Blaming anti-Semitism in Poland on the legacy of communism, a leader of the Polish Parliament promised here this week that he would see to it that Polish schoolbooks are revised to present an accurate picture of the contributions of Jews to Polish history.
Professor Andrzej Stelmachowski, speaker of the Senate in Warsaw, also pledged to a delegation of Australian Jews that his country would support moves to rescind “the Communist-inspired insult” that was the U.N. General Assembly’s 1975 resolution branding Zionism as racism.
Stelmachowski, who is visiting Australia as a guest of the Australian Parliament, acknowledged there were “extremists” in Poland who resorted to anti-Semitism but said they had little national influence and played no “decisive” role in elections.
He blamed their presence on “45 years of deliberate historical isolation forced on Poland by the Communists,” who repeatedly “provoked” anti-Semitism and had deliberately “written the Jews out of our history.”
Stelmachowski’s meeting with a six-member Jewish delegation was described as a frank discussion of the community’s concerns. At one point the Jewish group disputed his contention that the improvement of Polish-Jewish relations would have made better progress except for the intervention of “Jewish extremists from the United States.”
The professor was obviously alluding to Rabbi Avi Weiss, an activist from New York who demonstrated at the Carmelite convent at the former Auschwitz death camp in July 1989.
Weiss was accused by the Polish primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, of intending to harm the nuns, a charge Glemp later withdrew.
The Australian Jews pointed that out to their visitor.
The delegation, headed by Leslie Caplan, president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, maintained that the Polish government had a responsibility to combat racism and extremism with education, legislation and moral leadership.
The Jewish group appealed for proper labeling and accurate information at Holocaust memorials and concentration camp sites in Poland, where often the victims are not acknowledged as Jews.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
