Polish President Lech Walesa blamed himself last week for some of the increased anti-Jewish sentiment in Poland.
Walesa made the remark after meeting here with Polish-born Holocaust survivors, who told him they were surprised about the growth of anti-Semitism in a country of few Jews.
“The Polish nation and the Jewish nation cannot quarrel,” Walesa said.
Speaking through a translator after the meeting, arranged by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Walesa traced the recent revival of anti-Semitism in Poland to a remark he made last year during the country’s presidential campaign.
Walesa had been asked during one of his rallies, “Aren’t there too many Jews in the Polish government?”
He said he responded, ” ‘Sir, you know I am 100 percent Polish, leave me alone.’ And look what I did. I indeed gave reason to thinking I am anti-Semitic myself.”
At a ceremony last Thursday on the construction site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Walesa received strong applause from 200 guests when he said, “As long as I have something to say in Poland, I will not allow for anti-Semitism.”
“A good Catholic cannot be anti-Semitic,” Walesa told reporters afterward. “My religion tells me that the people of Israel are the chosen people, so how could I go against my God?”
Walesa announced, at the urging of the Holocaust museum, that he was creating a task force to combat anti-Semitism.
But Miles Lerman, chairman of the Holocaust council’s international relations committee, said it would be “naive on our part to believe that a decree of the president of the country will wipe it out.”
MUSEUM PRESENTED WITH ARTIFACTS
Lerman said he expects the Polish government “to condemn it, find it and find ways how to eliminate it.”
He said the survivors had “shared their frustration and their surprise with the fact that in a Poland that is totally devoid of the Jews, that there is still anti-Semitism.”
Samuel Goetz, another survivor from Poland, said he recommended to Walesa that he award presidential medals to some of those who helped save Polish Jews during the Holocaust, “so that the Polish population will become aware — I mean the younger generation.”
Walesa presented the museum with a tree stump from the outskirts of Warsaw, where Jews and others were executed between December 1939 and August 1943. He also presented a milk jug from the Warsaw Ghetto in which the historian Emanuel Ringelblum placed hundreds of documents depicting daily life there.
He said that at a later date, the Polish government will send the museum a gate from a Jewish cemetery at Tarnow, where thousands of Jews were shot amid the gravestones of their ancestors.
In return, Lerman presented Walesa with a huge book of photographs by Roman Vishniac that captured Jewish life in Eastern Europe on the eve of World War II.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
