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PROFILE
Israeli ambassador to Poland
beloved for his personal touch
By Ruth E. Gruber
KRAKOW, Poland, July 1 (JTA)
-- The scene shown live on Polish television this weekend
was extraordinary.
The camera panned across
the 10,000 frenzied fans who crammed into the main square
of Krakow's old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, for the final
concert of the annual weeklong Festival of Jewish Culture.
Suddenly, the camera zoomed in
closer.
There in the middle of the cheering, dancing throng
was a familiar bearded face: Israeli Ambassador Shevach
Weiss, almost lost in the crush, dancing hand in hand
with the other revelers.
"Shevach Weiss," says Konstanty Gebert, publisher
of the Polish Jewish monthly Midrasz, "is probably
the only Israeli ambassador in the world whose main
threat comes from being smothered in love."
Weiss, 66, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland and the
former speaker of the Knesset, has become a popular
and even beloved figure in Poland since taking up the
post of Israeli ambassador 16 months ago.
He travels widely around the country and appears frequently
on television and at public events, disarming and charming
the Polish public with his blunt yet informal style.
"Even when he says something that Poles disagree
with, they still like him," Andrzej Folwarczny,
a former member of the Polish Parliament who now heads
a center for cross-cultural dialogue in the southern
town of Gliwice, tells JTA.
At the Jewish Culture Festival, for example, the launch
of a book based on intensely personal interviews with
him drew a standing-room-only crowd, as did a public
meeting and Q-and-A session with Weiss and Poland's
ambassador to Israel.
But festival-goers -- 90 percent of whom were non-Jewish
-- could also find Weiss almost every afternoon sitting
with friends at an outdoor Kazimierz cafe, dressed in
a T-shirt and puffing on his pipe.
"Shevach Weiss is just great," says an accordion
player from a village near Krakow who, dressed in traditional
costume, plays Polish folk music for tourists in Krakow's
main square. "I love him. He really has a way of
reaching out to people."
Folwarczny agrees.
"He has something called charisma," he says.
"It is very easy for him to make direct contact
with his audience, and he is very honest when speaking,
without prejudices or hang-ups. It's very important
that he speaks Polish, and of course his personal history,
too, makes him special."
Weiss' personal history is dramatic and gives him a
deep understanding both of Polish sentiments and of
the painful complexity of Polish-Jewish concerns.
He was born in Boryslaw, a small town in eastern Poland
that was 30 percent Jewish. As a child, he survived
the Holocaust, hidden by local Gentiles.
"Boryslaw was typical for the region, multiethnic
and multilingual," he tells JTA. "At home,
we spoke Yiddish, Polish and Ukrainian.
After the war, Weiss and his family settled in Israel.
He entered the Knesset as a Labor Party member in 1981
and was speaker of the Knesset from 1992-96.
After retiring from political life in 1999, he became
chairman of the international board of the Jerusalem-based
Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
Because of his experiences, and because of the often
tense nature of Polish-Jewish relations, Weiss regards
his job as something more than just representing the
Jewish state.
"It's a mission to be Jewish and an Israeli ambassador
in Poland," he says.
"I am a delegate of Israeli diplomacy, but also
the representative of all those who died," he said.
Because of the Holocaust, "We have lost two generations
of dialogue, but in the last 10 to 12 years, there has
been a process of renewing. Part of my role is day to
day, more and more, to serve as a bridge between nations."
Poland had Europe's biggest Jewish population before
World War II, and 75 percent or more of Jews in North
America trace their ancestry to Poland.
The Nazis set up their main death camps in Poland, and
more than 3 million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust.
Under communism, Jews were oppressed. An anti-Semitic
campaign in 1968 forced some 20,000 Jews to leave the
country.
Weiss describes the current state of bilateral relations
between Israel and Poland as very positive.
But these political relations, he says, are better than
the relations between the Poles and Jews as people --
and that's what he would like to change.
His views on Poles and Poland, in fact, challenge the
stereotypes held by many Jews that single out Poles
as the embodiment of the anti-Semite.
"No stereotype is fair," he says. "What
about the Nazi Germans? The fascist French? The fascist
Italians? The fascist Slovaks? Lithuanians? It is a
surreal situation" that many Jews "are ready
to go to Germany as tourists, but not Poland."
Anti-Semitism does exist today in Poland, he says, but
it is a fairly marginal phenomenon, and -- unlike in
other European countries -- little anti-Israel bias
linked to the current conflict in the Middle East has
appeared.
He terms the media in Poland "the most pro-Israel
and pro-Jewish in Europe today."
"Poland is not more anti-Jewish than France or
Germany," he says. "And on many points, the
Polish elites are more pro-Israel and pro-Jewish than
they are in any other European state. It sounds surrealistic,
but it's a fact."
Weiss says that it is essential to support Poland in
the process of renewal and democratization begun after
the fall of communism a dozen years ago.
"Polish democratic culture is one of tolerance,"
he says. "It's not just a political system but
a culture."
Weiss is obviously comfortable in Poland and among Poles,
and his style and message appear to have struck a chord.
Poles are flattered, too, that Israel chose such a key
political figure to be its ambassador. Weiss, indeed,
likes to recount that he turned down ambassadorships
in Berlin and Moscow to come to Warsaw.
"I think the shtetl is still inside him,"
Janusz Makuch, the director of the Jewish Culture Festival,
tells JTA.
"He loves Ashkenazic culture," says Makuch,
who is not Jewish. "He is a witness. He says nothing
against the Polish people per se, and he tries to understand
the Polish mentality. People feel that he is one of
them.
"Sometimes I think he is actually the ambassador
of Poland to Israel. I love this man, and I trust him
very much."
ld
Ruth E. Gruber is also a member of the National Polish
American-Jewish American Council (NPAJAC). For more
than two decades, the NPAJAC is committed to improving
relations and establishing a framework of cooperation
between the Polish and Jewish communities in America.
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