Yad Vashem Rebukes Israeli and Polish Governments Over Holocaust Law

JERUSALEM — Israel’s official Holocaust memorial center on Thursday issued a stinging critique of a joint statement by the Israeli and Polish prime ministers that was meant to resolve a rift between the countries over a contentious Polish law on the Holocaust.

The Polish law, which made it illegal to accuse Poland of complicity in the Holocaust, was amended last week. The two leaders — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and his Polish counterpart, Mateusz Morawiecki — issued their statement in an effort to put the controversy over the law behind them.

But the memorial center, Yad Vashem, said the statement contained “grave errors and deceptions.”

Among other things, it objected to the statement’s assertion that the wartime Polish government-in-exile tried to stop the systematic murder of Polish Jews in Nazi death camps by trying to raise awareness among the Western allies, and that it “created a mechanism of systematic help and support to Jewish people.”

Yad Vashem, a venerated state institution and the country’s hallowed authority on Holocaust education, documentation and research, said “existing documentation and decades of historical research yield a totally different picture.”

The Polish government-in-exile and its representatives in occupied Poland “did not act resolutely on behalf of Poland’s Jewish citizens at any point during the war,” Yad Vashem said. “Much of the Polish resistance in its various movements not only failed to help the Jews, but was also not infrequently actively involved in persecuting them.”

Yad Vashem also said that even after the amendment of the law, its “essence” was the same, and raised the possibility of harm to “the historical memory of the Holocaust.”

Under pressure from the United States and other allies to amend the law, which was passed in February, and which Israeli officials likened to Holocaust denial, Poland backtracked late last month. Both houses of Parliament voted to remove the criminal penalties for the provisions that critics said would hamper dialogue about the Holocaust and distort history.

The original law had been furiously condemned in Israel. Since then, Israeli and Polish representatives have conducted months of intense, quiet dialogue that culminated in the changes to the law.

Netanyahu welcomed the amendment, saying in a statement on June 27, “Our ties with Poland are very important and are based on trust.” He then read aloud, in English, the full text of the joint statement, which he said he was making with the prime minister of Poland.

That was supposed to lay the controversy to rest.

Then on Thursday, the Polish government took out paid advertisements and published the joint statement, in English and Hebrew, in Israeli newspapers, soon after similar advertisements ran in the German press.

That prompted the unusually forthright rebuke from Yad Vashem, an independent body that is partly financed by the Israeli government and that is also known as the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

In Israel, home to tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors, the Polish law has touched a sensitive nerve.

Some remembered the help extended by individual Poles, but many more were outraged at what they saw as a Polish government effort to whitewash the crimes of Poles who collaborated with the Nazis.

While there is shared pain, there is also plenty of residual anger: Of the 6 million Poles killed during World War II, 3 million were Jews — nearly half of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust.

The first signs of trouble for the Israeli-Polish agreement came last week when Yehuda Bauer, 92, a Yad Vashem historian, described the joint statement in a radio interview as a “betrayal” that “hurt the Jewish people and the memory of the Holocaust.”

Repeating his withering criticism in a column published Wednesday in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, he wrote, “We accepted the mendacious official Polish narrative, and swallowed it.” He accused the Israeli government of sacrificing truth and justice “for its current economic, security and political interests.”

Netanyahu did not immediately respond to Yad Vashem’s criticism in person. Instead, in a curious twist, the leaders of Israel’s negotiating team who worked with Poland on how to revise the law issued a response stating, “The chief historian of Yad Vashem, Prof. Dina Porat, accompanied the process from the outset.”

The negotiators added that she had approved the historical clauses appearing in the joint statement.

Porat, who has been Yad Vashem’s chief historian since 2011 and is also professor emeritus of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, did not respond to requests for comment Thursday and was not answering her phone.

A spokesman for Yad Vashem, Simmy Allen, said that if Porat had been involved in the drafting of the joint statement, she was not representing Yad Vashem in that role. Relishing the opportunity to excoriate Netanyahu, who is battling multiple corruption investigations, his rivals weighed in from the political left, right and center.

Naftali Bennett, the hard-right education minister and leader of the Jewish Home party, described the statement as “a disgrace rife with lies.”

This is not the first time Yad Vashem has called out Netanyahu.

In 2015, after Netanyahu blamed the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, for giving Hitler the idea of annihilating European Jews during World War II, Yad Vashem published a paper titled, “Setting the Record Straight.”

Demonstrating that Hitler was determined to exterminate the Jews long before his meeting with the Grand Mufti, the paper rejected Netanyahu’s comments as “historically inaccurate.” It was written by Porat.

The renewed Holocaust uproar in Israel hit Poland as it was engrossed in an internal upheaval over its government’s efforts to purge the judges of its Supreme Court.

Bartosz Cichocki, the vice minister of foreign affairs and the leader of the Polish group for legal and historical dialogue with Israel, said the position expressed by Netanyahu in the joint statement of late June was “final” and “binding.”

“We follow the internal Israeli debate with great interest,” Cichocki said in a radio interview. “It is our deep conviction that it confirms the necessity of further tightening the cooperation.”

He said that process should take place not only through the joint efforts of scientific and educational institutions, but also through the dialogue groups established by both governments. In a measure of the long-standing nature of these tensions, the monumental 1985 Holocaust documentary “Shoah” by the French filmmaker and journalist Claude Lanzmann, who died Thursday, was originally condemned by Poland’s Communist government at the time as “anti-Polish propaganda” for its portrayal of Polish collaborators. Eventually, an agreement was reached for it to be broadcast in Poland.