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Monsignor Waldemar Chrostowski (b. 1 February 1951 in Chrostowo) is a Polish Catholic priest, Bible scholar, and theologian. He is a professor of theology at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw.
Chrostowski was born in 1951 at an eponymous village; he was educated at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (1978–1983) and spent an year (1979–1980) at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. [1] In 1986, Chrostowski received his Ph.D. on the interpretation of certain Biblical verses concerning Israel. [1]
In 1987, Chrostowski received appointment at the Academy of Catholic Theology. [1] Nine years later, in 1996, he obtained habiliation in Biblical studies. [1] In 1998, Chrostowski joined the Theological College in Warsaw as an associate professor and Chair of Old Testament exegesis. [1] At the same time, from 1999 till 2002, he served as the Vice-Rector of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University. [1] In 2003, he was promoted to full proffesorship. [1]
Until 1998, he was the founding-chairman of the Polish Council of Christians and Jews. [1]
In October 1997, Henryk Jankowski, a renowned priest-cum-politician claimed that it was undesirable to have a Jewish minority in the Polish government since the nation was "afraid of it". [2] His remarks drew international attention; Stanisław Musiał, a member of the Committee on Christian-Jewish dialogue, characterized them as Hitlerian-antisemitic and lamented the lack of dissent in Polish society, including from the clergy and politicians. [2] Musial's arguments invited a polemic from Chrostowski, a co-Chair of the Committee, who distanced himself from Jankowski's statement but accused Musial of misrepresenting it, engaging in hyperbole and demagoguery, and not delineating between anti-semitism and anti-Jewishness. [3] Chrostowski's article engendered a controversy with Polish Jews and in a rejoinder, Musial noted that some of Chrostowski's arguments were antisemitic in themselves among other flaws. [4] [5] Further, Musial's stance drew support from Stanislaw Krajewski, the co-chair, spurring Chrostowski to resign. [5]
Since then, Chrostowski has been vocal about "Jewish anti-Polonism" and has denounced, what he finds to be the Judaization of the Auschwitz. [5] He has argued that charges of anti-semitism has been weaponized to suppress discussions of anti-Christian sentiments among Jews. [6] He has supported the ahistorical notion of Żydokomuna — a notorious antisemitic trope —, [7] and has claimed that the Holocaust was organized in Poland to destroy the good name of Poles than persecute Jews. [8] Chrostowski has been a critic of Jan T. Gross's historiography — arguing his works to have no relation with "truth" — and opposed to idea that the Poles needed to apologize to the Jews for the Jedwabne pogrom. [6] [9]
Chrostowski has denied the existence of LGBT community, and suggested that pride marches are ideological tools of a cultural revolution. [10] Speaking at the Holy Mass, he has drawn parallels between women's protests against abortion bans to Bolshevic revolutions, arguing that the participants promoted "promiscuity" and "distorted the vision of man" to create a new world order, where "good women" would suffer the most. [11]
In 2014, Chrostowski was conferred with the Ratzinger Prize. [1]
The Jedwabne pogrom was a massacre of Polish Jews in the town of Jedwabne, German-occupied Poland, on 10 July 1941, during World War II and the early stages of the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of victims vary from 300 to 1,600, including women, children, and elderly, many of whom were locked in a barn and burned alive.
The history of the Jews in Poland dates back at least 1,000 years. For centuries, Poland was home to the largest and most significant Ashkenazi Jewish community in the world. Poland was a principal center of Jewish culture, because of the long period of statutory religious tolerance and social autonomy which ended after the Partitions of Poland in the 18th century. During World War II there was a nearly complete genocidal destruction of the Polish Jewish community by Nazi Germany and its collaborators of various nationalities, during the German occupation of Poland between 1939 and 1945, called the Holocaust. Since the fall of communism in Poland, there has been a renewed interest in Jewish culture, featuring an annual Jewish Culture Festival, new study programs at Polish secondary schools and universities, and the opening of Warsaw's Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
The Kielce pogrom was an outbreak of violence toward the Jewish community centre's gathering of refugees in the city of Kielce, Poland on 4 July 1946 by Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians during which 42 Jews were killed and more than 40 were wounded. Polish courts later sentenced nine of the attackers to death in connection with the crimes.
