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The Krakow Post
R E G I O N A L N E W S
Ex-Soviet states seek energy
ties with Japan: official
The GUAM regional bloc of four former Soviet
states late last week called for closer ties with
Japan over both energy-saving technology and
pipeline construction in the Caspian Sea.
Representatives of the group – Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine – visited Japan,
a major energy importer, for talks with Foreign
Minister Masahiko Komura.
“Japan is the world leader in energy-saving
technologies,” Andriy Veselovskyi, deputy foreign
minister of Ukraine, told a news conference
with other GUAM delegate members.
“We are interested to have this technology.
This is beneficial both for us and for you because
Japan expands their technologies to other countries,”
he said.
The group at the same time called on Tokyo
to take part in construction of additional pipelines
in the energy-rich region in an effort to diversify
energy supplies.
“Diversifying routes of energy would be beneficial
for the region and for the world market,”
Veselovskyi said.
Japan, the world’s second largest economy, has
virtually no natural energy resources of its own.
The European-oriented GUAM was formed in
1997 as an alternative to the Commonwealth of
Independent States, a Kremlin-dominated grouping
of ex-Soviet countries. (AFP)
U.S. broadcaster denounces
jailing of Azeri correspondent
A U.S.-funded broadcaster denounced the jailing
of its Azeri correspondent late last week for
slander by the same local court that had cleared
him of the charge two days earlier.
Prague-based Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
called in a statement for the immediate release of
42-year-old correspondent Ilgar Nasibov.
Nasibov turned up at the court in the western
city of Nakhchivan expecting to be given his dismissal
charges after being cleared of the slander
charges brought by local police two days earlier.
“Instead, without the presence of legal counsel,
the judge reinstated the charges and sentenced Nasibov
to 90 days in prison,” the broadcaster, funded
by the U.S. Congress, said.
RFE/RL president, Jeff Gedmin, said the court’s
action was “a complete mockery of due process
which violates Azerbaijan’s own lawful, judicial
procedure.”
Nakhchivan police had subjected Nasibov and
his wife, who also works for the broadcaster, to
harassment by bringing spurious charges against
them for more than a year, he said.
Both journalists had highlighted human rights
abuses and abuses of power in the former Soviet
Republic in the South Caucasus.
RFE/RL broadcasts 10 hours daily to Azerbaijan,
producing most programming in its bureau in
the capital Baku. (AFP)
Czech lawmakers approve
foreign military missions
Czech lower house lawmakers late last week
approved government plans for foreign military
missions next year, which include a boosted presence
in Afghanistan but a reduced one in Iraq.
In Iraq, Czech Defense Minister Vlasta Parkanova
announced plans in October to cut the
force from 100 to 20 next year with effect from
July 2008. Most of the current Czech contingent is
deployed around Basra in southern Iraq, where one
of its main tasks is to guard the international base
not far from the city.
As part of a wider reshuffle, the government
also proposed boosting its forces serving in Afghanistan
from 224 to 415.
The Czech’s largest current foreign contingent,
the around 550-strong peace force in Kosovo,
should remain at existing levels next year.
The government proposal has still to be cleared
by the Czech upper house, the Senate. (AFP)
Czech gov’t unchanged on
missile shield after report
The Czech government vowed late last week
to press ahead with negotiations with Washington
about hosting part of an anti-missile shield despite
a U.S. intelligence report downgrading the threat
posed by Iran.
“The U.S. intelligence report will not influence
the attitude of the Czech government in the face of
further negotiations with the U.S. over the possible
installation of a radar station on Czech soil,” the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
The threat of a missile attack from “rogue
states” such as Iran is frequently cited by Washington
as the main reason for its missile defense
shield project.
The Czech Foreign Ministry stressed that the
U.S. report, released Monday, concerned Iran’s
nuclear program and not the development of missile
delivery systems, which it said was ongoing.
“According to the report, Iran will probably be
capable of producing a sufficient quantity of nuclear
material for the production of a nuclear bomb
between 2010 and 2015.
“This corresponds with the previous estimates.
By this date the European pillar of anti-missile defense
should be in place,” the statement said.
The U.S. plan calls for the installation of a powerful
targeting radar in the Czech Republic and 10
interceptor missiles in Poland by 2012. (AFP)
P O L A N D
“New Jews” kindle revival in lost heartland
Polish Jews celebrating Hanukkah.
agence france-presse
the krakow post
The Ministry of Education has done an aboutface
and begun considering whether to add a section
on religion to the comprehensive examination
that high school seniors must pass before they can
graduate. Students would not have to pass the religion
component to obtain a diploma. They would
simply have the choice of taking it if they wanted
to. The ministry’s decision reverses the Prime
Minister Donald Tusk administration’s stance on
the religious-component issue in its earliest days
in office.
News of the government’s about-face has
touched off an angry debate on the subject. On one
side are Catholic Church officials and politicians
who support religious values. On the other side are
those who want to keep religion out of schools.
Prime Minister Tusk said that although his
administration is discussing the idea that the previously
ruling right-wing party Law and Justice
originally proposed, the government is far from
making a decision on it. Church officials began
pushing for a religion component in the comprehensive
exam in 1999, according to Father Piotr
Tomasik, who works on education issues for the
Conference of Polish Bishops.
The ultra-conservative, pro-Catholic Law and
Justice party began working on adding religion to
the exam after it won the most seats in the lower
house elections of 2005.
The education minister at the time, Roman
Giertych, put together a plan for the religion component
in 2006. Representatives of the Catholic
Church, 12 other religions and religious associations
worked with him on the plan.
With the help of this religious advisory group,
Giertych produced a sample religion component
for the exam.
In Europe’s former Jewish heartland,
flickering Hanukkah candles are a symbol
of both the annual religious festival and the
inner light guiding dozens of Poles to their
roots and the culture of their forebears.
The revival of Judaism in Poland is being
kindled by “new Jews”: Poles raised
in the shadow of the Nazi Holocaust and
Communist-era anti-Semitism, who have
chosen to leave the mainstream in a country
that is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.
After ceremonies marking Hanukkah in
Warsaw’s Jewish cultural center, recent convert
Agnieszka Kwasniewska, 37, recalled
her awakening.
“When I came to the synagogue, it was
like I had always belonged,” she told AFP.
“It was like coming home.”
Like many of her counterparts, Kwasniewska’s
conversion began as a quest to
understand the things left unsaid by her
family.
“We never talked about my ancestors. It
was like something had been broken,” she
said. As a 12-year-old, her paternal grandmother
had told her she had been forced
to hide during World War II because she
“looked like a Jew.”
“I knew there was something not quite
right in this story. She cried a lot. We never
talked about it again.”
“Later I asked my father and he said,
‘That’s past history, and there’s no going
back. We’re Catholics’,” said Kwasniewska,
whose conversion to Judaism has caused
tension with her family.
According to various estimates, Poland
counts just 3,500 to 15,000 Jews out of a total
population of 38 mln people, more than
90 percent of whom are Catholic.
But it is near impossible to say how many
Poles have some Jewish ancestry.
Jews first emigrated to Poland from western
Europe to escape 11th century pogroms,
and on the eve of World War II, there were
around 3.5 mln there.
The capital Warsaw alone had a Jewish
community of 400,000, ranging from the entirely
non-religious to traditionally-dressed
Orthodox believers. It was the largest Jewish
city in Europe and the second in the
world after New York.
After invading Poland in 1939, Nazi Germany
transformed Warsaw’s Jewish district
into a Ghetto, to isolate and eventually wipe
out the population.
Half of the six mln Jews killed by the Nazis
were Polish, and most died in Nazi concentration
camps set up in occupied Poland,
such as the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In 1945, Poland’s surviving Jewish population
numbered just 280,000.
Many emigrated to the U.S. or Israel,
either immediately after the war or during
waves of anti-Semitism in the 1950s and
1960s.
Many Holocaust survivors who had been
able to hide their Jewish identity during the
war decided to keep it that way in the postwar
era to protect the next generation. Others
came from mixed Catholic and Jewish,
or non-religious, families, where identity
was not hard and fast.
Another recent convert, Maciej Krasniewski,
20, adjusted his yarmulke skullcap
as he recalled the day he learned he
was Jewish.
