Poland

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Trump signs Holocaust property bill into law, angering Polish officials
10.05.2018
The legislation capped intensive efforts by Jewish groups, including the World Jewish Restitution Organization, to take immediate action while Holocaust survivors are still alive.
U.S. President Donald Trump. Credit: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
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Poland commemorates the 75th anniversary of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
19.04.2018
“We bow our heads to their heroism, their bravery, their determination and courage,” Polish President Andrzej Duda said at the ceremony at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw.
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder spoke at Poland's official ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Credit: World Jewish Congress.
Featured column
Ben Cohen16.04.2018
The Warsaw Ghetto: The epitome of rightful resistance
As the 75th anniversary of the uprising approaches, there will be a great deal of solemn commemoration of its heroes and victims. Yet the passage of time should encourage us to think a little less mournfully.
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Poll: 20 percent of Central, Eastern Europeans do not accept Jews as fellow citizens
Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS03.04.2018
A Pew Research Center survey of 18 countries finds that Jews are not wanted as neighbors or family members. Other minorities fared worse.
Thousands of young people from around the world walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the sites of former Nazi death camps, during the 2017 “March of the Living in Poland.” Credit: Drew Jacobson via Facebook.
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First lawsuit filed under new Polish ‘Holocaust law’
04.03.2018
A Polish agency filed a lawsuit against an Argentinian newspaper that used Polish soldiers to illustrate an article on the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom.
Part of a core exhibition dedicated to the Jedwabne pogrom at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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Ben Cohen22.02.2018
From Holocaust to ‘Polocaust’: A change in common parlance doesn’t change the facts
Only one other country today wields the Holocaust as a weapon to bash Israel and the Jews: Iran. That a member state of the European Union now finds itself in the company of Tehran’s deniers and revisionists should give pause.
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Outrage in Israel as Polish P.M. suggests Jews were perpetrators in Holocaust
18.02.2018
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “the Polish prime minister’s remarks here in Munich are outrageous. There is a problem here of an inability to understand history and a lack of sensitivity to the tragedy of our people. I intend to speak with him forthwith.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusza Morawieckiego. Photo from Wikimedia Commons
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Polish president signs controversial Holocaust bill into law
06.02.2018
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda on Tuesday signed into a law a controversial bill that makes it a crime for anyone to suggest Polish complicity in the Holocaust. 
Poland’s President Andrzej Duda. Credit: Lukas Plewnia via Wikimedia Commons.
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Polish government cancels visit by Israeli minister over Holocaust remarks
05.02.2018
The Polish government has cancelled a visit to the country by Israel’s Education and Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett’s following a statement highlighting Poland’s involvement in the Holocaust.
Israel’s Education and Diaspora Affairs Minister Naftali Bennett. (Wikimedia Commons)
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American and Israeli condemnation grows over Polish Holocaust bill
01.02.2018
American and Israeli condemnation poured in on Thursday in the wake of a controversial bill passed by the Polish Senate a day earlier criminalizing statements linking Poland to the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
The main gate of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Credit: Angelo Celedon via Wikimedia Commons.
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Ben Cohen01.02.2018
Who owns the Holocaust?
This dispute is about who sets the parameters for our understanding of what the Holocaust was and what it represented – and it is a problem that extends far beyond Poland's borders.
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Jonathan S. Tobin30.01.2018
Jews and Poles don’t need to be enemies
Jews and Poles spent most of the first half of the 20th century at each other’s throats. Must they continue on the same destructive path as we head further into the 21st century?
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Poland advances law criminalizing references linking country to the Holocaust
29.01.2018
The lower house of the Polish Parliament passed a law this week banning the use of the term “Polish concentration camps,” in an attempt to lay blame for the Holocaust squarely on German Nazis and exonerate Poles from being complicit in the crimes that left more than 1 million Polish Jews dead during World War II.
The rail leading to the former Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp in Poland. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
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International March of the Living
Baruch Adler26.01.2018
Holocaust education: the last chance for humanity
As the number of victims of and witnesses to this systematic, state-sponsored genocide dwindle with each passing year, preserving the memory of the Holocaust and transferring its lessons to future generations is becoming increasingly difficult. What’s more, we are constantly competing for the attention of our youths with a multiplicity of other stimuli that they find more interesting and engaging, not to mention considerably less disheartening.
Baruch Adler
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