Breaking tradition, Trump fails to visit Warsaw Ghetto
ON HIS first state visit to Poland last week, Donald Trump became the first US president since the fall of Communism not to visit the site of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The decision provoked a strong reaction from the country’s Jewish community.
Michael Schudrich, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, said: “We deeply regret that President Donald Trump, though speaking in public barely a mile away from the monument, chose to break with that laudable tradition. We trust that this slight does not reflect the attitudes and feelings of the American people.”
Standing by the monument to the 1944 Warsaw Uprising last Thursday, Mr Trump spoke about the horrors experienced by Poland’s Jews during the 20th century. He said: “A vibrant Jewish population was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation.”
The Shoah remains a thorny subject in Poland where the relationship between ethnic Poles and Jews remains complex. Neighbours, a book by PolishJewish historian Jan T Gross, revealed that in 1941, between 340 and 1,500 Jews were murdered by their Polish neighbours in the town of Jedwabne.
But earlier this year, the Polish government, led by the right-wing Law and Justice Party, planned a legal amendment that threatened to prosecute anyone who accuses Poles of participating in the crimes committed by the Nazis.
Mr Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, an Orthodox convert, did visit the ghetto on Thursday afternoon to lay a wreath.