“I found out when I was 13,” he said.
“I had got interested in my family’s
name. Polish names ending in ‘ski’ can
mean you have origins in the nobility, so I
was looking up my roots. I asked my father,
and he said: ‘Our real name is Kirschenbaum.’”
Krasniewski’s paternal grandfather had
survived the Holocaust, and the family
picked a Polish name in 1954.
Kransiewski said he took five years to
When Ryszard Legutko replaced Giertych as
education minister a few weeks before the end of
the Law and Justice party’s two-year reign, he said
he saw no reason for religion to be in the exam.
One of the archibishops, Slawoj Leszek Glodz
apparently thought it was a Law and Justice double-cross.
On Aug. 18, he threatened an all-out war
over the issue, and Legutko relented.
The government drew up a plan to include religion
in an exam to be given to 1,000 students at 50
schools in the spring of 2008.
Then the Civic Platform party ousted Law and
Justice in the national elections of late October.
The victors said they would drop the idea of putting
a religious component in the comprehensive
exam.
Church officials were apoplectic about the
government turn-about. Archbishop of Warsaw
Kazimierz Nycz demanded, and got, an audience
with Deputy Minister of Education Krystyna Szumilas
to discuss the issue.
Szumilas said after the meeting that she saw no
problem continuing work on the proposal. Tusk’s
statement later that no decision has been reached
on the issue suggested that the government could
back away from it, however.
The plan that church officials worked out with
Giertych was to include religion in a list of subjects
in the exam that high school seniors would
not have to pass in order to obtain their diploma.
The current education minister, Katarzyna Hall,
said that if some students want to show a mastery
of religious content by passing a religion section of
the exam, the ministry should make the component
available to them.
Other Civic Platform officials oppose the idea.
And the Left and Democrats party has threatened
to sue if the Tusk administration decides to include
a religion component in the exam. They believe
convert to Judaism, due to both fears of public
reaction and his lingering Catholic belief
that it would be a sin.
The spark for Krasniewski and his twin
brother was a recent holiday.
“We were standing in the middle of
Prague’s old Jewish district, and we decided
to convert,” he said.
“At first there was a struggle in our family,
to stop us going back to what they had
escaped from,” he added.
But the twins’ grandfather eventually
warmed to the idea, and finally told them
the story of the brothers and sisters he lost
during the Holocaust.
Krasniewski’s brother chose to become
an Orthodox Jew, and follows a strict kosher
diet. Krasniewski considers himself a conservative.
He said he is still wary of wearing his yarmulke
in public due to lingering anti-Semitism,
but, borrowing a phrase from the gay
rights movement, says he plans to.
“It’s like coming out. We’re here, we
won’t go away, get used to it. If you don’t
do it, no one will know there are Jews in Poland,”
he said.
Poland’s “new Jews” also want fellow
Jews, notably those from the U.S. and Israel
who come to visit the sites of Nazi-era death
camps, to wake up to the growth and even
the very existence of their community and
stop seeing Poland only as a vast cemetery.
“Other Jews need to see the reality of
Jewish life in Poland,” said Anna Janot-Szymanska,
37, who learned of her roots as a
teenager and said she is still a “Jewish beginner”
with a more cultural than religious
interest.
Her 27-year-old sister Malgorzata, who
runs the Jewish center in Warsaw, wants
visitors to come and meet with the growing
community.
“Out of the ashes of the Holocaust, there’s
a spark,” she said.
DECEMBER 13-DECEMBER 19, 2007
Foreign
ministers
hail new era
in ties with
Germany
agence france-presse
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter
Steinmeier and his new Polish counterpart
Radoslaw Sikorski said late last week they
hoped to mend bilateral ties that soured under
Poland’s former government.
“We both said that we want to open a
new chapter in German-Polish relations,”
Steinmeier said after talks with Sikorski in
Berlin.
He thanked Sikorski for coming to Germany
on his first visit abroad as the top
diplomat in liberal Prime Minister Donald
Tusk’s government.
“We see this as a sign of your interest and
willingness to play a role in breathing new
life into the relationship between Germany
and Poland.”
