JTA – When Rabbi Tanya Segal landed an apartment at 12 Jozefa Street in Krakow a decade ago, she was thrilled.

Segal knew that the building had appeared in the movie “Schindler’s List,” that it had once housed a rabbi and a Jewish house of study, and that the Jewish family that owned it in the 1940s was murdered in the Holocaust. She set out to create a pulsing heart of Jewish life where it had been extinguished.

“It was an open house,” said Segal, a Moscow native who, as the founder of the Beit Krakow congregation, is the first woman to work full time as a rabbi in Poland. Sometimes she hosted services, seders and Shabbat meals from her apartment.

“Everybody knew where I lived, where you can come, where you can ask to meet,”  she said.

Then, last month, Segal was forced to move out, under police supervision. She had been evicted at the behest of a Polish bureaucrat charged with stewarding the building. In what watchdogs say is an extreme outcome of Poland’s lack of a Holocaust restitution law, the building is officially “ownerless,” leaving tenants in perpetual limbo.

“Poland remains the only member state of the European Union that has not passed national legislation to provide restitution or compensation for private property seized during the Holocaust or nationalized by the postwar Communist regime,” Gideon Taylor, president of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

While some Jews who were stripped of property during the Holocaust have been able to reclaim it or obtain compensation under what Taylor’s organization said were “narrow technical circumstances,” there has never been a broad and transparent effort at restitution like those undertaken in other countries.

Not only has WJRO been fruitlessly pressing successive Polish governments for decades to address the issue, but the situation has actually grown worse, Taylor said.

He noted that the Polish government passed a law in 2021 that “prevents challenges to administrative decisions older than 30 years — even if those decisions were made without legal basis or in gross violation of the law,” Taylor said. The new law blocked countless ongoing claims from moving forward.

That law was passed while the country was run by the Law and Justice Party, which also criminalized statements suggesting Polish collaboration with the Nazi regime. It returned to power this summer, with a Holocaust revisionist historian at the helm.

Over the years, non-Jewish Poles could apply for the return of properties with relative ease; all they had to do was cross the street and go to court. But for Jewish heirs, strewn around the world, the process “is very cumbersome,” said the........

© The Times of Israel