(Re)discovering Missions to the Jews in Interwar Period Wilno

After decades of discrimination under imperial Russian rule, the Polish Catholic Church of the interwar period “re-discovered” and revisited the possibility of converting Jews to Catholicism. This paper examines Catholic missionary activity in the archdiocese of Wilno in the late 1920s and 1930s. It uncovers a mostly failed attempt (and accompanying reasons for its failure) to create a missionary organization under the name of the Section for Converting Jews (1929), as well as the activity of its ideological leader and convert, Frederik Pistol. The paper also sheds light on the private initiative of a priest, Jan Zieja (later a prominent Polish national figure), to launch a missionary project aimed at mass Jewish conversion in Poland (1934). Zieja’s call for a nationwide mission was the inspiration behind the “Questionnaire about the Jews” (1935) issued by the Catholic Curia of Wilno that involved all the parsons of the archdiocese in a debate about how to solve the “Jewish question” in the country. The analysis of these missionary initiatives reveals a prevailing ambivalence and a complicated inner struggle between an eternal ecclesiastical calling to encourage conversions of the “non-believers” and a skepticism towards such an endeavor being implemented by local Jews. In short, the paper uncovers the last 20th-century attempt to reconsider this centuries-old issue within a new setting of the nation-state during the interwar period, informed by aspects of antisemitism, anti-Judaism and nationalism in the background.