Poland’s Jewish leaders meet with ruling party chief in wake of nationalist marches

Leaders of Polish Jewry said they flagged what they felt was rising intolerance in the country during a meeting on Friday with a ruling party politician – but the party itself denied the subject was broached.

Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and Leslaw Piszewski, president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland, met with Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a founder of the Law and Justice Party, to discuss various topics, including the “issue of growing intolerance toward various minorities, including the Jews,” Schudrich told JTA.

But in an interview with the PAP news agency, Kaczynski denied the issue ever came up.

“We talked about the safety of Jewish communities and objects, but there was absolutely no mention of any growing climate of intolerance in Poland,” he was quoted as saying. He added the two communal leaders said Poland was safer for Jews than many other countries in Europe with large Muslim populations.

The Friday meeting followed nationalist marches in Warsaw and Wroclav on November 11 in which some marchers carried banners against Muslims and chanted slogans against Jews. However, Schudrich said, the meeting had been scheduled before the march took place.

Asked what he told Kaczynski about the march, Schudrich said: “I spoke to him about it in my way, which is to say the Jewish community valued the principled stance that some Polish leading politicians took in rejecting the expressions of racism on display.”

President Andrzej Duda last week wrote on Twitter: “In our country, there is no place or consent for xenophobia, radical nationalism, antisemitism.”

The meeting on Friday followed an internal dispute among Jews over an earlier meeting Kaczynski had in August with other leaders of Poland’s fractious Jewish community. Schudrich and Piszewski were among those who accused the communal leaders who met Kaczynski in August of falsely claiming to represent a broad constituency without properly addressing communal concerns over the alleged growth of xenophobia in Poland.

Attending that meeting were Artur Hofman, president of the TSKZ Jewish cultural group – which is Poland’s largest Jewish organization, with 1,2000 members; two rabbis from Chabad; and Jonny Daniels, founder of the Holocaust commemoration group From the Depths. It followed a letter sent earlier in August by Piszewski and another communal leader to Kaczynski saying that Polish Jews were increasingly fearful due to rising antisemitism and government inaction. (JTA)