List of Polish Jews

List Of Polish Jews

From the Middle Ages until the Holocaust, Jews comprised a significant part of the Polish population. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, known as a "Jewish paradise" for its religious tolerance, attracted tens thousands of Jews who fled persecution from other European countries, even though, at times, discrimination against Jews surfaced in Poland just as it did elsewhere in Europe. Poland was a major spiritual and cultural center for Ashkenazi Jews/Ashkenazi Jewry. At the start of the Second World War, Poland had the largest Jewish population in the world (over 3.3 million ), but the vast majority of whom were killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust during the German occupation of Poland, particularly through the implementation of the "Final Solution" mass extermination program. Only 369,000 (11%) survived. After massive postwar emigration, the current Polish Jewish population stands at somewhere between 8,000 and 20,000.

The below list includes people of Jewish faith or ancestry.

Read more about List Of Polish Jews:  Religious Figures, Historians, Business Figures, Holocaust Survivors

Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, polish and/or jews:

    Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.
    Janet Frame (b. 1924)

    Shea—they call him Scholar Jack—
    Went down the list of the dead.
    Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,
    The crews of the gig and yawl,
    The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
    Carpenters, coal-passers—all.
    Joseph I. C. Clarke (1846–1925)

    It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    No doubt Jews are most obnoxious creatures. Any competent historian or psychoanalyst can bring a mass of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed. But I, as an Irishman, can, with patriotic relish, demonstrate the same of the English. Also of the Irish.... We all live in glass houses. Is it wise to throw stones at the Jews? Is it wise to throw stones at all?
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)