The Jews of Poland (those, at any rate, who know they “are” Jews and are willing to say so) are no longer very numerous. What is more, not all of them are religious, and the practicing community is skeletal. And yet, in keeping with an ancient Jewish custom, it has managed to split into two groups that periodically hurl anathemas at one another. So it is that, alongside Midrasz, the periodical of the official community, there exists a little bulletin put out by the hundred or so dissenters who call themselves the “Old Testament community.” This bulletin periodically denounces the deeds and misdeeds of the official community (notably the untimely sales of real estate: synagogues, ritual baths, old religious schools, and so on) recovered since the change of regime in Poland and now a garment far too large for the real needs of the Polish kehilot. But it also drags individual sins into the open, insofar as they might damage the good name of the Jews in the country. Thus, in issue number 15 of the said bulletin, one reads a most curious story concerning the family home of John Paul II. During his third official visit to Poland in June 1999, the Pope went, among other places, to Wadowice, the small town of his childhood, where on the Market Square he met his old compatriots. He also visited his birthplace, at 7 Koscielna Street. This house is currently occupied by the Little Sisters of Nazareth, who have set up a papal museum there. The whole world was able to follow this visit on television, and among them Ron Balamuth, an American Jew. Now it so happens that this man is the grandson of a Jew of Wadowice who owned the house in which Karol Wojtyla’s parents were merely tenants. The Pope had, moreover, recalled during his visit his Jewish neighbors and friends, with whom he had played in Koscielna Street.
Ron Balamuth, having thus learned that his grandfather’s house was still standing and in good condition, took a plane, arrived in Poland, engaged the services of a law firm, and brought a suit for the restitution of his inheritance. A few years later he won his case; the Pope’s house became his legal property. But our American had no intention of occupying his grandfather’s house himself. Scarcely had he become its rightful owner than he put it up for sale. Asking price: one million dollars… Needless to say, this sum bears no relation to the market value of real estate in Wadowice. Mr. Balamuth was banking on the emotional weight of this house. At the same time, he publicly declared his wish that any eventual buyer respect the symbolic character of the building: in addition to the million dollars, the buyer was to undertake to keep the museum in place. After six months of uncertainty, the fate of the Wojtyla house was happily clarified: a Jewish institution, the Ryszard Krauze Foundation, bought it from Ron Balamuth, only to make a gift of it at once to the curia of Cracow. Phew… scandal averted at last. The Curia promised that “the memory of the Jews of Wadowice, victims of the Genocide, will be honored there,” with no further detail. One may hope that, if a commemorative plaque is put up, it will mention the death in 1943, at the Belzec camp, of all the Jews of Wadowice — including the Balamuth family.