Jewish Food Is Making a Comeback in Poland

Bagels, knishes, bialys and more are popping up in bakeries as the country reckons with historical trauma

Olga Mecking - Freelance writer

July 2, 2025

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It’s late morning in Warsaw, and we pick a place—nothing special—to have breakfast. “Look,” I say to my husband and children, quickly scanning the menu, making my way through various preparations of egg. “They have bagels.”

I’m surprised to find them here, in the city where I’m from, but then I remember that a Jewish friend of mine has recently opened a bagel place in The Hague, my adopted hometown. So maybe it’s no wonder that bagels made it to Poland as well?

Jewish food, and especially Ashkenazic Jewish food, is slowly but steadily returning to the country, where many of the dishes actually originated. The comeback is driven by a growing interest from Polish people in finally facing their country’s past.

This is certainly the case with the bagel, with bakeries all over Poland serving them. But other foods are reappearing as well, such as the knish, or knysz in Polish—a bun filled with kasha, potatoes or cheese. Journalist Laura Silver, author of Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, traced the savory pastry’s origin back to the Polish town of Knyszyn in the early 1900s. In 2022, the Polish government inscribed it to its list of traditional products, which aims to collect and protect traditional dishes and recipes. Another Ashkenazic Jewish food, the bialy (short for bialystoker kuchen, after the Polish city of Bialystok), a chewy yeast roll often topped with onions before baking, had been added to that same list two years prior.

How Jewish foods migrated to the United States and took on new forms

Jewish communities in Poland originated foods like the bagel, knish and bialy. When they fled from pogroms during the late 19th century, they brought their recipes with them, says Maria Zalewska, executive director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation and co-editor of the book Honey Cake & Latkes, a compilation of recipes written down by survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp. “These foods were part of Poland’s Jewish street-food culture, and they quickly gained popularity in the U.S., particularly in Jewish neighborhoods,” she says.

Between 1881 and 1914, more than two million Jews immigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. A large majority, about 1.6 million, came from the Russian Empire (which included parts of Poland at the time). Their exodus was driven by social, economic and technological change combined with antisemitic persecution in their countries of origins. Most Jewish immigrants settled in cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, but Cincinnati, St. Louis, New Orleans and San Francisco, as well as many smaller cities, were also popular destinations.

“You can follow the history of the Jewish community through food and understand why these foods have disappeared [in Poland] but survived in New York,” says Magdalena Maślak, culinary program curator at Warsaw’s POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

In the U.S., Polish and Ashkenazic Jewish cuisines are so intimately intertwined it can be hard to distinguish the two. Foods Eastern Europeans would immediately recognize, such as herring, sour cream, borscht or rye bread, are often considered Jewish in the U.S. Dill pickles have long been considered a Jewish food in America, because Jewish immigrants brought pickles to this country and popularized them at Jewish delis. “But they’re not necessarily Jewish, and that tells you something. That’s the story of food,” says Liz Alpern, a chef and co-founder of the Gefilteria, a New York-based venture that offers Ashkenazic food with a modern twist.

With time, foods such as the pastrami sandwich or the bagel became staples of an evolving Jewish American food culture, different from those of their parents and grandparents, that gave rise to new traditions.

“Jews were in Eastern Europe for hundreds of years, [and] they certainly were not eating meat every day. They were lucky if they were eating meat on Shabbat,” Alpern says. “Suddenly, you come to the United States and you can eat a pastrami sandwich every day—and a pastrami sandwich that didn’t even exist in Eastern Europe.”

Likewise, it was Hersz Lender, a Jewish baker from Lublin, Poland, who was credited with bringing the bagel to New York—and turning it into the morning staple known today. But in Europe, including Poland, the bagel is not coming back in its original version—served and eaten plain—but in its New York rendition, with toppings like cream cheese and lox.

“In America, bagels are what we call a mainstream food, one of the few Jewish foods that have sort of broken the barrier of Jewishness,” says Alpern. “They are very closely associated with New York City, so it would make total sense that in Poland you would see bagels as an American thing.”

Jewish American foods mixed with other cuisines and influences, and the bagel is no exception. “The lox itself is Scandinavian. The cream cheese is from New York. The capers on it are Italian. But it’s putting it all together that made it Jewish,” says Jeffrey Yoskowitz, a New York City-based food writer and co-founder of the Gefilteria.

Antisemitism in Poland and its effects on food culture

Poland’s history of antisemitism has long affected attitudes surrounding Jewish culture and cuisine. “Poland has a centuries-old, deeply rooted Jewish history, and a lot of trauma surrounding that history and a lot of silence and gaps in that history,” says Alpern.

