One day, a girl attending kindergarten in Muranów, pointing to the former boundaries of Europe's largest ghetto carved into the cobblestones, asked her father, "What is a ghetto wall?" The troubled man, unsure how to escape the Holocaust narrative, swallowed hard and replied, "Murgetta was a princess. This place was her kingdom." Following this fantasy, where Adam Czerniaków would be the king's advisor and Marek Edelman a knight, Rubinsztajn would become a court jester.
No information about Rubinsztajn's life before the war has survived. We know he came from Łódź, and it was probably from there that he was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto at the beginning of the German occupation. His name was supposedly Abraham, but no one seemed interested in his formal identity. Some called him Mojszele, others Icik, and most residents used no first name at all—he was simply Rubinsztajn. Some, like Emmanuel Ringelblum, addressed him with a special epithet, almost like we are accustomed to addressing historical rulers—"mad Rubinsztajn."
Rubinsztajn's anonymity didn't prevent him from becoming a true diva of the Warsaw Ghetto. He was written about by ghetto chroniclers— Władysław Szpilman , Jonas Turkow , and Yehuda Feld —as well as Oneg Shabbat group collaborators Rachela Auerbach and Hersz Wesser . Yitzhak Berensztein devoted an entire essay to him titled "Street Philosopher." Jerzy Jurandot, the poet and artistic director of ghetto theaters, dedicated a song to Rubinsztajn, published in the "Gazeta Żydowska" on May 20, 1941: "Not Chairman Czerniaków, Colonel Szeryński, / Not Counselor Kupczykier, Editor Czerwiński, / The most popular person in the district / It's Rubinsztajn, the madman—the street rag ." And it was this very street—the Jewish street—that was the biggest fan of Rubinsztajn's work.
Rubinsztajn's sayings were known and quoted not only by representatives of the ghetto's cultural scene, but above all by its ordinary inhabitants. Catchy slogans such as "All are equal (Ale glajch)" , "Nie odpowiedz bony" (Don't give up the voucher) , and "Boy, hold on a little longer" became deeply ingrained in the consciousness of people coping with the dramatic living conditions, occupying a permanent place in the newspeak of the so-called Jewish closed district. Stanisław Różycki recounted an incident when he was investigating the circumstances of the death of a young girl found on the street, to which the woman he was questioning replied: "What are you asking, what, you don't know, you know (she smiled sadly), today 'ałłe glach', well, the same disease."
| Rubinsztajn in the ghetto
The memory of the clown Rubinsztajn survived not only through accounts from the German occupation, but also in works written many years after the war. A case in point is the work of Uri Orlev , the acclaimed Israeli children's author and translator, born in Poland in 1930 as Jerzy Henryk Orłowski. In his autobiographical novel, "Island on Bird Street," he recounts a conversation with his mother about the sanctity of human life and the tragedy of every death. A young boy, seeing dead bodies daily on the streets of the ghetto, asked about "even mad Rubinsztajn?" to which his mother replied, "Of course, every human being is an entire universe. Even mad Rubinsztajn." Stanisław Adler , Alexander Donat , and Edward Reicher also mentioned him in their postwar memoirs.
The spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto jester lives on not only in prose and poetry, but also in drama. Even during his lifetime, Rubinsztajn saw his wisdom adapted for the stage: Rubinsztajn's popularity is growing. Recently, a revue titled "Ale glajch" ("But Glajch") was staged at the Melody Palace. Hersz Wasser confirms Emmanuel Ringelblum's words . The script has not survived, but it was most likely a cabaret performance – legend has it that the protagonist himself appeared and thanked the cast and audience at the end of the evening. However, this was not the end of the dramatic reception of this character. In 2019, American professor Henry Greenspan wrote the play "Death / Play, or the Mad Jester of the Warsaw Ghetto," which includes, among other things, an imaginary scene of a post-war conversation with Abraham Gancwajch , who, in terms of survival techniques, was the very opposite of Rubinsztajn.
In recent years, this nameless beggar has received unprecedented recognition. Rubinsztajn became a symbolic guide to the manifestations of comedy in the ghetto and extermination camps in the fictionalized documentary "The Cabaret of Death" (2014), directed by Andrzej Celiński , co-creator of the Oscar-nominated production "The Children of Leningradsky." He also appeared in the films "This Is a Must See" (2021, dir. Avi Merkado-Ettedgui, Yaron Niski ) and "A Film Unfinished" (2010, dir. Yael Hersonski )... in person. When a German film crew arrived in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942 to film footage for the propaganda film "Das Ghetto ," Rubinsztajn appeared on camera. A short scene shows him dancing in the street to the delight of onlookers, mostly children.
| "Gazeta Żydowska" No. 85 of May 2, 1941
Ale glajch – All are equal
Rubinsztajn's trademark was his most famous saying, "Ale glajch" (Yiddish: "All are equal"). Numerous accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto recall him wandering streets like Leszno and Smocza, shouting this slogan at passersby. It didn't take long for this phrase to take hold of the gated district, permeating the many manifestations of its inhabitants' cultural activity: the press, prose, poetry, theater, and, above all, satire.
