On the eve of World War II, some 3 million Jews were living in Poland, making up between 10% and 20% of the population. A vibrant, creative and flourishing community, it published about 600 daily newspapers in Hebrew and Yiddish. It had 15 theater companies as well as countless political parties, spanning the gamut from the far right to the far left. Never before had Europe seen a bigger, more diverse, pulsating and creative Jewish community than the one in Poland. Barring the American Jewish community, which gathered most of its clout after the war, it is safe to say that Polish Jews formed the biggest and most powerful and glorious Jewish community throughout the history of Jewish life in the Diaspora. Poland’s Jews led a full life. Many of the cultural assets of the Jewish world germinated and flourished there, including the well-known term “shtetl,” the small Jewish towns in Eastern Europe.

Then the Nazis arrived. By the end of World War II, Poland had a few tens of thousands of Jews who managed to survive in the forests and other hiding places, in addition to the 250,000 that had escaped to Russian-held areas and then came back. Some 90% of this community was murdered in the crematoria and the concentration camps. It would be hard to describe what Polish Jewry would have looked like today had the Holocaust not taken place. It would be hard to describe Poland today, had its Jewish population not been taken away from it, together with other regions consisting of other ethnic groups. “Poland used to be a multinational, multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious country, and World War II robbed us of all of this,” Jacek Chodorowicz, the Polish ambassador to Israel, told me in a conversation we had in mid-October. The Polish people have lost the Jewish community, which was annihilated by the Nazis and their collaborators (among them many Poles). They have also lost the German and Ukrainian minorities that were annexed back to their countries. From being heterogeneous and diverse, Poland has turned into a homogenous and strictly Polish state. Some people love such processes. But the Poles, as it turns out, miss their Jews.

On Oct. 27, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski’s personal jet landed in Israel. He dispatched it to Israel as a special gesture by his government to fly Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, along with a beefed-up delegation and entourage, for a special visit to Warsaw. This was Rivlin’s first trip abroad as Israel’s president. Rivlin had an especially crowded schedule this week. On Oct. 27, the Israeli parliament began its winter session with a special address by Rivlin, and had the president taken a regular commercial flight, he would not have made it in time to attend the dedication of the new Jewish Museum in the city on Oct. 28. The Polish president decided to go out of his way and sent his jet to help his Israeli counterpart to negotiate this impossibly tight schedule.

One of every five Israelis is linked, in some way, to the culture of Polish Jewry — be it through blood relationship, marriage or some other personal connection. Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was born in Poland. So was former President Shimon Peres, who epitomizes the “ultimate Pole” in Israeli culture. Another famous Pole is late Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Although he was born in White Russia (Belarus), Begin is considered a lofty Pole, given that he volunteered for Anders' Army, an exiled Polish military force that fought with the Allied Forces against the Nazis on the eastern front during World War II. Except for those born in Israel, almost all of Israel’s other prime ministers were born in Poland or its vicinities and raised in this rich environment of Jewish culture.