculture, provided me with much-appreciated material and moral support over an extended period of time. I also received material support for this project in 2003–4 as the recipient of a PSC-CUNY Research Award and as the Workmen’s Circle/Dr. Emanuel Patt Visiting Professor at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, and am delighted to be able to acknowledge my thanks in print.

Dr. Diethelm Blecking of Freiburg, and Professors Roni Gechtman (Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia), Samuel Kassow (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut), Ellen Kellman (Brandeis University), and Gertrud Pickhan (Freie Universität, Berlin) generously shared materials and unpublished papers with me. The trust and collaboration of these scholars means a great deal to me.

I did the bulk of the research for this book at the YIVO Institute and am grateful to all of those affiliated with the institute. I am also honored by YIVO’s decision to issue this work in conjunction with Syracuse University Press. Dr. Carl J. Rheins, the YIVO’s executive director, deserves special mention, as do Jesse Aaron Cohen, Krystyna (Krysia) Fisher, Leo Greenbaum, Chana Mlotek, Fruma Mohrer, and Marek Web, all of whom are on the staff of the YIVO Archives, as well as Yeshaja Metal, its public service librarian. My friend Nava Schreiber of Tel Aviv helped me to locate suitable illustrations from the YIVO’s collections. I have also benefitted from the expertise and cordiality of staff members at other institutions, including Dr. Gail Malmgreen, Associate Head for Archival Collections of the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, Eleanor Yadin of the New York Public Library, Rena Fuks-Mansfeld of the International Institute of Social History, and Misha Mitsel at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives.

I delivered papers on themes discussed in this book, at various points in time, in Australia, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, and in the United States and learned a great deal from the reactions of audiences. I am sincerely grateful to my hosts for inviting me to present my ideas. From among many, I single out Bobbi and Michael Zylberman of Melbourne, the staff of the Centre for Studies of the Culture and History of East European Jews in Vilnius, Claudie Weill of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, Prof. Dan Diner of the Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur, Leipzig, Prof. Feliks Tych of the Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, Prof. Michael Brenner of the Institute of Jewish History and Culture at the University of Munich, Prof. Jack Kugelmass, currently at the University of Florida, Gainesville, and Dr. Rachel Rojanski of the University of Haifa.

Jeffrey Broxmeyer of the Ph.D. program in political science at the CUNY Graduate Center helped to format the typescript and provided additional support services. I thank him for his careful work and genuinely appreciate the help provided by all those who aided me in preparing this study. Susan Milamed has been an anchor in times of despair. I would not have been able to complete this book without her.

Introduction

IN THE YEARS BETWEEN the two world wars, the Jewish community of Poland was larger than any other Jewish community in Europe. The General Jewish Workers’ Bund, a political party that had been founded in Czarist Russia in 1897, exerted a growing influence among Polish Jews in the 1930s.¹ Indeed, some argue that the Bund was the most powerful political party within Polish Jewry on the eve of the Second World War.² Both the extent of Bundist power, however, and the degree to which it could be fairly claimed that the Bund emerged as the strongest Jewish party in Poland in the late 1930s have been hotly contested.³ A great deal of light can be shed on such matters by close examination of the constellation of organizations that revolved around the Polish Bund, including the Bundist youth movement, the Bundist children’s movement, the Bundist movement for physical education, the Bund’s women’s organization, and the Medem Sanatorium (an institution for children at risk of contracting tuberculosis). It is the intent of my book to substantiate this claim.

Scholarly disputes as to the power of the Polish Bund have often hinged on analysis of electoral results. There were no Bundists elected to the Sejm, Poland’s national parliament, at any point in the interwar era. Other Jewish movements—including both the Zionist movement and a political movement committed to representing the interests of Orthodox Jewry—were far more successful in this arena.⁴ In 1919, the poor results obtained by Bundist candidates could be attributed, in part, to sharp divisions within the Bund itself. The Bund’s single largest local organization in Poland, the Warsaw Bund, ultimately chose to boycott the 1919 election (against the will of the Bund’s Central Committee), as did its organizations in Lublin and in Chelm.⁵ Moreover, the Bund’s daily newspaper, Lebens-fragen, was closed by the Polish government in the two weeks leading up to the election. Thus, the fact that the Bund did not elect any of its candidates to the Sejm in 1919 was not surprising.

But the Bund also failed to obtain any mandates in 1922. It ran a vigorous campaign in that year’s Sejm elections, and the party’s most prominent leaders headed its list. Bundist candidates obtained over eighty thousand votes, including almost nineteen thousand in Warsaw, more than twelve thousand in Lodz, and fifty-five hundred in Bialystok. However, because the mandates were won by candidates with the highest vote tallies in each of the sixty-four voting districts into which Poland was divided at that time, and because none of the Bundist candidates obtained the highest number of votes in the districts in which they ran for office, none of the candidates elected to the Sejm in 1922 were Bundists.⁶

The total vote obtained by Bundist candidates went up, to approximately one hundred thousand, in the Sejm election of 1928. Nevertheless, the end result, from the Bund’s perspective, remained the same. Not one Bundist candidate was victorious.⁷ Moreover, the number of votes received by Bundist candidates, running on a joint list with the Independent Socialist Party and the Right Poalei Zion, went back down in the Sejm elections of 1930, the last nationwide election in interwar Poland in which the Bund participated.⁸ The results obtained by Bundists in Poland’s parliamentary elections, in sum were, from the Bund’s point of view throughout the interwar years, consistently disappointing.

