Bahá'í Faith in Poland

The Bahá'í Faith in Poland begins in the 1870s when Polish writer wrote several articles covering its early history in Persia. There was a polish language translation of Paris Talks published in 1915. After becoming a Bahá'í in 1925 Poland's Lidia Zamenhof returned to Poland in 1938 as its first well known Bahá'í. During the period of the Warsaw Pact Poland adopted the Soviet policy of oppression of religion, so the Bahá'ís, strictly adhering to their principle of obedience to legal government, abandoned its administration and properties. An analysis of publications before and during this period finds coverage by Soviet-based sources basically hostile to the religion while native Polish coverage was neutral or positive. By 1963 only Warsaw was recognized as having a community. Following the fall of communism in Poland because of the Revolutions of 1989, the Bahá'ís in Poland began to initiate contact with each other and have meetings - the first of these arose in Kraków and Warsaw. In March 1991 the first Bahá'í Local Spiritual Assembly was re-elected in Warsaw. Poland's National Spiritual Assembly was elected in 1992. According to Bahá'i sources there were about three hundred Bahá'ís in Poland in 2006 and there have been several articles in polish publications in 2008 covering the Persecution of Bahá'ís in Iran and Egypt. The Association of Religion Data Archives (relying on World Christian Encyclopedia) estimated the Bahá'ís at about 990 in 2005.

The earliest known articles in Polish were written by in the 1870s after he had met the Bahá'ís in Baghdad, and one of these was to defend the Bahá'í Faith against an erroneous article in another publication.Isabella Grinevskaya was the pen name of a very early Russian Bahá'í born in Grodno, and her father is buried in Warsaw. Grodno was sometimes part of Poland and Belarus but during her entire lifetime was part of Russia. She is well known because of a play of hers performed in 1903 called Báb. In the 1910s some Jews in a regiment from Poland while stationed in Turkmenistan came into contact with the Bahá'ís there. Later the rector of the Catholic University of Lublin met `Abdu'l-Bahá in 1914 while he lived in Palestine, and in 1915 there was a Polish translation of Paris Talks published in Silesia.

...
Wikipedia