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Christians in the Ghetto: All Saints’ Church, Birth of the Holy
Virgin Mary Church, and the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto
The article deals with the Christian
communities in the Warsaw ghetto and their place in the social
fabric of the ghetto. What distinguishes these Christians is their
existence as two distinct communities, who stood out among the
Jewish community of the ghetto. The article seeks to sketch the
characteristics of each of the Christian communities and to examine
their common and distinct aspects – social, cultural, and religious
– vis-à-vis both the Christians in Warsaw and the Jews in the
ghetto, while looking at the allegations raised by the Jews in the
ghetto against these Christians and their churches. It seems that
although their fate was determined by their Jewish “race”, these
Christians meticulously emphasized their religious identity as
distinct from the racial identity that was forced upon them.
Examining the lives of these Christians as a community within a
community, on the background of the distance that they felt from the
Jews in the ghetto and the negative feelings of the Jews for them,
adds insight into an additional aspect of life under the Nazis in
Warsaw in all its social-religious-cultural complexity. |