However, the Bund performed very impressively in many of the Jewish communal and municipal elections held in Poland’s largest cities and towns in the latter half of the 1930s. The first significant victories of this kind took place during elections to the boards of the kehiles (organized Jewish religious communities) in 1936. In Warsaw, which was home to some 350,000 Jews in the late 1930s—a far larger number of Jews than lived in any other city in Poland—the Bund received a plurality of the votes cast in the kehile election and thereby won considerably more seats on the governing body of the Warsaw kehile than any other party.⁹ Whereas the Bundist list attracted 10,767 votes in an election characterized by relatively heavy voter turnout, its closest competitor, the National Bloc (a Zionist electoral list), obtained 6,982 votes, and Agudes Yisroel (a non-Zionist party committed to Orthodox Judaism), only 5,256.

Bundist lists obtained an even higher proportion of the vote than they had in Warsaw in the kehile elections that took place in 1936 in Grodno, Lublin, and Piotrków.¹⁰ Examination of kehile election results in ninety-seven cities and towns in central Poland outside of Warsaw demonstrates that the Bund did not do as well overall in this region as either Agudes Yisroel or the General Zionists.¹¹ Nevertheless, the Bund’s success in Warsaw and in other specific, important cities, was a stunning one, widely commented on in the Jewish press.¹²

The victory of the Bund in the Warsaw kehile election was followed by a major victory in the elections to the Lodz City Council. There were two hundred thousand Jews in Lodz during this period, making the Jewish community of that city the second largest in Poland. As in the Warsaw kehile election, turnout was high in Lodz.¹³ The proportion of votes for Jewish lists won by the Bund-led slate in the municipal elections in Lodz was even larger than the proportion obtained by the Bundists weeks earlier in the Warsaw kehile election. The total number of votes cast in Lodz in 1936 for the Bunddominated list (which also contained representatives of the Left Poalei Zion, the Council of Trade Unions, and other smaller entities) was 23,685. While the United Jewish Electoral Bloc (in which Agudes Yisroel played a key role) won three seats, and the United Zionist Bloc won two seats, the list headed by Bundists won six.¹⁴

The kehile election in Bialystok, held at the end of December 1937, had similar results. The Bundist slate won eight seats while Agudes Yisroel and the Labor Zionists each won three seats; the General Zionist slate won only two.¹⁵

The best-known examples of Bundist electoral victories date from the years 1938–39, at which point elections to city councils were held in major cities throughout Poland. In Warsaw, the Bundist-dominated slate, which attracted 61.7 percent of votes cast for Jewish lists, won seventeen seats on the city council in the elections conducted in 1938.¹⁶ The lists run by other Jewish parties in Warsaw, in contrast, won a total of only three seats. In Lodz, seventeen Jewish city council members were elected from explicitly Jewish slates in the balloting that took place on December 18, 1938. Eleven of these were elected on a list that contained members of the Bund, of Jewish trade unions, and of the Left Poalei Zion. At least seven of the eleven were Bundists.¹⁷ Bundist candidates also scored significant victories in city council elections in Vilna, Bialystok, and Lublin—which is to say that the Bund obtained more votes than any other Jewish party in five of the seven largest Polish Jewish communities. In addition, the Bundist lists did well in certain somewhat smaller but still significant Jewish communities such as Grodno, Radom, and Zamość. Representatives of the Bund were elected in 102 different cities and towns.¹⁸ In Galicia, an area with different political traditions than Congress Poland, and one in which the Bund had never succeeded in picking up much traction, Zionist candidates outperformed Bundists in Cracow and in Lwów (in the latter of which the Bund’s list was simply crossed out by the authorities) in the last set of pre–World War II elections.¹⁹ Nevertheless, even in Galicia, the Bund made some inroads in the late 1930s.²⁰

Scholars of Polish Jewry universally acknowledge that Bundist candidates won specific local elections. Both the reasons for these electoral victories, however, and the significance of these results have been subject to debate. Bernard K. Johnpoll, author of the first serious academic study of the Bund in Poland, suggests that the Bund benefitted indirectly from foreign affairs as well as from events within Poland: Three major events, one in neighboring Germany (that is, the rise of Hitler), the second in neighboring Russia (the Moscow trials, which purportedly led the Bund to reexamine its attitude toward the Soviet Union), and the third within Poland itself (a reference to an increase in anti-Semitism), argues Johnpoll, handed the Bund the leadership of Polish Jewry. Because the Bund was an ecclesia militanta, it was able to defy the threats from within and without, and to lead the Jewish people during a period of despair.²¹

