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Peg Simpson's Tabletalk Column for Aug 14, 2000

It took four years but Menachem Rosensaft ultimately worked out all the legal niceties to enable Ronald Lauder to go forward soon with development of the "Prozna Project."

That is the shorthand name for the planned renovation of portions of Prozna street, which had been a center of Polish Jewish cultural life and business in prewar downtown Warsaw.

The block was one of the few left partly intact after the saturation Nazi bombing of Warsaw in 1944 during the Warsaw Uprising. It also had been spared total destruction a year earlier when the Nazis eliminated the Jewish ghetto they had created because Prozna Street was just outside the Nazi-imposed ghetto prison.

The World Monument Fund, which Lauder chairs, includes Prozna on its listof the 100 most endangered sites.

"The Jewish intelligentsia was as prominent in Warsaw as in Berlin or Vienna," says Marie-Monique Steckel, who took over management of the project from Rosensaft this summer.

"This should show the first-hand experience of the 19th Century Jewish life, the grandeur of the Jewish life; and the struggle for integration," she said.

Four buildings on the block which were damaged but not destroyed during the war have been targeted for varying degrees of renovation under the Lauder project.

Lauder's emissary Rosensaft bought the first two buildings in 1996 from the original owner. That was deceptively easy compared to the politically induced slowdowns in subsequent years during negotiations to buy the two other buildings, which ultimately took place in public tenders from the city, in1997-98. And then there were two more years going through bureaucratic hoops required to get building permits, and fending off thinly disguised attempts at shakedowns."

Menachem got all the permits through blood, sweat and tears," says Steckel, working with the top-rated local Wardynski law firm.

Prozna 7 has been empty. Prozna 9 had three families living in it. Those two buildings will be renovated inside and out and Prozna 9 will become a site of multiple public activities.

The two other buildings, at Prozna 12 and 14, which once were homes of prosperous Polish Jews, now are occupied by 83 families (a microcosm of what happened to most onetime single-family homes under the socialist housing relocations). The Lauder project will focus on these buildings' exteriors, including expansion of the courtyards, but the existing families will stay put.

Prozna 9 was built in 1882 by the architect who had built the nearby synagogue - the one which Hitler ordered destroyed as the war neared an end, as final proof that the Jews had themselves been destroyed. The onetime synagogue site now is Plac Bankowy, site to a skyscraper. The Jewish Historical Institute, which rescued many priceless religious objects from the synagogue, is next door.

"Prozna 9 was built as a state-of-the-art building. And it soon became clear that if we were going to restore it, it was too historic for rentals. So we made it into a public space," Rosensaft said.  Steckel, a French-born American who is an international telecommunications specialist, originally worked with Lauder on his Central European media ventures in Prague. She jumped at the chance to take on the next stage of the Prozna project.

The Prozna 7 and 9 buildings will be renovated, inside and out, and will include a kosher pizzeria and a multi-language bookstore that, at theleast, will have books in Polish, English and Hebrew "and it's probablyworth the effort to include some in German and in Russian and, if we can, also in French and Yiddish," she said.

This will greatly enlarge the city's  basic resource centers that could shed light on prewar Polish Jewish residents  -- "for a Jewish kid coming here for the March of the Living or for a Polish university student,"said Rosensaft.

The basement of Prozna 9 will be a multi-visual Mecca, Steckel and Rosensaft said."

Memory is through experience not just in books, but memory is shared experience. It is experiential and visual and not just through the brain," she said. Some of the "memory" to be shared there may come from prewar residents of Prozna 9 tracked down in the United States, Steckel said.

In addition, the Lauder team is working with Dr. Eleonara Bergmann, a historian at the Jewish Historical Institute, on gathering pertinent "period" material for the exhibits.

Steckel and Rosensaft said the Prozna project would not compete with a proposed museum planned for a city-donated site near the Ghetto Uprising monument which would show 1000 years of Jews in Poland.  "This would be complementary," they said, "this would be a slice of that prewar life, a specific place."  They met with the museum project's current director, Jerzy Halberstadt, while they were in Warsaw.

Steckel is a newcomer to Poland.

Rosensaft has roots here. His father was from the town of Bedzin, near Katowice. In 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz "but took a dive out the train window. He was shot three times, in the head and in the hand. A Polish woman bandaged him up and he made his way back to the ghetto in Bedzin."

He was deported a second time to Auschwitz. "And he escaped again and was hidden again by a non-Jewish woman. And he was captured again and this time was put in block #7, the torture cell." He ultimately was liberated from a concentration camp in Germany.

After the war, the Rosensaft family left Germany and lived eight years in Switzerland, then moved to the United States when Menachem was 10 years old. He ultimately became an international lawyer, working 15 years with Chase Manhattan.

Rosensaft knows very well the complexities of Polish anti-Semitism. When his mother was in a displaced persons camp, "she talked to an emissary of Pope Pius III about what good he could do for them, if he would issue an edict to give up the children," referring to the children of Jews who had been given to Catholic families by fleeing Jewish parents.  "It never was done. Baptizing those kids was an act of faith," Rosensaft said.

On the other hand, he said, his father was "very well aware that he was alive because of two Polish Christians. The second one was a friend but the first was a stranger whom he never saw again."  During his time working here on the Prozna project, he said he experienced “not a single instance of anti-Semitism." Just the opposite, in fact.