A graduate of Ohr Somayach Monsey, Oxford University, Jagiellonian University and the University of Oregon, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein’s scholarly bona fides are beyond reproach. And as a student, he relocated to Poland in the ‘90s with a number of aims in mind, with the Holocaust on top of the list.
“When I got back to the States,” the founder of the Pico Shul said, “I knew I didn’t want to be a philosophy student. I wanted to study Polish Jewry. I was fascinated by the Holocaust. I was fascinated by how Poles and Jews could not get along.”
Combining his ambitions, he was interested in conflict studies. He created his own major at the University of Oregon, “Peace Studies in a Jewish Context.” His goal was to study the conflict in Polish-Jewish relations, before, during and after the Holocaust. “I did that with professors in sociology and anthropology and rhetoric. They had a special program that probably started in the ‘60s or ’70s. About one student every four years managed – that rare – to put together his or her own major, getting it approved/accepted at the Honors College. I had to write a thesis, a 300-page thesis, called ‘The Dictionary of the Kielce Pogrom.’”
This spring, Bookstein published a book “Denial Is a River in Poland,” an expansion of his undergraduate and graduate work on the Holocaust.
“I was absolutely passionate about the subject,” he said. “I went to Poland as an undergrad, did field work. In sociology, there are different kinds of fields. My mentor at the University of Oregon, Dr. Ken Liberman, said that rather than trying to analyze culture from the outside, you have to be part of that society to get to know it. You have to spend time in the community, get to know how people think in their own language and culture. That’s the goal of that kind of study.”
To get a better feel for Polish-Jewish relations, Bookstein hit the Polish streets and interviewed people. This was 1992 in Kielce, a community that became notorious during – and after – the Holocaust. According to Yad Vashem, in July 1946, a Kielce resident filed a police report that his son had been kidnapped by Jews but managed to escape. While the claim was phony, the subsequent police investigation led to a massive outbreak of violence against the Jewish community. Forty-two Jews were murdered and 80 others were injured.
When Bookstein started the project, he didn’t speak Polish, so he had to use translators. “I recorded many interviews, and they are transcribed,” he said. “I started digitizing those tapes, and I hope they will be included in my Kielce Pogrom website that is being published with the book.”
Another advisor at the University of Oregon urged the Detroit native to continue his pursuit, and apply for a Fulbright scholarship to go to Poland and continue his studies. “I did that, and I was accepted,” he said flashing one of his many smiles. So he went to Kraków, site of Jagiellonian University, where they had an intensive Polish language program. He enrolled in their Polish Ulpan to master reading, writing and speaking Polish.
He continued his research and volunteering in the Jewish community in Kraków for the school year of 1993-94. While there he met Jonathan Webber, an anthropology professor from Oxford. The professor told Bookstein, “You are doing interesting work. You should continue at Oxford.” The young man agreed, and after flying from Poland to England, he enrolled in the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Bookstein then thought about where he wanted to take his studies. “I said if I am going to pursue this, I have to know Yiddish. So I enrolled at the Oxford Yiddish Center. I studied Yiddish, cultural anthropology and Jewish Studies at Oxford. I got a master’s degree in Jewish Studies. My thesis was about Poland and the Jewish pilgrimage to Poland. I compared Hassidic and Zionist tours of Poland.”
While studying at Oxford he had begun writing a book about Polish-Jewish relations. “Then I started writing about the Kielce Pogrom as a book, and I wrote my first version of a book on it.” Then a new interest came on the horizon. “I met this great, amazing, amazing girl at Oxford, Rachel Steiner. We hit it off. She came over from Northern California to do her master’s degree in Jewish history. When we met, I said ‘This is clearly why I stayed at Oxford.’ I was smitten. We dated, got engaged and we married in June 1996.”
It’s been 30 happy years and four children for the onetime campus rabbi at Long Beach State and UC Irvine and leader of JConnect & Jewlicious in LA.
The next decision after marrying was to relocate. The Booksteins moved to Israel. But the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation “really needed our help in Poland,” he said. “Rachel offered to check it out. We started commuting from Israel to Poland. The reason we moved to Israel was – we were both observant Orthodox Jews, but our Jewish knowledge was pretty poor.
“We would go sit and learn for a year, and the Lauder Foundation would hire us to go to Poland six times a year. We commuted back and forth for two years, and we moved there in 1998. My work on the Kielce Pogrom just took a backseat.”
Bookstein retained all of his files, and thought about finishing his book, but he had become more interested in Jewish communal work. There was a very practical reason for shifting the interests in his life: “It’s depressing writing about pogroms and antisemitism,” he said. “I had done it for a bunch of years. It’s a painful subject.”
But what about the Holocaust survivors he had been focused on? He said they remained central to the rabbi and rebbetzin. “While we were [in Poland] to help Jewish Communal Renewal, a major part of that was tending to survivors – in helping to create community for them – minyanim and programs,” said the rabbi. “We had a café in the Lauder Foundation in the building we managed. We had daily programming while providing kosher supervision in the Joint Distribution Committee soup kitchen where any elderly Jew could come in – and they did.”
