Byline: Tamara Micner

Exploring Jewish Marseille

BirthWrong participants in Calanques de Morgiou. (photo courtesy Jewdas)

Marseille, a lively port city sloping down toward the Mediterranean Sea, has a long, rich history of immigration and multiculturalism – including a Jewish presence dating back 1,000 years. Today, France’s second-largest city is home to about 80,000 Jews, or almost 10% of its population, with both newer and centuries-old Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities.

Recently, a group of 30 self-identifying Jews and allies from Europe, North America, South Africa and Israel gathered in Marseille for the second edition of BirthWrong, an initiative started by the London-based collective Jewdas to explore and celebrate Diaspora histories and cultures. (The inaugural BirthWrong took place in Seville, Spain, in 2015.) We spent four days exploring the city and surrounding nature, meeting with locals and partaking in Jewish life, and found plenty to do for visitors.

The city’s Old Port is the classic starting point, with a spacious plaza, boat-filled marina and daily cruises shuttling visitors along the Calanques, a 20-kilometre series of fjord-like inlets surrounded by steep limestone cliffs. With a compact city centre, Marseille is easy and enjoyable to explore on foot; there are also trams, buses and subways. As in Vancouver, there are beaches in the heart of the city (Plage des Catalans, west of the Old Port) and near the centre (Malmousque, Plage du Prophète, Plages du Prado and Pointe Rouge).

In a city of 40 synagogues, the oldest and grandest is aptly called the Grande Synagogue de Marseille. Opened in 1864, it’s a three-storey Sephardi synagogue (with a basement Ashkenazi chapel) that hosts Shabbat services on Saturdays, followed by Provençal-style kiddush including green olives, anchovies and pastis, which is a local anise-based liqueur. The small congregation is predominantly Algerian-French Jews, and the impressive sanctuary – with the men’s section on the ground floor and women on the second floor – has shining marble floors, chandeliers, Romanesque arches and jewel-toned stained-glass windows. To attend services, be prepared to bring ID and have your bag searched, and women are asked to wear a dress or skirt.

A plaque outside commemorates that, in 1943, Jews were deported from the synagogue to Nazi death camps. In Marseille, 23,000 Jews were deported – with French police aiding the Nazis – and about 1,800 were killed in camps.

Prewar Jewish history in Provence dates back to the first century, with a more documented presence starting in the sixth century. After the Inquisition, Sephardi communities arrived from nearby Spain and Portugal and, in the Middle Ages, when the Vatican controlled the Avignon-Carpentras area, the Juifs du Pape (Jews of the Pope) acted as its financiers. At the time, Jews were banned in most other parts of present-day France.

photo - BirthWrong participants take part in Havdalah
BirthWrong participants take part in Havdalah. (photo courtesy Jewdas)

Today, much of the Jewish community in Marseille came from Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco in the late 1950s and early 1960s, following the countries’ independence from France. The city is also home to large Italian, Armenian and North African communities (resulting in delicious cuisines to choose from).

A local guide, Lou Marin, gave us a custom walking tour of the city centre focused on 1939-1945, and has encyclopedic knowledge of Marseille’s history. He leads hours-long or multi-day walking tours with flexible rates. (Contact [email protected] or 33-486-954576 to inquire about a tour.)

Just outside the city, Calanques National Park offers more than 85-square kilometres of stunning coastal walks through pine forests, which were planted by the Romans, and ridges above the cliffs, with bushes of wild rosemary and thyme dotting the landscape. Our group did a four-hour hike with local guide Felix Altgeld (provenceapied.wordpress.com), who offers customized walks and has extensive knowledge of the local flora and geography.

Food-wise, Marseille is an affordable city within France, with ample fresh produce coming from sunny Provence and varied cuisines to relish, including North African kebab shops, Lebanese delis and 30 kosher eateries (including the pizza food truck L’imprévu). On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings, look out for the market in La Plaine plaza, a community institution with independent food stalls and other shopping. The neighbourhood, which holds an annual carnival and is filled with colourful street art, is fiercely resisting gentrification, and maintains an inspiring multicultural, multi-class spirit day and night.

We got the sense that many non-Jewish Marseillais are aware of Jewish history and culture. At the annual May Day rally, multiple locals (both Jewish and non-Jewish) approached our group to ask about our trip and the Yiddish songs we were singing. Both Marin and the local historian Alessi Dell’Umbria, who spoke to us about Marseille’s history, knew a lot about Marseille’s Jewish history and culture through both their work and their personal lives.

Given France’s culture of secularism – where religious identity isn’t generally part of public life – the local Jewish activists who hosted us found it refreshing and unusual to meet Jews who bring our religious identity to politics, wear Stars of David and kippot and are openly Jewish in public. We, in turn, were fascinated to visit a bustling but laid-back city with a rich left-wing history, near-constant sun and diverse communities carving out an inclusive collective identity.

Marseille is just over three hours from Paris by high-speed train (visit sncf.com/en).

Tamara Micner is a playwright and journalist from Vancouver who lives in London, England. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal and London Review of Books.

