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Vacancy announcement – Program assistant for East European Studies program

From the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

The position of Program Assistant for the East European Studies program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., is currently open.

Vacancy Announcement number: CK146427KM

Title: Program Assistant (OA)

Pay Plan./Series/Grade: GS-0303-05/06

Who May Apply: U.S. Citizens and U.S. civil service merit promotion eligible candidates.

How to Apply: You must apply for this position online through the Office of Personnel Managements website:

Duties, requirements, benefits application procedures and the full text vacancy announcement can be found at the above link.

Please note: application materials submitted to the Woodrow Wilson Center’s HR office can not be considered.

East European Studies
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20004-3027
tel: 202-691-4000
fax: 202-691-4001

Located in the Ronald Reagan Building Federal Triangle Metro Stop (Blue/Orange) Lines.

Current Events, Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia, Political

Nouveau Neighbors

This is typical of the things that happen when people move into a neighborhood thinking that all must change because they’ve arrived.

It happens in Upstate New York quite a bit. People move into rural areas expecting picket fences and the scent of roses. What they get is electric fences and the scent of cows and horses.

Then they decide to do the neighborly thing – they bring complaints and lawsuits against the farmers, who have been there since the 1800’s.

Jackie Briguglio of the Chicago area moved in across from a PNA youth camp that’s been active for 72 years and suddenly she’s owed peace and quiet 24/7. Alice May who has lived in the area for 43 years gets it. Ms. Briguglio only understand litigation and the police state.

From The Chicago Tribune: Community clash puts damper on Polish camp

Upset neighbors cite rising crowds, noise

Everyone seems to agree that the Polish camp near Yorkville is a quiet neighbor most of the summer, with kids splashing in the swimming pool and families attending Sunday mass in an open-air chapel, then picnicking under the trees.

But the dances and special events grated on some nerves. Polka beats thumped, cars crowded River Road and, one weekend last summer, 7,000 visitors came for a glimpse of the World’s Strongest Man, a stubble-headed Pole capable of carrying a refrigerator.

So this summer, Kendall County in effect exercised a pocket veto of the Polish National Alliance Youth Camp’s special events, failing to approve permits until it was too late to schedule, camp spokesmen said.

The county said it takes time to work out conflicts between the camp and some neighbors.

Either way, the result has been a summer without the four or five fundraisers that usually keep the camp in business, and a sense that times are changing for the 72-year-old camp and the Polish community that sustains it.

As Kendall county has grown — it was the nation’s second-fastest growing county from 2000 to 2006, according to the U.S. Census Bureau — it has gone from rural to more suburban, leaving camp
officials feeling unwelcome.

“We were there before everybody else,” said Chicago attorney Chris Nowotarski, who represents the organization, “and now we’re being pushed out.”

There’s even talk of selling the property and moving elsewhere.

But some neighbors said big-draw weekends bring in rowdy crowds, and the county had to deal with the problem.

The camp is affiliated with the alliance, a Polish fraternal organization. Jointly established by the alliance’s North Side and South Side districts in Chicago, it is a place where generations of
immigrants could escape the city and celebrate their culture in the country.

…

Jackie Briguglio, who lives across the street from the camp, said the music at dances is too loud, though the camp insists it doesn’t exceed county decibel limits. And special events, particularly the
visit of the strongman, have become a nuisance for the neighborhood, with reports of people urinating in Yorkville yards.

…

Some neighbors shrug off the occasional crowds. Alice May, a retired businesswoman who has lived across the street for 43 years, said she charges people to park in her yard during special events. Her children learned to swim there, and she recalls an old-country naivete among some visitors.

…

But Briguglio, the neighbor, has saved a newspaper story that invites the public to attend. So she’s not taking any chances.

“I already called the police,” she said, “and I’m going to be out of town that weekend.”