As Jewish culture was thriving in the United States, it was being eradicated in Poland with the murder of three million Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Those who survived the Nazi genocide and attempted to return home were met with antisemitism and disrespect. After World War II ended, the Soviet-backed communist government was actively repressing any information related to the Holocaust, not to mention the pogroms that took place almost immediately after the war.

Between 1968 and 1972, many Jewish people lost their jobs in the Polish government, and as many as 13,000 Polish Jews left the country. According to Poland’s 2021 census, only 15,700 Poles today identify as Jewish, and some of the antisemitic prejudices remain until this day.

A 2023 study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that one-third of Poles harbored anti-Jewish beliefs, agreeing with a majority of 11 statements associated with antisemitic views, including “Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own country,” “Jews have too much power in international financial markets,” and “Jews have too much control over global affairs or media.” The percentage had decreased since the previous poll, which was conducted in 2019, but, among the 103 countries studied, Poland still has the lowest number of people reporting that they interact with Jews often. While the situation has begun to improve since the fall of communism, recent political action such as the 2018 Holocaust law, which threatened to punish anyone who discussed Poland’s role in the Nazi genocide, has made progress difficult.

“There have been many post-1989 efforts to focus on propagating Polish education about Polish Jewish history,” says Zalewska. This includes the official registration of the longstanding Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland, a religious association of Jews, in 1993, as well as establishing academic studies of Judaism at both Warsaw University (1990) and Jagiellonian University in Krakow (1986). Poland has been experiencing an increased interest in creating movies, TV series, documentaries and books about Jewish figures, as well as complex narratives of Jewish life and death.

Among many others, the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow has been one of the city’s major events since 1988. It takes place in Kazimierz (Kuzmir in Yiddish), the district where the Jewish ghetto used to be, in late June, and it features Jewish artists and klezmer concerts, as well as lectures and workshops, many of which are food-related. This year’s festival included events that highlight traditional Ashkenazic dishes served in many Jewish restaurants in Poland, such as gesi pipek (stuffed goose necks), tzimmes (a stew of root vegetables and dried fruit) and forshmak (Jewish herring).

Since 2018, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews has been organizing Tisz—the Polish spelling of “tish,” a Yiddish word signifying a table—a Warsaw festival fully devoted to highlighting the importance of Jewish food to Poland’s own culinary traditions, complete with lectures and cooking demonstrations. Alpern and Yoskowitz helped create the first installment of the festival.

For the duration of the mid-October festival, some milk bars (restaurants serving simple but filling and delicious homemade dishes) change their menu items from Polish names to Yiddish ones. And so, nalesniki become blintzes, golabki become holishkes, and placki ziemniaczane become latkes. “You can order the dishes in Polish or Yiddish,” says Maślak. “You only have to change the name, because it’s the same dish.”

In his new TV documentary series on the history of Polish cooking (“Historia Kuchni Polskiej,” or “The History of Polish Cuisine”), the food historian Jarosław Dumanowski devoted one episode to Jewish food in Poland, taking the audience to historic centers of Jewish culture—Warsaw, Krakow and Lublin, but also New York, Paris and the Ukrainian city of Lviv—interviewing experts on Jewish food traditions. “The origins of these dishes are the same,” he says in the episode, while trying stuffed goose neck prepared by Polish chef Maciej Nowicki.

New Polish cooking, as popularized by chefs such as Marcin Przybysz and bloggers like Michał Korkosz, uses traditional recipes as inspiration, while giving them a modern, global twist. A chef may use twarog (farmer’s cheese) instead of cream cheese in a Basque cheesecake, for example, or combine zurek (a traditional Polish soup made with fermented rye flour) with Japanese ramen to create the so-called zuramen.

Yoskowitz finds that Jewish chefs in Poland and the U.S. are exploring the origins and sustainability of food as well as adapting traditional recipes for the new era.

“We’re asking the same questions, just a little bit differently,” he says, feeling some solidarity with Polish chefs. “These are my people. We don’t even realize how we’re so deeply connected to each other. Those points of connection feel really important right now.”

Despite facing antisemitism, Jewish Poles still hold reason for hope of greater understanding, especially as trauma resurfaces more and more often as a topic of discussions in Polish consciousness. This is especially visible in the 2024 book Traumaland: Polish People in the Shadow of the Past, written by the psychologist Michał Bilewicz. “Without acknowledging historical trauma, we won’t be able to understand modern-day Poland or how Polish people react to failures and successes, how they manage crises and conflicts,” Bilewicz writes.

For Alpern, it is this new generation of Poles and Jews who will change the narrative and work on breaking the cycle of trauma. Bringing Jewish foods back to Poland is an important part of that. “To me, that’s what healing looks like,” she says.

Olga Mecking | Read More

Originally from Poland, writer Olga Mecking now lives in the Netherlands. She is the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing.