WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland summoned Israel’s ambassador on Monday over a tweet from a Holocaust memorial institute that Warsaw said did not make clear that occupying Nazi German forces, and not Polish authorities, made Jews wear star badges during World War Two.
Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski was protesting against a social media post in which Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial institution to the victims of the Holocaust, wrote that Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear “a distinctive badge to isolate them from the surrounding population”.
He said the post, published on Sunday, should have made clear Poland was “German-occupied” at the time.
“Since the misleading post has not been amended, I have decided to summon the ambassador of Israel to the foreign ministry,” Sikorski wrote on X.
The Israeli foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Yad Vashem had reposted the original tweet saying: “As noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities.”
Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War Two, which lasted from 1939 to 1945. Warsaw takes pains to underline that the persecution of Jews on its territory, such as in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, was the work of the Nazi German occupiers.
More than three million of Poland’s 3.2 million Jews were killed by Nazi Germany, accounting for about half of the Jews in Europe killed during the Holocaust.
“Yad Vashem presents the historical realities of Nazism and WW2, including countries under German occupation, control or influence. Poland was indeed under German occupation”, Dani Dayan, the chairman of Yad Vashem, wrote on X on Monday.
“This is clearly reflected in our material. Any other interpretation misreads our commitment to accuracy.”
(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk, additional reporting by Pesha Magid in Jerusalem; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
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