Rubinsztajn's slogan can be understood in two ways: first, as a cynical remark about the enormous social stratification that prevailed in the Warsaw Ghetto. Instead of equalizing and uniting the people imprisoned within, its closure only deepened existing inequalities—the Jewish poor suffered even greater misery, while the living conditions of the well-off remained largely unchanged. Rubinsztajn's words were ironically used by an unnamed author in "Undzer Hofnung" from March 1942: " As you can see, in the Jewish ghetto the slogan 'all equal' has far from been realized." Here we have a beautifully maintained ground floor at Leszno 2, while on the first floor people are freezing and dying of cold . The Judenrat played a significant role in maintaining these social divisions, proclaiming equal treatment for all ghetto residents, while it was common practice to influence one's living conditions through connections or bribes offered to its officials."
On the other hand, "Ale glajch" can be seen as a kind of prophecy, according to which all ghetto inhabitants, regardless of their position, are equal in the face of death. For, in the eyes of the Nazi policies of the Third Reich, all European Jews were sooner or later to meet the same fate. In this perspective, Rubinsztajn's dictum seems to allude to the medieval motif of the danse macabre, the dance of death represented by a procession of skeletons. It is as if the unknown dimension of the afterlife were to become the space where the long-awaited reunion of the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto would take place.
| Rubinsztajn's photograph from 1941 (Ghetto Fighters' House)
Give back the voucher
A voucher was a ration card for bread or other rations that all ghetto residents were entitled to until their death. To receive one, one had to be registered in the closed district—according to several accounts, Rubinsztajn never took steps to achieve this. He had other ways of securing his food; as Alexander Donat writes, he used to stand in front of the best-stocked delicatessens in the ghetto, shouting, "Down with Hitler! Down with the German murderers!" until the terrified shopkeeper ran out with an armful of food, ready to do anything to put an end to this life-threatening blackmail. It doesn't seem that Rubinsztajn shared any particular fear of the occupation authorities – numerous testimonies from survivors, including Władysław Szpilaman, recall him mocking German soldiers: One of his specialties was approaching German guards and calling them, with tremors and grimaces, "fools, bandits, and a pack of thieves." The Germans had a wonderful time and often threw Rubinsztajn cigarettes and coins as payment for his insults, because a lunatic couldn't be taken seriously.
Recognizing the ubiquity of death as the sine qua non of ghetto life, Rubinsztajn equated the living and the dead in his practice: he viewed his fellow ghetto inmates as living corpses, while the bodies of the dead littering the streets as companions for conversation. In a dying city, with a funeral home on every other corner, he chose death and the dead as the primary target of his satire. He spoke to the dead, but meant the living. Another controversial memory involved him jumping onto carts carrying the bodies of the deceased to the cemetery, shouting, "Give me back my bona!" Rubinsztajn's slogan became the popular street song attributed to him, "Di Bone," which has survived in two language versions: Polish and Yiddish.
Rubinsztajn's practices can be seen as a continuation of the tradition of badchanim (Hebrew for "comedians")—professional traveling pranksters, typically commissioned for Jewish weddings, where they entertained guests with riddles and stories drawn from source texts or folklore. If this category existed 80 years ago, Rubinsztajn would undoubtedly have deserved the title of performer, instead of "lunatic," "madman," or "fool." However, the only ceremony he enlivened was the wedding of Warsaw Jews to death.
| "Gazeta Żydowska" No. 113 of November 19, 1941
Rubinsztajn is dying. […] An idea, a symbol that astonished with its truth and lie, that "all are equal," is passing away . (Hersz Wasser)
The exact circumstances of Rubinsztajn's death are unknown, although the "Gazeta Żydowska" reported the event. According to one version of events circulating in the ghetto, during the so-called Great Liquidation Action, he voluntarily went to the Umschlagplatz, from where he was transported to the Treblinka extermination camp. According to another account, he died before the summer of 1942, likely shot by a German soldier. One thing seems certain, however: Rubinsztajn, like nearly 400 fellow prisoners in the Warsaw Ghetto, did not survive the war. But after reading the accounts about him, the question arises almost automatically: was survival ever of any interest to him? Everything known about him suggests the answer is negative.
Opposition to the German occupier's terror, whose goal was to hound and dehumanize the Jewish population of Warsaw, could be expressed in many ways – including something as seemingly mundane yet invaluable as entertaining the inhabitants of the ghetto. It has long been known that humor is a tool for overcoming trauma; it allows one to gain distance from one's own, in this case, unimaginably tragic, situation and view it from a different, even absurd, perspective. This is confirmed both by the documented satirical and cabaret activities of ghetto prisoners and the extensive body of academic research on humor in the context of the Holocaust. Perhaps today, 80 years after the events that unfolded in the ghettos of occupied Poland and the German extermination camps, when more and more voices are being raised to recognize civilian resistance as equivalent to armed revolt, Rubinsztajn has a chance to be perceived not as a fool or a madman, but as a hero of sorts.
Joanna Bakoń
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The article was first published in "Słowo Żydowskie" (September 2022), a monthly magazine published by the TSKŻ Social and Cultural Association of Jews in Poland.
