Poles mark 30th anniversary of 1968 anti-Semitic campaign

ROME, March 4 (JTA) — Hundreds of people in Poland marked this week the 30th anniversary of the 1968 anti-Semitic campaign that forced 20,000 Polish Jews to emigrate. A standing-room-only crowd of more than 350 people filled a downtown Warsaw auditorium Sunday to hear a panel discussion and take part in a question-and-answer session on the events, which were fomented by the communist regime. There was also a brochure reprinting the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda published in newspapers at the time. The audience included government officials, the U.S. and Israeli ambassadors to Poland and local Polish Jews and non-Jews. A number of Jews who left Poland in 1968 also attended, some of them returning to Warsaw especially for the occasion. “It was a very successful meeting,” Stanislaw Krajewski, a Warsaw Jewish leader who helped organize the session and moderated the panel discussion, said in an interview. “Many people stood up and presented personal testimonies about the 1968 events and what happened to them.” For several of the panelists, the meeting was the first public forum in which they spoke about their Jewish identity. The meeting, organized by the Warsaw Jewish community and the Jewish Forum, an organization of Jewish businesspeople and professionals, was one of a series of events planned to mark the anniversary. The anti-Semitic campaign was initiated in 1967 after the Six-Day War, when most communist countries broke off relations with Israel. It erupted with full force in March 1968 in the wake of student protests against the regime. The communist regime branded student demonstrators and their supporters “Zionist elements” who were mounting an “open attack” on the state. Amid a vicious propaganda campaign, thousands of Jews were purged from their jobs.