Jedwabne, Alabama…Both Rewriting History  

Before anyone corrects my geography, please note that I am well aware that Jedwabne is in Poland, and not Alabama, although both communities are in the midst of denying Jewish history and attempting to create false truths to respond to political pressure.

Regarding the Polish town of Jedwabne, where historians agree that the townspeople killed most of their Jewish neighbors during World War II, a brand-new “information center” ds arisen intent on denying the crime, according to a report by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

The deceptively named “information center” is housed in two shipping containers that stand taller than anything else at the memorial site. On the side of one container, in Polish, are the words “The earth doesn’t lie” — a slogan promoted by those who believe that exhuming the site would exonerate the Poles of Jedwabne of the guilt they bear for their actions there during World War II.

The second shipping container demands “conditions for seeking and defending historical truth,” which it says are “in Poland’s national interest.”  Both containers were installed earlier this month and celebrated by Wojciech Sumlinski, a right-wing Polish activist.  Last year, he took credit for placing seven boulders near Jedwabne’s official memorial, bearing plaques that deny Polish responsibility for the pogroms and claim that Jews historically conspired against Poles. Sumlinski repeatedly targets Warsaw’s relatively new Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews as well, claiming that even the name Polin, which is Yiddish for Poland, is a national insult.

In 2001, former president Aleksander Kwasniewski officially apologized for the Jedwabne pogrom, and an official investigation by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance confirmed the next year that the murder was carried out by Poles.  Nevertheless, Jedwabne has since become a flashpoint in Polish politics, with some far-right politicians claiming it was Germans who perpetrated the massacre and characterizing research on Polish complicity as part of an effort to slander their nation. The school of those delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews sadly includes the president Poles elected just last year, Karol Nawrocki.

But defiance against historical accounts about the town still mobilizes the community of fewer than 2,000 people according to Anna Bikont, a Polish Jewish journalist for Gazeta Wyborcza who wrote about Jedwabne in her 2004 book “The Crime and the Silence.”  She commented, “You can’t win the elections in Jedwabne without saying that it was a lie, what Gross said (about Polich complicity).”

5,000 miles away in Alabama there is yet another example of officialdom trying to create new false truths. As of this month, many public schools in Alabama are required to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms, libraries, lunchrooms and all other common spaces. Putting aside the fact that multiple courts over the years have ruled that doing so is unconstitutional as it violates the principle of separate of church and state, the language of the text to be posted has been truncated to eliminate the fact that the decalogue was written by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and given to the Jews at Sinai.

The official text to be posted according to the Alabama Senate Bill reads:

1. I AM the LORD thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven images.
2. Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain.
3. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
4. Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
5. Thou shalt not kill.
6. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
7. Thou shalt not steal.
8. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
9. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house.
10. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his cattle, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.”

P. J. Schwartz, Rabbi of Temple B’nai Shalom of Huntsville, Alabama, writes in the Forward that: “Proponents of Senate Bill 99… have claimed that these enforced displays are historical, educational and religiously neutral. As an Alabama rabbi — and a father of two future public school students — I see that defense as not just incorrect, but also deceitful, especially because the version of the Ten Commandments that the law endorses is, itself, not historically accurate.”

He continues: “The Ten Commandments are a sacred Jewish text. They were given to the Jewish people, written in Hebrew, and rooted in a specifically Jewish story of liberation and covenant. This law takes that text, strips it of its context, and reshapes it using a Christian lens.  The version of the Ten Commandments that will be displayed in our schools omits the text’s defining opening: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of bondage.” That line grounds the commandments in the narrative of the Jewish people. To remove it is not preservation. It is distortion.”

As a result, of course, the text as approved reflects neither the beliefs or desires of all Christians nor those of most other religions as well.  Rather, that in the name of current politics, the law is an ideological move that uses religion to draw boundaries around belonging, and has morphed into the weaponization of something sacred.

It would seem that while the two locations may be 5,000 miles apart, they share a desire to massage the truth to fit their own political aims and goals.  In so doing, both situations take aim at the Jewish story and attempt to create a new “truth” that is neither true nor accurate.

Anglican cleric and writer Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) wrote:  “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”

Those who proffer falsehoods to alter historical truth will find that eventually the truth will prevail even if it has to come along at a slower pace because of its limp. To achieve that we need to be ever watchful.