Joseph Marcus has also pointed to events outside the ranks of the Bund as helping to explain its electoral successes. To Marcus, however, the most significant of these events was apparently the disbanding of the Communist Party of Poland in 1938 by order of the Comintern. When [that party] finally disintegrated, Marcus has written, the ranks of Bund supporters swelled. In the last years before the outbreak of the 1939–45 war, the Bund emerged as the strongest Jewish party in Poland.²²

Ezra Mendelsohn has sought the seeds of the Bund’s electoral victories in its leading role in the struggle against anti-Semitism, in the perception that the Bund had allies in the non-Jewish world when other Jewish parties did not, and also in the Jewish public’s growing disgust with the failure of the General Zionists’ political strategies and, above all . . . the collapse of the Zionist movement’s program for Palestine after 1936. According to Mendelsohn, the British decision to prevent substantial immigration by Jews to Palestine "led to disillusionment with Zionism in general and a readiness to support [the Bund,] a party whose doikeyt [focus on Poland rather than on Palestine or some other potential land of emigration] was accompanied by excellent organization, ties with the Polish left, and the courage to demonstrate against Polish fascism."²³ As Mendelsohn put it in another, more recent, work, The Bund owed much of its newfound popularity to the Zionist debacle.²⁴ Thus, from his perspective, the Bund’s success was due not first and foremost to the conversion of massive numbers of Polish Jews to revolutionary socialism or to any other component of the Bundist orientation, but rather to the collapse of the Bund’s ideological opponents.²⁵

Daniel Blatman has taken a somewhat different tack. His study of the Bund in Poland in the latter half of the 1930s suggests that the Bund’s electoral victories were the result of internal ideological alterations: By the second half of 1933 . . . the Bund . . . came to the end of a process of crystallization, reorganization, and ideological change that had begun in the early 1930s. As a result of these changes the Bund was able to play a central role in the political struggle of that decade.²⁶ Blatman underscores the Bund’s 1930 decision to join the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) as both indicating a new direction on the part of the Bund and as a reason why it began to attract new members during that decade. He points as well to the Bund’s role, in March 1936, in organizing a general strike in response to a pogrom in Przytyk; its role in defending Jews against anti-Semitic attacks; its attempt to organize a Workers’ Congress for the Struggle Against Anti-Semitism (which was to have convened in June 1936, but which was prevented from taking place by the Polish government); and its opposition to a ban on kosher slaughtering, among other matters, as indication of a reorientation on the part of the Bund, and as clarifying why it attracted more voters beginning in the mid-1930s than it had in the past: There was . . . a clear connection between the Bund’s new ideological direction and the continuous rise in the movement’s strength at that time.²⁷

Gertrud Pickhan, author of the single best study of the Bund in interwar Poland, puts particularly great stress not so much on the Bund’s purported ideological alteration, but on changes in the socioeconomic composition of Polish Jewry in explaining the party’s political rise. According to Pickhan, an increase in the number of wage laborers among Polish Jews led to an increase in the significance of the Jewish trade unions. Since these unions were tied to the Bund, the increase in the power of the unions ultimately led to an increase in the power of the party.²⁸

Several prominent academics have cautioned against making too much of the Bund’s late victories. Antony Polonsky, for example, in a piece published in 1988, argued that Jewish political opinion had some pendulumlike qualities in interwar Poland, and thus that the Bundist electoral gains in 1938–39 were not necessarily the result of major changes in Jewish life or indicative of long-term trends:

Jewish political life in Poland, partly as a consequence of the perilous situation of the Jews, was subject to violent swings of mood. The Bundist upswing was partly the result of Jewish hopes that the Bund could intercede on their behalf with a victorious Polish Socialist Party. Had the socialists not been able to take power . . . or had they failed to fulfill the hopes the Jews placed in them, these attitudes could very quickly have changed.²⁹

It is my contention that the electoral victories of the Bund in the late 1930s were not ephemeral but rather the result of deeper tendencies. The fact that such tendencies existed may best be demonstrated by focusing on the attempts made by Bundists in the 1920s and 1930s to create a Bundist counterculture.³⁰ The Bund in Poland was not simply an American-style political party concerned primarily with electing candidates to office or passing legislation that furthered the interests of its members. It was a nucleus eager to instill in the movements revolving around it a set of values and ideals sharply different than those dominating Polish society or traditional Jewish religious institutions. The total number of individuals involved in the constellation of Bundist movements was significantly larger than the number of Bund members per se. Most, though not all, of these peripheral movements grew dramatically in size over a period of years, beginning in the mid-1920s.

Neither the significance of the Bund, nor, for that matter, the movement’s limitations can be properly assessed without study of the attempt to create a Bundist counterculture. However, the Bundist constellation of movements has never been systematically explored. My hope, in the chapters that follow, is that I will be able not merely to describe the functioning of some of the major movements and institutions that circled the Bund, but also to suggest ways in which the histories of these movements and institutions help to explain the electoral victories of Bundist candidates in the years immediately preceding the Second World War.

1

The Youth Bund Tsukunft

THE YUGNT-BUND TSUKUNFT (Youth Bund Tsukunft) occupies pride of place among the constellation of organizations associated with the Bund in interwar Poland.¹ By the late 1930s, the Tsukunft, as this movement was widely known, had more than twelve thousand members,