A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [156]
When he arrived in Warsaw as the rabbi for the Nozyk Synagogue, he took the title Chief Rabbi of Poland. A second Chief Rabbi of Poland showed up from New York during a service, and their dispute ended up with the two rabbis in a physical tussle. The other Chief Rabbi was Wawa Moreino also from Lodz. Moreino had been the Chief Rabbi of Poland, traditionally a lifetime position, but he had been removed by the regime in 1955 and forced into exile.
Three times a day, Moishe Shapiro and about six other elderly men waited at the Nozyk for a minyan. Simon Heustein, the kosher slaughterer for the restaurant, would walk over to be the eighth. When Yoskowitz was in town, he made the ninth, and they only needed one tourist, any Jewish man. They looked out toward the square and waited to pounce. Tourists did show up full of questions—how many Jews are here, how did you survive the war, what happened to your parents—all very sympathetically posed. “Later,” they would say to the tourist. “Come to the shul. We need a minyan.”
The kosher restaurant was funded by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. Lauder, the heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a Reagan-appointed ambassador to Austria, had an idea that with his considerable financial resources, he could make a difference in the future of Central European Jewry. He made his greatest effort in Poland. But to many of the Jews here, he simply created the illusion of Jewish life. Yes, there was a kosher restaurant, an education program, a summer youth camp, a Jewish youth newspaper, and an organization to help the so-called “hidden children” who were just discovering their Jewish origins after a half-century, but all of this was done by an American financier and without him it would collapse. The idea was to create a foundation on which Jews in Poland could build, but Jews in Poland were skeptical. “Lauder is trying to resuscitate things,” said Ninel Kameraz, “but it won't work. If you want to live a Jewish life, you have to leave Poland.”
Simon Heustein, the shochet, or kosher slaughterer, was born in Przemysl in 1929, and survived the war in Siberia. When he returned, he had found Cracow to be a relatively thriving Jewish community in need of a kosher slaughterer. There he learned the shochet trade and then in the 1950s emigrated to Israel, along with most of his customers. In 1991, Yoskowitz persuaded him to come to Warsaw. “I wanted to do something for the Jews,” Heustein said. He kosherized the Polish restaurant with $6,000 worth of new plates and new pots and pans, and he trained the non-Jewish staff in the dietary laws. Its clientele was a combination of Orthodox Jewish tourists who complained about the prices, and Polish non-Jews who believed that the high quality of kosher food justified the price. It was always a Polish belief that kosher things were better because the Jews knew secrets and took special care and got only the best. On a Friday afternoon in any store, workers in overalls lined up to buy bottles of vodka. While waiting in line, they argued with each other over which kosher vodka to buy. They were not interested in the quality Polish vodkas that are prized in gourmet circles in Paris and New York. They wanted the kosher stuff because the Jews really know how to make it. It's cleaner. It's stronger. It's healthier. It gets you a better drunk. These were all commonly offered reasons for drinking kosher, and they consumed the vodka with frightening speed.
Kosher vodka was also one of the issues in the fight between Yoskowitz and Moreino: which of them had the right to put the seal of the Chief Rabbi of Poland on a profitable line of kosher vodka? Yoskowitz, who was, after all, a businessman, wanted to expand his line to more than just vodka, and he even offered a kosher mineral water with the brand name Chaim.
Still, Poland's only kosher restaurant barely survived. The shuffle of Simon Heustein, the small disheveled shochet,