Jewish Polish history (1989–present)

With the end of Communism in Poland following the Revolutions of 1989, Jewish cultural, social, and religious life has been undergoing a revival. Many historical issues related to the Holocaust and the long period of Soviet domination in the country – suppressed by Communist censorship – have been reevaluated and publicly discussed leading to better understanding and visible improvement in Polish-Jewish relations.

In 1989, the Soviet-backed regime – notorious for its political repression – collapsed, thus exposing the rift between the Polish non-Jewish and Jewish communities caused by the World War II remembrance and the 1944–1989 period of prolonged human rights violations committed by the Polish government against its own people. Since then, the 20th-century history of the Polish Jews have been widely popularized, including the circumstances surrounding the Massacre in Jedwabne, the Koniuchy Massacre, the Polish-Jewish wartime as well as postwar relations in general,Stalinist reign of terror and the March 1968 events. Many negative stereotypes originating from the cold-war literature on the subject have been challenged. The rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust suppressed by the Soviet-backed regime in an attempt to discredit the Polish resistance movements as reactionary has also been reasserted.

In 1993 the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland (ZGWŻ) was established with the aim of organizing the religious and cultural life of the members of the Jewish communities in Poland. It helps the descendants of the Holocaust survivors in a variety of legal matters (communal as well as personal) such as, in the process of recovery and restoration of property once owned by the Jewish Kehilla (קהלה) and nationalized in communist Poland. Jewish religious practise has also been helped financially with grants from the Ronald Lauder Foundation. The Polish Jewish community employs steadily two rabbis, runs a network of Jewish schools and summer camps, and sustains several Jewish periodicals and book series.

...
Wikipedia