Oliver Sears
Fathom Journal, December 2024
“His short statement drips with contempt, revealing how such antiquated anti-Jewish racism presents itself in contemporary political commentary, without the least self-doubt.”
I have a photograph, circa 1908 of my great-grandmother, Perla Rozenblum aged eighteen with a group of friends in Vienna at the tombstone of Theodor Herzl, the godfather of modern Zionism who died in 1904. How this group of Jewish friends from Poland found themselves there, I cannot be sure. Forty years before the founding of the State of Israel, Zionism was certainly less definable than today. Zionism, by its simplest definition, is the right of self-determination for Jews in their ancestral homeland and the locus of their religion. Although it remains, in the words of the writer Howard Jacobson, a hundred different dreams.
Perla and her husband, Dawid Lasocky died before the horror of the Holocaust, in Łódź, Poland’s second city. Their son-in-law, Pawel Rozenfeld, my grandfather, was not a committed Zionist. A secular Jew, he was nonetheless a respected member of the Jewish community who saw the future of his family rooted in Poland, despite growing anti-Jewish hostility which included racist laws which were enacted from 1935. After the death of Marshal Piłsudski in 1935, there were shameful quotas for Jewish students by university institutions. In 1938, a citizenship law stripped Polish Jews who had lived outside the country for five years of their citizenship, to deter those Jews of Polish extraction living in Germany from returning. Having been expelled by the Nazis, these Jews found themselves in a legal no man’s land, shorn of the rights of citizenship and residency. …SOURCE