(JEWISH GROUP) Pioneering rabbi evicted from historic Krakow building rendered ownerless by the Holocaust

When Rabbi Tanya Segal landed an apartment at 12 Jozefa Street in Krakow a decade ago, she was thrilled.

Segal knew that the building had appeared in the movie “Schindler’s List,” that it had once housed a rabbi and a Jewish house of study, and that the Jewish family that owned it in the 1940s was murdered in the Holocaust. She set out to create a pulsing heart of Jewish life where it had been extinguished.

“It was an open house,” said Segal, a Moscow native who, as the founder of the Beit Krakow congregation, is the first woman to work full time as a rabbi in Poland. Sometimes she hosted services, seders and Shabbat meals from her apartment.

“Everybody knew where I lived, where you can come, where you can ask to meet,” she said.

Then, last month, Segal was forced to move out, under police supervision. She had been evicted at the behest of a Polish bureaucrat charged with stewarding the building. In what watchdogs say is an extreme outcome of Poland’s lack of a Holocaust restitution law, the building is officially “ownerless,” leaving tenants in perpetual limbo.

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