Poland’s president talks about anti-Semitism as not only a demonstration of hatred towards Jews, but also as disrespectful to the memory of those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Poland’s president spoke of anti-Semitism as not only hateful to Jews, but also disrespectful to the memory of those who risked their lives to save them. Amid a public debate about Poland’s Holocaust-era record (as in Lithuania), the country’s president attended the opening of a museum for non-Jews who saved Jews during the genocide.

At a ceremony attended by approximately 2,000 people Thursday, Andrzej Duda spoke of anti-Semitism as not only hateful to Jews, but also disrespectful to the memory of those who risked their lives to save them. Those who “sow hatred between people, sow and foment anti-Semitism, at the same time trample upon the grave of the Ulma family,” he said of the family who gave the new museum in the southeastern town of Markowa its name: the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews. On March 24, 1944, German police murdered eight Jews and several people who hid them: Jozef Ulma, his pregnant wife and their six children. The Ulmas were recognized in 1995 as Righteous among the Nations for their actions by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.

Righteous Gentiles Jozef and Wiktoria Ulma

The Markowa museum’s opening is one of several new government initiatives to commemorate the Righteous, including plans and funding for a monument to be located next to the All Saints Church on Warsaw’s Grzybowski Square. Another monument, which is controversial for its location, is planned near the Museum of the History of Polish Jews at what used to be the Warsaw Ghetto. The Polish government allocated this year $53,000 for building a chapel in Torun near Bydgoszcz in central Poland dedicated to the Righteous.

At the same time, Poland’s rightist government, elected in 2014, has courted controversy by taking steps which are seen as inhibitive for confronting the actions of Poles who participated in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

President Duda in January requested a re-evaluation of the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit medal, which was given in 1996 to Jan Gross, author of the controversial 2001 book “Neighbors” about the 1941 pogrom perpetrated against Jews by their non-Jewish countrymen in the town of Jedwabne.

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