A Yiddish Yishuv in Selesia

In 1945, in a little-known episode, an entirely new Jewish community of 50,000 people was established in Reichenbach (Dzierzonow) and Breslau (Wroclaw) in Lower Silesia, now incorporated into Poland. Beginning with a petition by the few concentration camp survivors led by Shimon Balicki, the entire project was conceived and led by Jacob Egit. Egit, like most of those making up the new community, was formerly a Polish Jew who had survived the war in the Soviet Union (in Kazakhstan). ‘I was haunted’, he said, ‘by the thought that here, in this land which the Germans had cultivated for so many years, the Jews could exact their retribution and justice and could repudiate Hitler’s ‘final solution’ by making this former German territory a Jewish settlement.’ Following a conference of survivors held in Reichenbach on 17 June 1945, Egit persuaded the new Communist government to support his idea. Edward Ochab, the Polish Minister of the Interior, supposedly commented: ‘Whether it pleases anyone or not, go and build a new life on that new soil. We will support you in all your endeavours and with all the forces at our disposal’. Piankowski, a local Polish governor, issued edicts with poignant echoes of the recent past: ‘German houses in Lower Silesia must be designated by white flags; Germans must wear white bands on their left arms; a German meeting a Jew on the pavement must step aside; Germans repatriated to Germany can take only 16 kg of personal belongings … AH other possessions are to be left intact in their homes, which will be occupied by Jews from the concentration camps and repatriates from Russia.’ Although wildly popular with concentration camp survivors, all these edicts except the fourth were rescinded six weeks later at Warsaw’s behest. Egit and his fellow members of the newly formed Central Committee of the Jews in Lower Silesia set about creating a yishuv (settlement) amid the postwar chaos and received support from the Committee of Polish Jews in Russia, then numbering some 200,000 souls. As the community rapidly developed, it encompassed returning Jews with new skills such as coalminers and engineers, as well as the more traditional textile workers. Many established cooperatives. In 1948-49 there were 250 families in 150 farms around Reichenbach. Youth centres, schools, orphanages, banks and all the institutions of modern life sprang up. But all was to end in tears. Polish antiSemitism had never disappeared and by 1948 the support of the former Polish government for the concept had evaporated. A proposed Jewish pavilion in a major exhibition in Wroclaw was required to be dismantled as being too Zionist, and the next year Egit was forced to stand down as Secretary of the Central Committee oftheJews in Lower Silesia. The project collapsed under the new anti-Semitism emanating from Moscow as well as locally. The majority of the Jews emigrated to Israel. Egit himself went to Canada.