WARSAW (EJP)---Poland said it would return citizenship to Jews forced out by the former communist regime in an anti-Semitic purge 50 years ago.
In a letter to the Union of Religious Jewish Communities in Poland, Polish Interior Minister Grzegorz Schetyna said Tuesday: "I shall order the implementation of the appropriate procedures today."
"These matters (confirming citizenship) will be dealt with quickly, very quickly," he added.
The minister was answering a letter sent by the Union of Jewish Religious Communities end February in which Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union, and Paula Sawicka, chairman of the “Open Republic” Association against anti-Semitism and xenophobia, asked for a quick decision to settle the issue.
Nearly 20,000 Polish Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors or the children of survivors, were forced to emigrate after a political campaign launched by the communist party in March 1968 against the intelligentsia and academic youth.
The purge was accompanied by an anti-Semitic defamation campaign.
Passports confiscated
Upon departure, their passports were confiscated and replaced with a "travel document" that did not allow them to return. Their properties were expropriated by the state.
Many of them emigrated to Israel or the United States.
During a 2006 visit to Israel, Polish President Lech Kaczynski vowed Polish citizenship would be returned to victims of the purges. But with no blanket legislation covering the issue, exiled Jews, especially in Israel, are left having to jump numerous bureaucratic hurdles.
A majority of the exiles have refused to take this route, deeming it an additional humiliation.
The problem of those who were forced to leave Poland between 1968 and 1972
could have been solved by the President, Minister Schetyna said. "However he did not take that opportunity," he added.
On the initiative of Golda Tencer, director general of the Shalom Foundation, Jewish organisations and Polish intellectuals petitioned President Kaczynski to automatically return citizenship.
The petition was prepared on the eve of the 40th anniversary of the March 8, 1968 pro-freedom student protests which the communist regime used as an excuse to begin its purge.
"Among communist crimes, the infamy of March 1968 remains an event which weighs particularly on the Polish conscience," read the petition signed among others by award-winning film directors Andrzej Wajda and Agnieszka Holland as well as Nobel-prize winning poet Wislawa Szymborska.
It appealed to the Polish President to initiate such legal regulation so that “the authorities of sovereign Republic of Poland could automatically return the lost citizenship to each Polish Jew forced to leave the country by the communist regime.”
"Anyone who lost their citizenship due to the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign must regain it."
In accordance with the law, Polish citizenship cannot be recovered so it has been agreed that that persons who emigrated to Israel after March 1968 in fact never lost their citizenship. According to ministry, the problem concerns about one thousand people.
Piotr Kadlcik welcomed the minister’s quick response. “We were able to enter a dialogue with the authorities, this is important,” he told EJP.
“While the number of people concerned by the decision is not so big, it was a matter of justice, he said.