KATALIKŲ BAŽNYČIA PERMĄSTO ŽYDŲ KONVERSIJAS: MISIJŲ STRATEGIJOS IR VEIKSMINGUMAS TARPUKARIO VILNIUJE
Catholic Church rethinks Jewish conversions: mission strategies and effectiveness in interwar Vilnius

Summary/Abstract: In the interwar period, the Polish Catholic Church revisited the Jewish question and attempted to reevaluate the possibility of Jewish conversions. This article recreates the missionary activity in the Vilnius Archbishopric of that time and estimates the local clergy’s attitudes towards the Jews as potential converts. Based on a rich (previously poorly examined or completely unknown) archival material, the article presents a pretty much failed attempt in 1929 to create a missionary organization under the name of the Section for Converting Jews and the activity of its ideological leader, convert Frederik Pistol. It also sheds some light on the private initiative of priest Jan Zieja to launch a mission of a mass Jewish conversion in Poland and his inspiration behind the Vilnius Catholic Curia’s issued Questionnaire about the Jews that all the parsons of the archbishopric participated in. The analysis of the documents of the Section, clergy’s correspondence and parsons’ answers on the Jewish question in the country reveals a complicated inner struggle between the eternal ecclesiastical calling to encourage conversions of the “non-believers” and the skepticism towards such an endeavor influenced by the interwar antisemitism, antijudaism, and nationalism.

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