Pride, hope as Poland ordains first postwar rabbis

By Gareth Jones

WARSAW (Reuters) - Nearly 70 years after most of his family was wiped out in the Holocaust, Shmuel Glitzenstein is proudly fulfilling what he knows they would have wanted.

Glitzenstein and eight other young men have just become the first rabbis ordained in Poland since World War Two, the latest sign of a revival of Jewish culture and spirituality in one of its historic heartlands.

"We have made history," said Glitzenstein on Monday at the rabbinical college in Warsaw, Chabad Lubavitch Yeshiva, where they are completing a year of studies.

They received their diplomas in a ceremony at a hotel in the Polish capital on Sunday evening.

Glitzenstein, 21, comes from a family of rabbis originally based in the central Polish town of Lodz. When the German Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, his grandfather was studying in what was later to become the State of Israel, so escaped the Holocaust.

"My grandfather was very proud of me when I came here to study, though he could not witness my graduation because he died two months ago," said Glitzenstein.

"I am so grateful that I was able to devote myself here from morning to night to my studies."

Before the war Poland was home to some 3.5 million Jews, one of the largest Jewish communities in the world, but most of them were murdered by the Nazis in ghettos and death camps such as Auschwitz built on Polish soil.

Today Polish Jews are believed to number just 20,000, though growing numbers of Jews from Israel, the United States and elsewhere visit the country to trace their family roots.

"Not one spiritual leader was ordained in Poland since 1939 until now... It has taken a long time to revive this tradition, but better late than never," Meir Lau, chief rabbi of Tel Aviv and himself a Holocaust survivor, told Reuters by telephone.

"Without spiritual leadership we cannot promise the continuity of the Jewish people. The main concern of all generations is to ordain rabbis for the leadership of the next generation," he said.

The nine young rabbis studied at a Jewish school or 'Yeshiva' run by Chabad Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement of Orthodox Judaism which is based in New York but traces its origins back to late 18th century eastern Europe.

Chabad Lubavitch runs more than 3,000 educational institutions in more than 70 countries worldwide.

HITLER DID NOT WIN

"Poland was always a centre of Jewish study in the world. People used to come from all over the world to study the Torah (the Jewish holy book) here. This was stopped by the Nazis," said Rabbi Shalom Stambler, head representative of Chabad Lubavitch of Poland who is based in Warsaw.