Duda: ‘Israel caused Jew hate in Poland’
POLISH PRESIDENT Andrzej Duda has been reported as blaming the increase on antisemitic attacks in his country on Israel.
He is said to have made the remark at a meeting with American Jewish leaders at the Polish Consulate in New York last week, during a visit to the United Nations.
Mr Duda referred to Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who caused a diplomatic row earlier this year when he repeated the comments of former President Yitzhak Shamir that “the Poles suckle antisemitism with their mother’s milk”.
The Polish president said that Mr Katz’s conduct had resulted in increased anti-Jewish incidents and that some of his countrymen had advised him not to go to Israel until the Foreign Minister apologised, the Jewish Insider said. The website reported witnesses as saying that Mr Duda’s words were defended by Holocaust survivor Edward Mosberg, who recently received Poland’s Order of Merit.
The history of the Holocaust has become a highly contentious issue in Poland in recent years. In 2018, the coutnry’s senate passed a controversial law making it illegal to suggest Poland was complicit in the extermination of the Jews.
As a result of Mr Katz’s comments in February, Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki pulled out of a meeting for EU leaders in Jerusalem.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who attended the meeting with the president, said he had objected when Mr Mosberg had suggested that Mr Katz’s comments had created antisemitism in Poland. (right)
“The more [Mr Mosberg made] the insinuation that Jews are responsible for any Polish antisemitism, the more uncomfortable I began to feel,” he wrote in the Jerusalem Post last week.
“Mosberg is special man, a Holocaust survivor. He has witnessed horrors that I can scarcely comprehend. But I could no longer hear someone saying that antisemitism is caused by Jews and I shouted across the room, ‘Eddie, you’re a hero of the Jewish people. But you’re wrong. We Jews are not responsible for antisemitism. Antisemites are responsible for antisemitism.’”
But Rabbi Boteach also said Mr Katz’s comments were “not just factually wrong but an affront to Jewish values”.