• US Census Bureau
• Feet in Two Worlds

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  In the U.S. census workers are going door to door now.  Their goal is to visit the 48 million households that did not mail back their forms.  One neighborhood on the Census takers’ itinerary is Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, New York.  The community is home to many Russian speaking immigrants and language barriers and a mistrust of government are keeping many of them from participating in the Census.  Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska prepared our story.

EWA KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA:  It’s a busy Saturday morning on Brighton Beach Avenue.  This area is known at Little Odessa.  People come here to shop and Russian is heard everywhere.  Census workers and community activists have set up a table on the sidewalk.  They hand out hats and pens with the Census logo.  They are hoping the response rate in the neighborhood will be better than it was ten years ago, but they face persistent challenges.  For one, some Russian speaking immigrants still don’t have a lot of confidence in civic participation.

VALERIY SAVINKIN:  People do not believe that they can influence the situation.  Their voice matters.  It’s based on their experience.

KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA: Valeriy Savinkin is a U.S. Census Bureau partnership specialist and liaison to the Russian speaking community.

SAVINKIN: Because you know, in the Russian community we have many, many elderly people.  And they had their experience it the Soviet Union.  For their whole life they tried to stay aside from the political activity to save their selves.

KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA: Just off the Brighton Beach boardwalk overlooking the Atlantic Ocean some older men are playing chess.  One of them is Sam Vitebsky.  He came from Moscow 16 years ago.  He is 58 and on disability.  He refuses to fill out the Census form because he doesn’t see how it can help his community.

SAM VITEBSKY:  I don’t understand.  Everybody said it will bring billion of money to New York.  Why?  Why?  Explain me?  Explain to me no.  Crazy.

KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA: It’s these kinds of questions and suspicions that community leaders have been trying to overcome.  Two years ago they formed a Complete Count Committee for Russian American New Yorkers.  Gene Borsh is the chair.

GENE BORSH:  We realized that this ambitious goal can be fulfilled only if the entire community will be working on every single level.  We’re talking about businesses, professional offices like medical offices; of course probably one of the biggest input came from local media.

KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA: A local radio stations airs Census ads in Russian every hour.  Recently New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg called in to make a special Census pitch.

MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG:  And if everybody gets counted we have more money for schools and health care and housing and other essential services.  But if we miss anybody, anybody we miss costs us roughly $33,000.00 over the next ten years.

KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA: He went on to reassure immigrants that the Census Bureau doesn’t share personal information with other government agencies.  That’s especially important to undocumented immigrants.  Local leaders have made another argument.  They say filling out the Census could help the undocumented prove residence if Congress passes immigration reform.  But it’s not just fears; there is also the language barrier.  Roxana Nagorskaya came from Ukraine 15 years ago with she was 66.  And like many older immigrants here, she speaks very little English.  This year, for the first time, Census questionnaires are available in Russian.  But they didn’t come in the mail, you had to call to request them or get them at a Census Assistance site.  She filled out her questionnaire with help from a Russian language newspaper that printed a translation.  By mailing in her form, she hopes that her neighborhood will benefit and that medical care she relies on will be funded too.  Gene Borsh says community leaders like him are stressing that Russian speaking immigrants can have a say in affecting policy.

BORSH:  Unlike it was in former Soviet Union, it was impossible.  Here its’ up to you.

KERN-JEDRYCHOWSKA: For The World, I’m Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, Brooklyn, New York.

WERMAN: Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska reports for Feet in Two Worlds.  It’s a project that brings the work of immigrant journalists to public radio.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Our history podcast How We Got Here looks back at Senator Edward Kennedy’s contribution to the anti-apartheid movement. We also talk to Pulitzer-Prize winning author Tracy Kidder. He’s written a new book,  Strength in What Remains, about a genocide survivor’s quest to come to terms with his memories. And finally the story of a new museum in Warsaw dedicated to the history of Jews in Poland.

Construction has just started in Warsaw on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. It will not simply be a museum about the Holocaust. The museum team wants to focus more broadly on centuries of Jewish life and achievements in Poland. Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska has our story. Her report was produced with the help of Feet in Two Worlds, a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

There’s a new Jewish museum being built in Warsaw. It’s not a Holocaust remembrance musem. It’s dedicated to the centuries of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska has the story.

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp and this is The World. A history museum is under construction is under construction in Warsaw. That’s hardly surprising. The Polish capital has an especially rich past. But this museum is different. It’s devoted exclusively to the history of Jews in Poland. That history nearly ended during the Holocaust. This museum will look past that tragedy to the centuries of Jewish life and culture in Poland. Report Ewa Kern Jedrychowska says the museum comes as dialogue is opening up about the complicated Polish-Jewish relationship.

