Poland’s foreign minister summons Israeli ambassador over Yad Vashem post

WARSAW, Poland (AP) – Poland’s foreign minister said Monday that he was summoning the Israeli ambassador over a post by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial institution.

Yad Vashem wrote on X on Sunday that “Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear a distinctive yellow badge in order to isolate them from the surrounding population.”

Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski appealed to Yad Vashem to “post afresh” and make a reference to “German-occupied” Poland. Polish officials have been for years objecting to language that might falsely attribute crimes of Nazi Germany to Poland.

The previous nationalist conservative government even came close to imposing a prison sentence on those suggesting that the Polish nation was complicit in Nazi crimes.

In its post published on Sunday, Yad Vashem described how, on Nov. 23, 1939, “Hans Frank, the governor of the Generalgouvernement issued an order that all Jews aged 10 and above must wear a white cloth armband 10 cm wide marked with a blue Star of David on their right arm.”

Nazi Germany-occupied Poland in September 1939, a date which constitutes the start of World War II. Six million Jews and others were killed in the ensuing Holocaust, many in Nazi death camps located on occupied Polish territory.

Beyond Sikorski, others in Poland criticized the language used by Yah Vashem, including Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Yad Vashem responded to the criticism on social media but only to specify: “As noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities.”

On Monday, Sikorski announced that he was summoning the Israeli ambassador “since the misleading post has not been amended.”