The Jewish Labor Committee announced today that it would not participate in the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising which the government of Poland is sponsoring next month.
Donald Slaiman, president of the JLC, said that to permit the commemoration of this event “to be utilized by the Polish government in its desperate effort to gain acceptance from freedom-loving democratic people after its ignominious and tragic efforts to extinguish the brightest flame of freedom which has arisen in Eastern Europe since World War II — the Solidarity labor movement — would be unfortunate.”
Slaiman noted that the Polish government “has a long history of manipulating the ‘Jewish question’, playing on domestic anti-Semitism and at the same time wooing world Jewish agencies for its own purposes.”
The projected Warsaw Ghetto uprising commemoration “is being used by the government to defend itself against well-founded Western charges of anti-Semitism,” Slaiman said. “The hand of American and world Jewish organizations that continually insist that the Soviet Union and its satellites abide by the human rights guarantees incorporated in the Helsinki accords will not be strengthened by a regime that daily flouts these rights.”
STUDY ON ANTI-SEMITISM IN POLAND
In line with JLC’s opposition to participate in the commemoration, it released a 17-page study of Polish government collaboration and encouragement of anti-Semitism in Poland during the rise and suppression of the Solidarity labor movement. The study, “Anti-Semitism in the Polish Crisis: 1980-1983,” states in its forward:
“Anti-Semitism has been exploited during each post-war crisis in Poland (1947, 1956, 1968), and the current crisis precipitated by the rise and suppression of the Solidarity movement is no exception. Both before and after the imposition of martial law, the Polish authorities initiated a vitriolic and xenophobic anti-Semitic campaign.
“To date, the Solidarity labor federation has resisted the temptation to resort to similar anti-Semitic intrigues. During the past year, the Polish government has also abandoned the use of the crudest and most obvious provocations, and has made overtures to Polish and Western Jewry. The anti-Semitic campaign appears to have been muted to enable the regime to improve its image in the West ….”
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