05 March 2008
Poland’s government has announced that Jews who were stripped of their Polish citizenship 40 years by the then Communist regime are to be reinstated as citizens. In a letter, Polish interior minister Grzegorz Schetyna said he would "order the implementation of the appropriate procedures today." Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Religious Jewish Communities in Poland, told the JTA news agency that he had already received verbal confirmation that Schetyna endorsed the plan to re-naturalize Jews who fled between 1968 and 1970. Some 15,000 Polish Jews were deprived of their citizenship following an anti-Semitic campaign borne of Soviet anti-Israel policies.
It has been agreed that these former Poles never legally lost their citizenship. Once the decision is formalized, Jews who fled Poland will be able to go to a Polish consulate in their current home country and "reconfirm their citizenship" as if they had never lost it, Kadlcik said. The decision follows recently increased pressure from Kadlcik and Jewish advocacy groups in Poland. Golda Tencer, head of Poland’s Shalom Foundation, recently told the Polish ‘Dziennik’ newspaper that president Lech Kaczynski had not yet answered her request of last October. Schetyna said the problem could have been solved by Kaczynski, but "he did not take that opportunity."
Kadlcik said the policy would apply particularly to Polish Jews who went to Israel, "because those who went to other places had no problem getting back their citizenship" up to now. He added that he did not think the number of applicants would be very large, but he felt "very good about it because it shows that we as a Polish Jewish community can have dialogue with the Polish government. It is important."
