Ruderman Foundation Urges US To Suspend Ties With Poland Over Holocaust Law
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
(JTA) – The Ruderman Family Foundation, an American Jewish philanthropic organization, launched a campaign urging the United States to suspend its ties with Poland over that country’s law on rhetoric about the Holocaust.
The campaign includes a petition for suspension hosted on the NeverDeny.org website and a professionally produced video message. It shows men, women and children saying “Polish Holocaust,” which is supposed to be in defiance of the law passed by Poland earlier this month.
The law criminalizes blaming the Polish nation or state for Nazi crimes. Israel and several Jewish organizations, as well as the Department of State and the French foreign ministry, protested the law. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, also opposed it while noting that blaming Poles for the Holocaust and use of the phrase “Polish death camp” is unfair.
Ridiculing the law, one of the people in the film produced by the Ruderman Family Foundation – an organization focused on facilitating greater inclusion for people with disabilities and strengthening ties between American Jews and Israel – is seen standing in a bar holding a beverage while saying “I wonder if they have been in Polish prison.”
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