Poland - Polish - Polonia

On Eagles Wings Event

“Why are your children not here with you? Who will remember you, if they are not here, to learn what you have accomplished? Who will remember, if not they? What will happen to your legacy, if they forget?” — Colonel W. Perchal of the Royal Regiment of Canada, addressing Polish-Canadian World War Two veterans

A past correspondent, Mr. Henry Sokolowski, a member of the Board of Directors of the Polish Combatants Association, Branch #20 in Toronto, Canada announces a gathering of the generations to pay tribute to the Polish survivors and victims of World War Two.

These events are meant to connect the children and grandchildren of Polish World War Two survivors with their parent’s and grandparent’s memories and experiences. Part of the project is the documentation of these experiences.

This English-language, family oriented event will feature is Polish WW2 survivors themselves, as well as Polish WW2 experts who will help identify family documents, photos, and medals.

The event, On Eagles Wings will be held in Toronto on October 21, 2007. You can also refer to the Soviet Invasion of Poland During WW2 site for more information.

Poland - Polish - Polonia

Poles in New Britain, Connecticut eligible for job assistance

From the New Britain (CT) Herald: Polish American Foundation gets $90K grant

More city residents of Polish descent should be wage earners in the months ahead.

The U.S. Department of Labor has awarded the New Britain-based Polish American Foundation of Connecticut Inc. a total of $90,000 to help Polish-speaking people find jobs.

The foundation was selected as among the best of competing applicants in two competitions; $30,000 of the grant represents a renewal from the previous year.

According to the U.S. Census, roughly 14,000 people claim Polish heritage in New Britain.

“These grass-root grants are designed for specific communities,” said Ted Fitzgerald, the department’s assistant regional director in New England. He said a “tracking mechanism” is built into each grant to ensure that terms of the grant are met.

Foundation President Andre Blasczynski said the funds will be used to continue a program that began in 1996 to provide “training and employment for people limited in English proficiency.”

Some of the money will fund a part-time position at the city’s Spanish-speaking center, He added.

“Through the work of Polish-speaking job counselors at the employment office on Broad Street in New Britain, hundreds of Polish-speaking people have received employment and training services for the first time,” Gov. M. Jodi Rell said. “After completing English classes and employment skills training, people are able to find good jobs.”

“This money will help even more people enter our work force,” she said. “I want to remind the public these services are free of charge.”

Rell agreed with Blasczynski that the foundation’s goal “isn’t just job placement, it’s self sufficiency. I know the foundation’s job development capabilities are improving dramatically, and these funds will help them continue the momentum.”

Founded in 1996, the foundation enhances the cultural and economic development of the community by sponsoring cultural and educational programs and activities, improving access to and providing social and work force development services, promoting understanding among ethnic groups, fostering international exchange and providing humanitarian assistance.

Located at 121 Broad St. in New Britain, the foundation’s Employment Assistance Program is funded through a major grant from Capital Workforce Partners, the American Savings Foundation and the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain.

Current Events, Media, Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia, Political

Please – fear your physician next

You would think that Michael Moore’s Sicko would have instilled a fear of American medicine in everyone’s mind, but no.

Now we have to ramp up the fear mongering – fear of all those overtly foreign physicians that staff our hospitals. You know, the ones you see to get your Lipitor or Viagra… They are poisoning you and they are going to blow you up.

From the Washington Post: Bomb Plot Suspects Are Foreign Physicians

LONDON, July 3 — Police investigating last weekend’s failed bomb attacks in London and Glasgow on Tuesday questioned foreign-born doctors who are suspected of plotting the attacks, while a suspicious piece of luggage at Heathrow Airport forced the evacuation of thousands of travelers and the cancellation of more than 100 flights.

All eight suspects now in custody are believed to have worked for Britain’s National Health Service, seven as doctors or medical students and one as a laboratory technician, according to officials and British media reports. One of the eight is being held in Australia. The suspects are said to have earned their medical degrees in Iraq, Jordan, India and other countries before immigrating to Britain…

Of course folks here in the U.S. of A. never overgeneralize. We are never led by the media into painting anyone who is foreign born with broad brush strokes, lets say í  la today’s articles regarding the Simpson’s movie promo…

For instance, from the San Francisco Chronicle: Please to be enjoying a promotional gimmick.

