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.