Sikorski told reporters: “I would like to
second every word of that.”
Ties between the two neighbors suffered
under nationalist Prime Minister Jaroslaw
Kaczynski, who was soundly defeated by
Tusk and his Civic Platform in October
elections.
Kaczynski missed few opportunities to
reproach Germany over its World War II
past. He told fellow EU leaders during a row
about voting rights in the bloc this year that
had the Nazis not invaded Poland it would
today be a nation of 66 mln people instead
of 38 mln.
But while Steinmeier and Sikorski exchanged
warm remarks, Tusk’s new advisor
on relations with Germany, Russia and
Israel sounded a warning over a simmering
row triggered by German plans to honor
those expelled from their homes in central
Europe at the end of World War II, including
Germans who were forced to flee modernday
Poland.
The project has the support of German
Chancellor Angela Merkel, but has been
condemned by Warsaw for failing to make
a distinction between the victims and the aggressors
in the war.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski said in an interview
with Die Zeit weekly published on
Thursday that he was saddened by Berlin’s
plans to create a center in memory of those
expelled after the war.
“It does not suprise me but it saddens
me,” said Bartoszewski, who is a survivor
of the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.
“We should not create a situation which
forces the new Polish government to react
in the same manner as the old government,”
he warned.
Problems with school religious exam
such a move would be unconstitutional because
it would be inserting religion into the educational
process. Education experts point out that universities
use scores on the comprehensive exam to
help decide which students to admit. Thus, these
experts say, the Education Ministry should draft all
questions on the exam.
If a religious component is included in the
exam, the experts say, the church will be deciding
the questions, not the Education Ministry. That
means the ministry will be ceding its authority for
overseeing the exam to outsiders, these experts
say. Tusk said that although he feels “great esteem
for and sympathy toward Archbishop Kazimierz
Nycz,” the decision about a religion component in
the final exam will not be made in talks between
government officials and “people from outside the
government.” It will be made solely by government
officials, he said.
The arch-Catholic Giertych said the Law and
Justice government did so much work on the proposal
that backing away from it now would amount
to breaking a promise to the Catholic Church and
others who championed it. “Any change is impossible
without consultation with the Conference of
Polish Bishops,” he added.
Left-leaning politicians detest the idea of a religion
component in the exam. “It is a sign of primitive
conservatism,” Jerzy Szmajdzinski, the deputy
head of parliament, said in a radio interview. He
is one of the leaders of the Union for Democratic
Left Wing party.
He maintained that politicians should promote
tolerance, openness and respect for all religions but
not be involved in forcing into the comprehensive
exam a section that basically deals with one denomination
– Catholicism.
Introducing religion into the exam also would
favor students wanting to go into university theology
departments, he added. Beata Gorka, a spokeswoman
for Catholic University of Lublin agreed
that the religion-component results would help
those interested in theology gain admission to universities
that offer theology programs.
What does the public think about the issue? The
polling group PBS DGA reported that more than
61 percent of Poles it polled for the daily Gazeta
Wyborcza newspaper opposed the idea of a religion
component in the comprehensive exam. Thirtytwo
percent supported the idea and seven percent
were undecided.
Thus public sentiment is running 2 to 1 against
the idea. Schools do not require students to take religion
courses. Students can choose to take religion
courses, can choose to take ethics courses or can
choose to take neither.
Jaroslaw Zielinski, an MP and member of Law
and Justice party’s chamber of ethics, said one out
of three students at most schools take neither religion
nor ethics courses. Tadeusz Bartos, a journalist
who is also a theology expert, said on TOK FM
radio that government officials should remember
that they represent all Poles when they consider
proposals to include such a religion component in
the comprehensive exam.
The notion that a decision about the issue might
be made in private talks between an archbishop
and a deputy minister is unacceptable, he said.
There should be a public debate on the issue, he
contended. The debate should include the question
of “what is the function of religion as a school subject,”
he said. Is that function instilling knowledge
or proselytizing, he asked.
If the main function of teaching religion is instilling
knowledge, then there is a case for including
it in the comprehensive exam, he said. If it’s to
proselytize, then it is inappropriate to include it in
the exam, he suggested.