44% of Warsaw teens wouldn’t want Jewish neighbors

JTA — More than 44 percent of participants in a survey on Warsaw teenagers’ attitudes to Jews said they would rather not have Jewish neighbors.

The findings of the survey of 1,250 students in 20 high schools in the Polish capital were published Tuesday in the Polish media.

Commissioned by the Jewish community of Warsaw, the survey showed that just over 60 percent of the 17- and 18-year-old respondents said they would not like to have a Jewish boyfriend or girlfriend.

The poll, which was conducted by the Homo Homini Institute, also showed that 54.6 percent of respondents said Polish people helped the Jews “sufficiently” during the Holocaust, the French news agency AFP reported. Less than 5 percent said Poles did not sufficiently help Jews and 11.2 percent said Poles extended “excessive” assistance to Jews.

Joanna Korzeniewska, a spokeswoman of the Jewish Community in Warsaw, told the Gazeta Wyborcza daily that the findings will be helpful in designing educational programs “which are more necessary than we had imagined.”

Piotr Kadlcik, president of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, was quoted on the news site Interia as saying that the apparent prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes is “particularly surprising considering there are hardly any Jews in Poland.”

According to Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, there are about 40,000 Jews in Poland, which had a prewar Jewish population of 3.5 million.