Marek Jan Chodakiewicz is a Polish-American historian specializing in Central European history of the 19th and 20th centuries. He teaches at the Patrick Henry College and at the Institute of World Politics. He has been described as conservative and nationalistic, and his attitude towards minorities has been widely criticized.
Jan Tomasz Gross is a Polish-American sociologist and historian. He is the Norman B. Tomlinson '16 and '48 Professor of War and Society, emeritus, and Professor of History, emeritus, at Princeton University.
Żydokomuna is an anti-communist and antisemitic canard, or a pejorative stereotype, suggesting that most Jews collaborated with the Soviet Union in importing communism into Poland, or that there was an exclusively Jewish conspiracy to do so. A Polish language term for "Jewish Bolshevism", or more literally "Jewish communism", Żydokomuna is related to the "Jewish world conspiracy" myth.
Bogdan Musiał is a Polish-German historian. In 1985 he left Poland and became a political refugee in Germany, where he obtained German citizenship. In 2010 he returned to Poland and became a professor at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw.
The mass murders in Tykocin occurred on 25 August 1941, during World War II, where the local Jewish population of Tykocin (Poland) was killed by German Einsatzkommando.
Tadeusz Piotrowski or Thaddeus Piotrowski is a Polish-American sociologist and author. He is a professor of sociology in the Social Science Division of the University of New Hampshire at Manchester in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Stanisław Musiał was a pioneer and leader of Catholic-Jewish dialogue and Polish-Jewish reconciliation.
Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland is a book published in 2000 written by Princeton University historian Jan T. Gross exploring the July 1941 Jedwabne massacre committed against Polish Jews by their non-Jewish neighbors in the village of Jedwabne in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Joanna Beata Michlic is a Polish social and cultural historian specializing in Polish-Jewish history and the Holocaust in Poland. An honorary senior research associate at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London (UCL), she focuses in particular on the collective memory of traumatic events, particularly as it relates to gender and childhood.
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews is a museum on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. The Hebrew word Polin in the museum's English name means either "Poland" or "rest here" and relates to a legend about the arrival of the first Jews to Poland.
Hermann Schaper, was a German SS functionary during the Nazi era. He was a Holocaust perpetrator responsible for atrocities committed by the Einsatzgruppen in German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union and was convicted after the war of numerous war crimes.
Wolfgang Birkner was a German SS functionary and a Holocaust perpetrator in World War II. Birkner served as the KdS Warschau in Warsaw following the German invasion of Poland in 1939.
Antony Barry Polonsky is Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. He is the author of many historical works on the Holocaust, and is an expert on Polish Jewish history.
Anna Bikont is a Polish journalist for the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper in Warsaw. She is the author of several books, including My z Jedwabnego (2004) about the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, which was published in English as The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne (2015). The French edition, Le crime et le silence, won the European Book Prize in 2011.
"Paradisus Judaeorum" is a Latin phrase which became one of four members of a 19th-century Polish-language proverb that described the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795) as "heaven for the nobility, purgatory for townspeople, hell for peasants, paradise for Jews." The proverb's earliest attestation is an anonymous 1606 Latin pasquinade that begins, "Regnum Polonorum est". Stanisław Kot surmised that its author may have been a Catholic townsman, perhaps a cleric, who criticized what he regarded as defects of the realm; the pasquinade excoriates virtually every group and class of society.
Glenn Davis Dynner is an American author and historian specializing in religion and history of East European Jewry. He is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies and a Professor and Chair of Religion at Sarah Lawrence College.
Elena Kutorgienė was a Lithuanian physician who resisted the Nazi occupation of Lithuania during World War II. Kutorgienė and her son took Jewish children out of the Kovno Ghetto and placed them in gentiles' homes to save them from genocide. She is recognized as Righteous Among the Nations.