Replacing images of Nazi past | Synagogue opens near Auschwitz death camp

__________________________________________NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

13-Sep-2000 Wednesday

OSWIECIM, Poland -- For the first time since World War II, a synagogue opened yesterday in the vicinity of the Auschwitz death camp, and was hailed as a symbol of the healing of the long- troubled relationship between Poles and Jews.

In front of the small synagogue, ransacked by the Nazis and later used as a

carpet warehouse under Poland's post-war communist government, Jewish leaders, Polish ministers and Jordan's Prince Hassan gathered to hear messages of reconciliation, including a call from President Clinton to act with "principle and purpose" on the lessons of the Holocaust.

But the atmosphere of good will was clouded slightly by the fact that the

synagogue's opening came a few weeks after that of a large discotheque,

located about a mile closer to the camp.

Jewish organizations, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles,

have protested that the discotheque "in the immediate vicinity of the largest Jewish graveyard in history" amounts to an affront, but local authorities have said that they can do little because the dance club is on private property, a mile from the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex.

The difficulties appeared to capture the tensions between the desires of the living, particularly Polish youth, and the shadow of the dead, including more than a million murdered Jews, in a provincial Polish town stained forever by what the Nazis did nearby.

"It is better, and normal, that young people go and dance" instead of getting into trouble, said Klaudia Zaor, an 18-year-old student.

"Sometimes, we have the impression that the Jews just want this town to die."

As she spoke, she watched, with an amused twinkle in her eyes, as the ceremony at the synagogue proceeded. Speakers referred to a restoration of life. The sun shone with a late-summer glow on the newly painted cream-yellow walls of the refurbished building, the only place of Jewish worship not destroyed by the Nazi onslaught in 1939 on the town of Oswiecim

-- the Polish name for Auschwitz.

It was this modest southwestern Polish town, whose Jewish minority numbered

7,000 in 1939, that gave the German version of its name to the adjacent camp.

Not one Jew lives in Oswiecim -- the last survivor died in May. But the synagogue will serve as a place of prayer and reflection for the many Jewish visitors to the Auschwitz camp. No rabbi is to be permanently attached to the synagogue, so any formal service must be organized in advance.

The past, post-Communist, decade has brought a modest Jewish revival in Poland. Fred Schwartz, the New York businessman who raised $3 million for the new synagogue, said he backed the building in part because "the ashes at the camp communicated nothing of the life that had been here."

His initiative was applauded by more than 100 people at a ceremony yesterday. The U.S. ambassador, Christopher Hill, read a letter from Clinton that said the synagogue would serve "as a place for contemplation where future generations can reflect on the world they lost."

The ceremony yesterday included an emotional speech by the local bishop and

a warm evocation of Polish-Jewish relations by Marek Siwiec, the national

security adviser to the Polish president.