Bundist Counterculture in Interwar Poland

Conclusion

98 Conclusion The Jewish Workers’ Bund, which was supported by only a limited proportion of Polish Jewry at the beginning of the 1920s, grew in power quite markedly over the course of the interwar period. The augmentation in the Bund’s power was both presaged and fostered by an increase in the size of certain of the movements most closely affiliated with the Bund, notably the Tsukunft, SKIF, and Morgnshtern. The increase in the sizes of these movements began in the 1920s and seems, in some especially notable cases, to have gained momentum over time. The Tsukunft, among the most important of the movements in the Bundist constellation, had some three thousand or so members in 1924, five thousand members in 1925, close to ten thousand adherents in 1930, and over twelve thousand members in 1939.1 SKIF, which was not established until the mid-1920s, grew from an entity with twenty-two hundred members in 1930, to one of almost thirty-five hundred in 1931, and five thousand in the mid-1930s.2 It claimed to have more than ten thousand members on the eve of the Second World War.3 The Bundist movement for physical education, founded in the same year as was SKIF, had approximately twenty-five hundred members in 1927 (six months after the creation of its central coordinating body), four thousand members in 1929, forty-five hundred in 1933, five thousand members in 1934, and may have had as many as eight thousand in 1937.4 The Medem Sanatorium , finally, increased the maximum number of children it was able to serve at any one time from seventy in the mid-1920s to 160 in 1932 and to two hundred in the mid-1930s. It expected that it would serve up to three hundred children at a time in the summer of 1939—and was filling only a Conclusion | 99 small fraction of the requests made for admittance.5 The sanatorium also sharply increased the total number of clients it served each year between its opening and its eventual closing. There is concrete evidence that young people regularly graduated from SKIF into the Tsukunft, and that significant numbers of Polish Jewish youth graduated from the Tsukunft into the Bund.6 There were reportedly more than one thousand one-time Tsukunftistn entering the Bund every year in the period leading up to the Second World War.7 By 1939, one-time members of the Tsukunft were playing leading roles in its parent party. No fewer than five of the sixteen Bundists elected to the Warsaw city council in the last election to be held before the war—Jerzy Gliksman, Yoysef Gutgold, Zalmen Likhtnshteyn, Emanuel Scherer, and Nakhman Shafran—had been active in the Tsukunft at various points in time. At least one of the Bundists elected to the Lodz city council in 1938, Hersh Mayzner, had also been a Tsukunftist during an earlier period in his life.8 The electoral victories obtained by the Bundist party in the period 1936– 39 came in the wake of successes achieved over a longer time span by a number of movements and institutions closely affiliated with that party. It is by no means the case that the successes of Bundist peripheral organizations were the primary cause of the eventual political successes of the Bund. But the growth of certain of these peripheral organizations in the 1920s and early 1930s was an indicator of the potential of Bundist institutions and may have directly contributed to the victories achieved by the party’s candidates in the years immediately preceding the start of World War II. Thus, some of the arguments made by Ezra Mendelsohn and Antony Polonsky appear to be open to reconsideration, such as the one suggesting that electoral victories by the Bund in city council and Jewish communal elections in the late 1930s ought not to be taken as suggestive of longer-term trends.9 The success of Bundist candidates in 1936–39 was not an aberration. It was not even particularly surprising given the growth in the breadth of constituent components of the Bundist constellation that had gone on over a number of years preceding 1936. The increases in the size of the party’s children ’s movement, youth movement, and physical education movement led to an increase in the total number of people who had had positive experiences in its entities (either directly or via members of their families) and helps to [18.117.81.240] Project MUSE...