WARSAW — Piotr Cybula is a lawyer in the Polish capital, with a specialization in confirming clients’ eligibility to become a citizen of Poland. Lately, he has registered a boom of Israelis seeking Polish citizenship. “Officially, I hear that they want to study or work here,” says the lawyer. “But in the back of their minds they also have the issue of safety.”
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These are individuals who have Polish ancestors, but who have not maintained any formal ties to the country. One can also be eligible for Polish citizenship if they have Polish parents but were born abroad, even if they never lived in Poland. The same is true for the grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of people who emigrated from Poland long ago.
In practice, descendants of people who emigrated as early as the 19th century still have Polish citizenship. They don’t have to have been to Poland earlier and do not have to speak the language. What they do need is a document confirming their eligibility for Polish citizenship, after which they can apply for a passport.
Record citizenship applications
The decision if someone is or is not eligible to apply for a Polish passport depends on the office of the Masovian Voivodeship (or Mazovian Province, which contains the Polish capital Warsaw). More specifically, it depends on their Department of Foreigners’ Affairs, which has been all but blocked due to the sharp increase in applications.
While in the past, individuals applying for Polish citizenship could be expected to wait a month or two for a reply, that delay has now risen to 13 to 18 months, lawyers say. The impatience among foreigners has grown so high that they are taking the matter to court, filing complaints about the excessive length of the proceedings and the inaction on their individual case files.
In the meantime, the desks of bureaucrats and local officials are all but buckling under the weight of record numbers of citizenship applications, which are only continuing to grow. A large wave has come from citizens of Israel, which began last year with the unstable political situation in Israel that came about as a result of the Oct. 7 attack.
Citizens of Israel are the most common population now seeking Polish citizenship.
But even in 2022, one year before the attack, 4,000 Israeli citizens applied for Polish citizenship. Last year, that number rose to 8,000 — more than from any other country in the world. And that number is incomplete; it did not include fourth quarter numbers.
EU passports
Citizens of Israel are the most common population now seeking Polish citizenship, but they are not the only ones who want the Polish passport, which has one great benefit: It is an EU passport. “A previous large wave of applications came from British people, who wanted to have an EU passport after Brexit,” says lawyer Piotr Stączek, who specializes in mediating citizenship confirmation for foreigners.
But those dreaming of a Polish passport can also be somewhat unexpected. Last year, behind citizens of Israel and citizens of the UK, the next greatest number of applications for Polish passports came from Argentina, Brazil and the United States.
“From South America, we have applications from every country. Aside from Brazil and Argentina we also have them from Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and many from Guatemala. We also have them from Mexico, of course the U.S. and Canada, from Africa namely from South Africa. But I also remember applications from Congo and Uganda, and from Asia we have them from Japan, Thailand, and Hong Kong,” Cybula says.
These are all countries where the descendants of Polish migrants live, although their ties to the country are often illusory.
Special law offices
The Foreign Affairs department is located on Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw. But the descendants of emigrants do not report here in person; they do not even have to come to Poland. Their cases are handled by specialized law firms that operate almost all over the world. These are not only Polish law firms but also foreign ones, active in Israel, the U.S. and Australia. On the internet, you can even find a five-minute form in English that answers the question of whether you are eligible for Polish citizenship.
If so, the applicant’s role is reduced to providing documents from their ancestors, such as a grandfather’s old passport, grandmother’s birth certificate, baptismal certificate or marriage certificate from Poland.
In total, last year, 23,109 applications were submitted to the office from around the world (again, an incomplete number, because registration is ongoing). Four years ago, there were 11,000 such applications.
But not everyone gets the Polish passport they dream of. Last year, there were 14,394 approvals (for 23,000 applications), but in this case, many are still being processed. The proportions are more visible in previous years: in 2023, out of 21,000 applications, 15,800 citizenship confirmations were issued.
As an aside, let us add that in theory, each year, there are several thousand new voters assigned to the Warsaw district. Although it is hard to suspect that they will run to the consulates with new passports to vote in the elections in Poland.
Cases for exclusion
Theoretically, officials have few reasons to refuse if someone presents credible documents from their ancestors. But there would be even more willing applicants if it weren’t for the negative grounds that disqualify some descendants. This concerns the regulations in force in the years 1920-51, which deprived Polish citizenship of persons who had the status of a public official in a foreign country or served in a foreign army before 1951 (excluding World War II).
“A teacher or a bank employee were treated as a public official, so this is not a small group at all,” Cybula says, giving the example of Polish pilots fighting in the British RAF. “If they continued to serve in the British army after the end of the war, they lost Polish citizenship. This group is now pursuing their rights in court,” he says.
And what about Israel, which was famous for conscripting almost all people who disembarked from ships in Haifa or Tel Aviv in the first years of its existence? The “negative premise” of being an official excludes from citizenship, for example, descendants of David Ben-Gurion, one of the main founders of the state of Israel, who was born in Płońsk, near Warsaw, but later served as prime minister of Israel.
“If someone admits that they served in the Israeli army before 1951, we simply do not accept such cases. But it is not true that everyone served, there were after all people with disabilities or those exempted from service for other reasons,” says Cybula.
In practice, Polish officials do not have the possibility to check service at source, so applicants attach to the documents a certificate issued by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirming that they did not serve in the army.
An emergency exit
Finally, I asked the lawyers why foreigners need Polish citizenship? Israel and the EU have signed visa-free travel agreements. But those only allow entry for a short period. After that, a citizen would have to apply for permanent residence or a work permit. So do those applying for citizenship want to move to Poland permanently?
“Almost none of them wants to live here,” Cybula says.
Piotr Stączek adds: “It happens, although these are rather exceptions, that someone from the U.S. wants to move to Poland, for example. There are cases of British people who have a house in Spain and need an EU passport. Citizens of South American countries want to come mainly to work, because Poland is simply a country that is becoming more and more developed economically. Among people from wealthier countries, the motivations are more sentimental, ideological.
The situation is different with citizens of Israel. “Sometimes I talk to clients semi-privately and everyone has in the back of their minds that it is worth having an emergency exit, just in case,” Cybula says.
These are often older people whose loved ones died in the Holocaust.
Of course, it is about the difficult political situation in Israel, which is being attacked by Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, Houthis and Iran.
“Let’s remember that these are often older people whose loved ones died in the Holocaust, and they themselves have also experienced trauma. They see threats differently. One woman told me that if Hitler said he would destroy the Jews and did so, then if Ahmadinejad [Mahmud, former president of Iran] said he would destroy Israel, he would do the same. And her grandchildren would not forgive her for being able to obtain Polish passports for them, but she did not do it,” the lawyer says.
I asked the provincial office why there is such a delay in considering cases: “First of all, the number of applications is constantly increasing. Additionally, the nature of such cases is complicated and requires conducting a thorough evidentiary procedure, which directly affects the extension of the time of their consideration. In addition, the submitted applications are often incomplete and burdened with many formal and material deficiencies, and that extends the time of issuing a decision,” says Joanna Bachanek, spokeswoman for the Mazovian Voivodeship office.
She adds that Voivodeship official Mariusz Frankowski has already applied to the Minister of Internal Affairs Tomasz Siemoniak for money for additional positions to handle the growing number of applications.