[SOUND OF CANTOR CHOIR]

EWA KERN JEDRYCHOWSKA: A choir of cantors and a song of thanksgiving at the ceremony to start construction for the museum earlier this summer. In the small crowd of guests was New Yorker Zygmunt Rolat who survived a Nazi labor camp in Poland.

ZYGMUNT ROLAT: I think that too many of my Jewish compatriots here confuse the horrible experiences during the war, the Holocaust, with the very long history of the almost millennium of Jewish coexistence in times good and bad.

JEDRYCHOWSKA: After the war Rolat immigrated to the US. Now this successful businessman and philanthropist is raising money to support the new museum in Warsaw. Rolat belongs to a small but growing group of Jews who are trying to rebuild Polish-Jewish relations both in the US and in Poland. Part of that is for discovering Jewish history.

ROLAT: The fact is that when Spain, when Portugal, was expelling their Jews, Polish kings, Polish nobles, were receiving Jews not only with open arms but granting them special privileges.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Until World War II started Warsaw was a center of Europe’s Jewish community. At that time every third citizen of this city was Jewish. The museum will stand where the Jewish district once was located just next to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial. Inside visitors will see interactive reconstructions of a Jewish home and a synagogue. They will learn about the first Jewish merchants who arrived in Poland in the Middle Ages, the spread of Hassidism, the role of Jews in the development of Poland’s industry, and Jewish cultural contributions.

BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT: We really want to capture the quality on an everyday basis.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett walks around the future site of the museum in Warsaw. She’s a professor at New York University and head of the core exhibition planning team.

KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT: The way we put is this: We’d like to communicate the lived experience of what it meant to a Jew in Poland across this enormous period. What was Polish about it? What was Jewish about it? What was unique about it? What did it share with those non-Jews among whom Jews lived?

JEDREYCHOWSKA: In the museum the Holocaust will be just one of seven galleries. The controversial post-war years will conclude the exhibit. Under communism the Polish government led an anti-Zionist campaign which forced tens of thousands of the remaining Polish Jews to leave the country in 1968. But now Poland’s chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich says the situation is different. The Polish government is a strong ally of Israel and Schudrich says Poles have a new attitude.

MICHAEL SCHUDRICH: While there are anti-Semites in this country there’s even a larger number, and that group is growing faster, of people opposing anti-Semites – the anti-anti-Semites.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Still problems remain. Right-wingers, including Father Tadeusz Rydzyk who runs a radical and notoriously anti-Semitic radio station, continue to attract listeners especially older Poles. The restitution of Jewish property confiscated during World War II is still an unresolved issue. For their part many Jews still cannot forget that some Poles collaborated with the Nazis during the war.

ERIN EINHORN: I had always been told that Poland was a country of anti-Semites.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: Erin Einhorn, a 36-year-old American writer lived in Poland for a year researching the story of her mother who survived the Holocaust because she was hidden by a Polish family near the southern city of Krakow. When she arrived in 2001 Erin recalls she was afraid of hostility. Instead she found that many younger Poles were fascinated by Jewish culture.

EINHORN: You’d walk into a restaurant and there’d be Jewish music playing and there were these klezmer festivals and people studying Yiddish and you’d go to synagogue services and there’d be young Poles there just curious to see what the service would be like and just really expressing an interest and feeling that this was their way of showing tolerance for Jews.

[SOUND CLIP OF PRAYERS AT SYNAGOGUE]

JEDREYCHOWSKA: This is evening prayers at Warsaw synagogue. Poland is in the midst of what some call a Jewish renaissance. Twenty years after the collapse of the communist regime and more than 60 years since the end of World War II many Poles are looking for their Jewish roots – roots that used to be dangerous, sometimes deathly dangerous, to acknowledge. No one knows how many Jews live in Poland toady but everyone agrees the community’s growing. Changes like these have made the construction of the museum possible. But not everyone supports it. Some Poles worry that they will be shown only in a negative light. Many Jews are nervous that anti-Semitism will be white-washed. Again Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett.

BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT: When we present the museum and people learn more about it, they become very enthusiastic. I’ve even heard individuals say I’m converted.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: When Poland was still ruled by communists, Zygmunt Rolat used to take his family there to show them where he grew up.

ROLAT: I think that it is very important that my children, my grandchildren, and for that matter all Jewish children and as a matter of fact not just Jewish children but young people in Poland in the world should know, should know and should learn and should be very proud of the long, long Jewish experience in Poland.

JEDREYCHOWSKA: For The World I’m Ewa Kern Jedrychowska.

SHARP: That report was produced with the help of Feet in Two Worlds, a project of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.