Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland with Long Island roots, seeks to encourage 'renaissance in Jewishness'

In 1975, Newsday published a story about the efforts of a 19-year-old State University at Stony Brook sophomore, Michael Schudrich, to share Jewish culture with a student body that didn’t know much about it.

Schudrich and a partner developed more than a dozen non-credit courses on Jewish ritual, cooking, movies and one on Jewish medical ethics called “My Son the Doctor.” About 100 people enrolled.

Half a century later, Schudrich is the chief rabbi of Poland, working to rekindle Jewish life in a place where it was nearly obliterated. Historians estimate that 90% of the 3.5 million Jews who lived in Poland before World War II were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices, who included Poles.

“A rabbi means being there for Jews wherever they may be, wherever they are in their spiritual journey,” Schudrich said in a phone interview. “That’s what I did in Stony Brook 50-some years ago ... That’s what I’ve been doing the last 30-something years in Poland.”

Schudrich, who lives in Warsaw but was raised in Patchogue in the 1960s and 70s — his father, David, was the community’s only rabbi at the time — is scheduled to lecture Saturday at the Hampton Synagogue in Westhampton Beach. His subject is the Kristallnacht anti-Jewish riots that occurred in 1938 across what are now Germany and Poland. The riots marked a radical acceleration of Nazi Germany’s state-sponsored terror against Jews, driving many from the region.

Hampton Synagogue Rabbi Marc Schneier said in a phone interview that he wanted the audience Saturday to think about the “moral and religious leaders who knew what was happening and chose to remain silent” after the riots, but also is encouraging the “renaissance of Jewishness” Schudrich has encouraged in Poland.

Saturday’s event will include liturgical music performed at Central European synagogues before the war. The music was performed less after the war because many of the cantors who knew it best were dead, Schneier said.

The “vast majority of survivors” left Poland after the war, and for decades Poland’s Communist government suppressed Judaism, Schudrich said. “If you stayed in Communist Poland, you stopped being Jewish, often to the extent where you didn’t tell your children or your grandchildren that you were ever Jewish. It was a deep, dark secret.”

Schudrich first traveled to Poland in 1973. Communist rule ended in Poland 1989. Schudrich went there the next year to work. “Survivors were confronted with a question: Do I feel safe to tell friends, colleagues, family, that I’m Jewish?” Schudrich said. In 2004, an umbrella group of Polish synagogues named him chief rabbi.

One early newspaper account of his work described it as teaching people “how to be Jewish again.” The few Jews he encountered usually had “limited knowledge of what it means to be Jewish,” of ritual or history, he said. Though he is a rabbi from Judaism’s Orthodox branch, he said he saw his job as teaching “generic” Judaism, “letting people learn as much as they want to learn and learn at their own speed” about Torah.

The number of self-identified Jews in Poland is growing, he said. Fourteen years ago, a government census counted 7,000 people who said they were ethnically Jewish; two years ago, there were 18,000. The number of families participating in synagogue activities has also increased, he said, from 250 five years ago to 750. “These are people who were there the whole time but today feel comfortable checking off ‘Jewish’ on a government document,” he said.

Schudrich said he was horrified but heartened by the response of the community this summer when, ahead of the anniversary of a 1941 pogrom in the town of Jedwabne in which Jews were burned alive by Polish neighbors, Polish ultranationalists posted signs denying Polish involvement and accusing Jews of being involved in the massacre, according to the newspaper Haaretz.

Those who posted the signs “represent a very fringe element of Poland,” he said. “More important is what is the reaction of mainstream society,” and nearly all of Poland’s major political parties condemned the signs, he said.