I see you live in New Zealand - probably a very civilized place.
If you had relatives who lived in eastern Europe, like grandparents or great-parents - which really isn't all that long ago - they would have remembered pogroms and attacks on Jews by infuriated ignorant "Christians".
A Jewish man I knew told me the last memory his mother had of Russia was a Cossack whipping her in the face when she was a little girl.
I am a Christian, and I found that picture of long-beared Jews wearing horned hats with Stars of David on them to be repellent, disgusting and inaccurate. They are not representing real people of the time. These are vicious anti-Semitic charactures. Given Poland's past record on anti-Semitism, more sensitivity should be shown to Jewish feelings.
I have seen many Passion Plays in the U.S. and in no instance have been Jews so pictured. The emphasis was always on Christ, His mother, what He suffered, the women of Jerusalem, etc. Caiaphas and his associates have a very small part - if any in Catholic Stations of the Cross and Passion plays in the U.S. Check out a Catholic Church in New Zealand with the "Stations of the Cross" I doubt if you will even see the Sanhedrin pictured. I believe the first Station of the Cross is "Christ before Pilate".
Christ was a Jew. His mother was Jewish as were His desciples. Christians believe He fulfilled prohecies in the Jewish Old Testament. We claim our God the Father is the same God as the God of the Exodus and of Isaac and Jacob. The first Christians were a Jewish sect. You originally had to become a Jew before you could become a Christian.
How can some of us possible call ourselves Christians when we hate Christ's people?
I have been in many different Christian Churches and in Synagogues also. God is in all of them.
If you had relatives who lived in eastern Europe, like grandparents or great-parents...
I was born and bread in Moscow, a virulent ant-semitic environment, though not Christian but atheistic in my time. And I came to think that the only effective answer to a real anti-semitic assault is balls' ripping. Discussions just don't do... and any censoring of old rituals even less so.
They are not representing real people of the time.
Of course they don't! And they were not meant to. The ritual is not a documented enacting of the past, and even if certain details of it could be interpreted by someone as not flattering towards the Jews, so what? These details may represent the one-time feelings, and who are we to edit them all that centuries later?
How can some of us possible call ourselves Christians when we hate Christ's people?
Indeed. But this is not the case with the ritual in question. In Poland, like everywhere else, there are decent people and there are scoundrels, there are Jew-haters (America-haters, Russian-haters, even Pole-haters) and those who saved Jewish lives.
What I am pleading for, is not to blow this event's significance out of all proportion.