We laugh at foreigners when its easy, fear them when we need a scapegoat. It is easier to fear the Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis then it is to know them.

It’s easier to ask, ‘Why are they here?’ then to ask our President: “Why are we there?”

Of course the Rev. Andrew Greeley pegs it in Ethnic biases stronger than ever.

It’s all about nativism. We never threw out that bigotry. We exercise it with every ethnic joke and by our mimicry.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, Americans began to worry about the stability of their society and its culture. Strange languages were spoken on the streets, strange-looking people in strange clothes were shopping in our stores. Strange smells percolated in certain neighborhoods. Strange customs were appearing on strange holidays. These strangers were pouring into our country. They threatened our democracy, our way of life, our culture, our religious beliefs, our economy, our blood stock. Why didn’t they stay in their own countries?

The answer is they were caught in a demographic transition — the birth rate had increased and the death rate had fallen. A population explosion was driving people out of eastern and southern Europe.

In the decade before the beginning of the Great War, the government established a commission, presided over by Sen. William P. Dillingham of Vermont, to recommend restrictions of immigration from Europe. Many of the immigrants were of inferior races, as 19th century ”scientific” racialism defined inferior. It was evident to explorers that Asian and African races were inferior to the ”white” races. However, all one had to do was to observe eastern and southern Europeans to realize that they were inferior too. Indeed, the most successful of the races were the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Surely they represented, along perhaps with the Germans, the greatest progress in human civilization.

Therefore, the Dillingham Commission informed the country that it was patent that Italians were an innately criminal race, that the Poles had very limited intelligence, that Jews were incapable of honest business dealings and that the Irish were shiftless, superstitious and incapable of ambition. Such individuals could never become good Americans. On the basis of ”science” like this, the commission recommended draconian limitations on immigration. The country sighed with relief.

These ”racial” stereotypes persist — not as vehement as they once were, but still part of the national unconscious. ”The Godfather” and ”The Sopranos” fit perfectly. So does the film ”The Break-up,” in which Vince Vaughn plays an insensitive oaf. He is subtly labeled “Pole” by the huge Polish flag, complete with the Polish eagle, on the wall of his office. The lazy, alcoholic Irish laugh all the way to their hedge-fund manager.

A Mexican-American high school sophomore sent me an e-mail asking why other Americans hate them so much and tell so many lies about them. My answer is that Dillingham is alive and well. They don’t want more people with somewhat darker skin who can never become good Americans.

Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington has argued that Mexicans do not want to acculturate into our Protestant political and social system. Don’t tell me, kid, that you can refute all the “facts” they propound to establish your inferiority (you’re second generation, but you have no right to the educated prose of your e-mail). The bigots (less than a third of the country) who hate you know in the depths of their souls that you and your kind are an inferior people who are trying to take over their country and ruin it. We don’t need no more Mexican flags at soccer matches and certainly no more statues of Guadalupe parading down our streets…

Current Events, Poland - Polish - Polonia, Political

EU Summit and a bad choice of words

If you have followed the press on the recent EU summit you probably heard that the Polish President and Prime Minister raised World War II issues in their negotiations.

The response to their raising these issues was less than positive. It’s kind of like the response a person receives when they raise a notion that no one else wants to acknowledge. “Can’t they just be quiet?”

The EUObserver notes in Polish twins accused of bad taste in Brussels:

The most controversial Polish tactic was its attempt to leverage German World War II guilt. When Jaroslaw [Kaczynski] talked ahead of the summit about using EU voting to repay Poland for the millions of Poles killed by Germany in the 1940s, it seemed like just another populist faux pas.

But Lech [Kaczynski] brought up the idea again at the EU leaders’ dinner in Brussels, in a move that may have contributed to chancellor Merkel’s threat to call an intergovernmental conference without Polish approval. In post-summit interviews, the twins kept the same line.

