Polish Politician Wants ‘Anti-Semitic’ Tweet Removed From Jewish Museum
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) – A former Polish presidential candidate who now works as a television news host has called on the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews to apologize for putting one of her tweets on display as an example of modern anti-Semitism.
Magdalena Ogórek in a tweet on Monday called the display of her prior tweet “another expression of oppressive political propaganda.” She said that if the Polin Museum does not apologize for placing her tweet on display that she will go to court and ask for compensation, which she later said she would donate to The Museum of Cursed Soldiers, which highlights a variety of Polish anti-Soviet and anti-communist resistance movements formed in the later stages of World War II.
The new temporary exhibition “Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath” uses Ogórek’s tweet from July 2017 as an example of modern anti-Semitism. In the tweet, she asks if Polish Senator Marek Borowski changed his surname “from Berman to Borowski,” referring to his Jewish roots.
“No one has the right to gag the questions of a historian and a journalist. To see my tweet as an example of ‘modern anti-Semitism’ is another example of political oppression,” said Ogórek.
“Part of our exhibition ‘Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath’ includes examples of modern hate speech similar to the language used 50 years ago. All texts are real, and come from various websites and social media. We don’t publish the names of their authors,” Żaneta Czyżniewska, Polin Museum spokesperson, told JTA.
The exhibition deals with the organized anti-Semitic campaign by Polish authorities that resulted in the exodus of several thousand Jews from Poland. Polish President Andrzej Duda apologized this year on March 8 for the actions of Polish authorities 50 years ago.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO