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Opinion How I Came To Grips With My Bias Against Poles — on Visit to Auschwitz
OSWIECIM, Poland (JTA) — I did a shameful thing on my first visit 20 years ago to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In a guestbook outside an Auschwitz museum exhibit featuring information on 70,000 Polish non-Jews who were murdered here, I downplayed the significance of their deaths by writing: “Your pain is no credential here,…
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Israel News How Jared Kushner Became a Teenage Hero — and Learned To Be a Zionist
Almost 20 years before Jared Kushner became a chief adviser to Donald Trump, a man who has boasted about groping women’s genitals, he rescued a teenage girl from a groping attack in Poland. The incident happened in 1998, when Kushner was a high school participant in the March of the Living, a Holocaust education trip…
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Opinion How Auschwitz Can Be Both a Memorial and a Center for Education
How should we define the authentic remains of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which today are protected and preserved by the Auschwitz Memorial? Should we define it as: 150 buildings, about 300 ruins, including those of five gas chambers and four crematoria in Birkenau that are especially important to the history of…
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Fast Forward 21 Gravestones Created by Famed Jewish Craftsman Are Restored at Warsaw Cemetery
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage financed the restoration of 21 historic gravestones at the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. The gravestones were crafted before the World War II by Abraham Ostrzega, a Jewish artist murdered in 1942 in Treblinka. Among the restored gravestones are Mausoleum of the Three Writers –…
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Fast Forward Anti-Semitism Spikes in Poland — Stoked by Populist Surge Against Refugees
Anti-Semitism is on the rise in Poland, a country with almost no Jews. A new national study conducted by the Center for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw finds a significant increase in negative attitudes toward Jews since 2014. The research, covering the years 2014-2016, shows that anti-Semitic hate speech is becoming increasingly…
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Israel News European Jews Alarmed by Israeli Outreach to Anti-Semitic Far Right
Jews in Europe are voicing increasing consternation about Israel’s budding engagement with surging far-right European parties that have anti-Semitic histories. In Poland, Austria and the halls of the World Jewish Congress, among other places, Diaspora activists are raising sharp questions about the morality of Jerusalem’s foreign policy. “We should not abandon our heritage and cut…
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Fast Forward Polish President Meets Jewish Leaders Ahead of Israel Trip
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Polish President Andrzej Duda met with representatives of the country’s Jewish community, ahead of an official visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Duda, during his meeting with Jewish officials on Thursday explained that this year there was no traditional Hanukkah meeting at the presidential palace because Hanukkah coincided with Christmas….
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Fast Forward Polish Gentiles Don Yarmulkes To Protest Anti-Semitism
(JTA) — On a quiet Thursday evening, Café Foksal in central Warsaw suddenly filled up with about 50 people wearing kippahs. The event was unusual for a city with very few observant Jews and an insignificant number of Israeli tourists. What made it exceptional is that almost none of the yarmulke wearers were Jewish. It…
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