“There are no reasons to censor the past,” Lech said, regretting that he himself was too young to have fought the Germans. “I’m sorry, but today we still have to remind people who was the executioner and who was the victim,” Jaroslaw said in his interview.

Commenting on the rhetoric, Polish liberal MEP and historian Bronislaw Geremek told PAP that “the EU was based on the idea of putting an end to the war era…[the Polish government] tried to open wounds that have not yet fully healed.”

The German press was less kind. The biggest selling paper, Bild, called the twins “poisoned dwarves” and referred to their “sickening double game…”

Speaking of ‘poisoned dwarves,’ probably a bad choice of words for the German Press.

Among Mengele’s favorite experimental subjects were Jewish dwarves and identical twins.

From The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments by Baruch C. Cohen at Jewish Law Articles.

— or —

Many people with disabilities became the subject of medical research both before and after their deaths and were used to enrich the profits and prestige of medical institutions, doctors, and German and Austrian universities and researchers. Corpses of patients that had been marked before gassing as being of potential “scientific interest” were separated out and delivered to a nearby autopsy room. Young German physicians performed autopsies on these corpses to earn academic credit. Many organs from murdered disabled victims, brains in particular, were recovered for scientific study at medical institutes. Researchers sent lists of desiderata to killing centers requesting the brains of dwarves and people suffering from “idiocy” and rare neurological abnormalities, presumably with the belief that such disabilities would be scientifically interesting. Although many organs were harvested, the brains of murdered victims were the ones most utilized. Some of Germany’s most prestigious institutions benefited from this hideous use of the body parts of murdered people with disabilities, including Breslau University, Heidelberg University and the medical schools and psychiatric departments at Bonn, Cologne, Berlin and Leipzig.

From Forgotten Crimes – A Report by Disability Rights Advocates.

But then again, Bild is not exactly about journalism…

Current Events, Perspective, PNCC, Poland - Polish - Polonia,

Sad end to a rich history

It appears that seven predominantly Polish R.C. parishes will be closing on Buffalo’s East Side. For more check out Seven Buffalo churches to merge into two: East Side closings stir some protests from the Buffalo News.

Among the churches to be closed is Holy Apostles Saints Peter and Paul, my mother’s home parish and the parish my grandparents helped to found. It was initially a mission parish for St. Stanislaus, the mother church of Buffalo’s Polonia – a parish designed to serve the Poles who had moved to farther flung neighborhoods.

The most shocking closure is that of St. Adalbert’ Basilica.

Yes, a Basilica.

St. Adalbert’s was the first church designated as a basilica in the United States (1907). You don’t find many of those laying about in the United States.

The genesis of the independent Catholicism in Buffalo occurred at St. Adalbert’s as noted in the history section of the Holy Mother of the Rosary Cathedral website:

An Independent Polish Catholic parish was first established in Buffalo in August, 1895, when a rejected group of parishioners at St. Adalbert’s Parish decided to form a separate church just a block away. These discontented souls were forced to decide their own fate when their requests were rejected by the Roman Catholic Bishop and his advisors.

More on the history of St. Adalbert’s and its tie in to the PNCC here, here and here.

As a grade school student I attended a magnificent Mass at St. Adalbert’s. It was held in honor of the International Eucharistic Congress which took place in Philadelphia in 1976. I had family who attended Holy Mother of the Rosary and St. Adalbert’s.

It would appear that those who chose to have a voice and a vote in the destiny of their parish made a better choice. Their parish still exists.

Here’s a photo from St. Adalbert’s 120th Anniversary celebration in 2006. The next to last celebration.

adalberts_120.jpg

Perspective, Poland - Polish - Polonia,

Annoying Polish spam

The Young Fogey has written a few posts commenting on the spam he receives.

As a person attached to organizations with the word “Polish” in them, being part of Polish newsgroups, and perhaps by my Polish last name alone, I get hit with Polish E-mail spam.

Everyone knows something of the Nigerian scams, the I’m the wife, daughter, girlfriend, cousin, of a deposed dictator, and the have we got meds, potions, cures, and ‘enhancers’ for you pitches.

As Serge has often said, the poorly crafted language is enough to let you know these aren’t genuine.

Anyway, let me tell you about Polish scams.

In a way, they are the most devious and cruel of all scams.

They play on the long tradition in the Polish-American community of helping our poor, suffering, downtrodden brothers and sisters in the old country.

We all recall grandma and grandpa, or a parent, or an aunt or uncle sending money to cousin Jan. You may have known Jan as your poor rural cousin, down on the farm. He allegedly had nothing and needed everything. In many cases this was true in the years following the Second World War and under communism. í‰migrés were exceedingly generous, and those dollars stored in cupboards or in the mattress really helped in bringing Poles out from under the economic destruction caused by the Communist system.

The typical Polish scam has these lowlights and variants:

  • The person lives in a small community (although I’ve seen a few from major cities).
  • The family is poor and the father (if one exists) is unemployed.
  • Someone has a serious medical condition (typically a small child, sometimes a woman with several children – and the husband is desperate).
  • There is a picture of the sick person (typically black and white, with a seal or stamp of some type in the corner of the picture – hey it must be authentic…).
  • There is cryptic medical documentation attached, and sometimes a lot of it (statements from doctors, usually from the big city, clinics, specialists – all stamped, sworn to in front of a notary, and certified).
  • There is a request for money so little Magda can get medicine, rehabilitation, or specialized therapy.
  • There is information regarding a bank account and instructions for initiating an electronic transfer of funds to help the poor waif.

Just prior to leaving for Poland for the first time, back in 1991, our group leader, Dr. Ryszard Sokolowski (Ричард Соколовский) (the link is from the Tver/Твери group he founded), gave me some of the best advice I ever received. “Don’t be romantic about Poland” or words to that affect. He joked that we wouldn’t be met by girls in ethnic costumes dancing the Polka.

The communist system in Poland had just breathed its last breath a year-and-a-half before. There weren’t many consumer goods, that is, there wasn’t a vast selection of stuff. But there was stuff. I remember buying cans of Coke for about thirty cents off the back of a truck. There were VCRs in almost every home. There were mini satellite dishes on homes and apartment buildings (how many folks in the U.S. had mini dishes in 1991? Back then we were still buying the giant dishes that took up your whole backyard).

In other words, our perception of our poor cousins was part truth and part the fabrication of cold war propagandists. I’m not downplaying the suffering that existed and the repression that was very real, but we tend to paint things very black and white, and they weren’t.

If you are ever hit by one of these Polish scam artists looking for help ask this all important question: If they are so desperate for help, and entangled in illness and suffering, how did they find the time to establish a bank account, set-up electronic transfers, and mass spam thousands of folks (with scanned documents) from their poor rural village? The bandwidth alone would eat-up their life savings…

Christian Witness, Poland - Polish - Polonia, Political

Against the priest politician

From the Catholic News Service: Stop politicizing homilies, Vatican nuncio tells Catholic Polish clergy

WARSAW, Poland (CNS) —“ The Vatican’s ambassador to Poland has called on Catholic clergy to stop preaching politicized homilies.

“I wish liturgical services in Poland would not turn into public rallies and just dispose people to be more human and more Catholic,” said Archbishop Jozef Kowalczyk, the Vatican’s ambassador, or nuncio.

“We need priests, not politicians —“ and if politicians, then politicians of God’s word,” said the archbishop, whose sermon was carried by Poland’s Catholic information agency, KAI. “We also need evangelists, not economists —“ we have enough of those already in Poland to do the job. Let’s work on their spirit and conscience so they’ll become true professionals in serving all society. This is the mission of a priest…”

To which my friends in Poland, going to church and looking for spiritual sustenance would say, Deo gratias.

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