Poland’s wartime contradictions

In August, Poland’s right-wing cabinet approved a bill that would criminalize using the phrase “Polish death camp” or “Polish concentration camp,” with punishments including fines or imprisonment.

The bill raises questions about Poland’s role in the Holocaust. It echoes the country’s communist-era stance on the Second World War – that Poland was a victim and heroically saved Jews.

Growing up, I was told the opposite by my family, my Jewish day school and the broader community – that Poland was antisemitic and complicit in the Holocaust.

But recently, I’ve come to believe that both narratives are true. As we approach the High Holy Days and Yizkor, I think it’s worth reflecting on whether we as a community can see Poland’s role in the Holocaust differently.

This summer, I visited Poland for the first time with my sister, and the trip was full of contradictions. For example, we learned that Christian Poles – including our local guide’s grandparents – were sent to concentration camps, too. The Nazis killed two to three million Christian Poles and three million Jewish Poles. In total, Poland lost one-fifth of its prewar population – more than any other European country. But, those numbers represent roughly 10% of the Christian Polish population and 90% of the Jewish Polish population.

At the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, I learned about Zegota, the Council to Aid Jews. The Polish government-in-exile created it to support and fund Jewish resistance in Poland, including the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; it was the only such organization created by a European government.

At Yad Vashem, Poland has the most Righteous Among the Nations of any country. Yet, it also lost one of the highest percentages of Jews of all European countries.

We found that Holocaust memorials were also inconsistent, dependent on local policies rather than a unified national one. In our baba’s hometown of Wlodawa, the Jewish cemetery is now a park, without a Holocaust memorial, unlike the many memorials around Warsaw, Krakow and the preserved camps. This inconsistency seems to reflect the divisions within Polish society about whether, and how much, Poland took part in the Holocaust.

In our zeyda’s (z”l) hometown of Bilgoraj, we spoke with three people (through our guide) who live near his former house, which was recently torn down to build a shopping mall. One of them, who had the same build and attire as our zeyda, recognized our family name and said that our zeyda’s next-door neighbors were rumored to have hidden Jews (including, possibly, one of our zeyda’s younger sisters). Another neighbor said her mother hid a Jewish man for three days before he fled town, and that Jews and Christians lived in peace before the war. (Our grandparents never expressed that.)

Nearby, a new development claims to recreate the town shtetl, including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s house, a Belarusian-style (not a local-style) synagogue and luxury apartments. We called it “shtetl Disney.” We didn’t see any information on display about why the real shtetl disappeared, and I only hope that no one will want to live in a place that seeks to profit from nostalgia for a lost community. But that, too, depends on how people see their country’s role in that loss.

At the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, we took a synagogue walking tour with a guide who, like a growing number of Poles, has discovered her own Jewish ancestry since communism ended. (She’s now a Yiddish lecturer at Columbia.) We learned that Polish-Jewish history dates back 1,000 years, since Jews fled the Crusades and got special protection, including freedom of religion, from a series of Polish kings. We also saw “Jewish-style” restaurants run by and for non-Jews, and “shtetl rabbi” statuettes being sold in the Old Town – we felt uncomfortable seeing people exoticize and capitalize on our culture.

We also saw a play, based on a true story, about a Jewish Torontonian with Polish roots who visits Poland for the first time, confronts the history and legacy of the Holocaust and witnesses the country’s “Jewish revival,” led by Jews and Christians. Seeing some of our experience reflected back at us emphasized, for me, that Polishness and Ashkenazi Jewishness are partly intertwined, whether or not we acknowledge it.

Realizing that our family is more Polish than we’d thought was both heartwarming and heartbreaking. On our way to Wlodawa, we bought fresh forest blueberries along a highway, and realized our grandparents would have grown up eating them, rather than discovering them in Vancouver as adults, as we’d assumed. In Wlodawa, the restaurant where we ate lunch could have been our baba’s dining room: the walls were peach, the curtains were lace and doilies covered the tables. In Lublin, flea-market stalls sold porcelain figurines just like the ones in her glass-doored cabinets. Were we in Poland, or at home?

Several times, I’ve wondered what to make of these contradictions.

The Jewish community, coming from collective trauma, can insist that Poland was a perpetrator; the Polish government, wanting to avoid collective reflection or partial responsibility, can insist it was a victim or martyr.

The truth is, some Christian Poles collaborated and killed Jews; some joined the partisans or hid Jews; most did nothing. The country was occupied and partitioned, and no one (Jewish or Christian) knew what was going to happen. There was a death penalty for resisting or hiding Jews. The truth is, societies are messy and heterogeneous, and we can’t make universal statements about them.

My question is, do Jews and Polish society want to perpetuate narratives that deny the differences within Polish society during the Second World War? Or do we want to heal?

If we want healing, I believe both communities need to accept that Poland was both perpetrator and victim, complicit and righteous – much as we may not want to, and much as that may feel difficult or even impossible. If we can accept this paradox, maybe then we can move from our respective pain to some kind of healing.

Tamara Micner is a playwright and journalist from Vancouver who lives in London, England. Her work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Wall Street Journal and London Review of Books.