Archbishop Wojciech Polack Polish Catholic leaders have condemned a new wave of anti-Semitism in the country amid tension over a government-backed law on responsibility for the Holocaust.
Archbishop Wojciech Polak of Gniezno, Poland’s Catholic primate, called anti-Semitism “a moral evil and a sin”, saying attempts to divide people or pit them against each other “in a nationalistic context should be totally censured”.
“Any political activity which causes divisions, prejudices or tribal thinking is dangerous,” he said after the Polish bishops’ conference discussed the controversy during their plenary, which ended March 15.
Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan, president of the Polish bishops’ conference, said hostility belonged “neither to Christian nature nor to the nature of Judaism”. He urged prayers to ensure “the great good achieved by common efforts of Poles and Jews” was not squandered.
“We hear of an increase in aggressive attitudes among both Poles and Jews, who’ve begun to fear for their presence in Poland and speak very harshly about Poles,” Archbishop Gadecki said.
“We need a spirit of peace to mitigate these extreme positions and show there’s more uniting than dividing us.”
More than 6 million Polish citizens, half of them Jews, were killed during Poland’s 1939-1945 occupation by Nazi Germany. Polish officials have long objected to accusations of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.
In place since March 1, the law imposes up to three years in jail for anyone who “publicly and against the facts attributes to the Polish nation or Polish state responsibility or co-responsibility for Nazi crimes” or “flagrantly reduces in any way the responsibility of the real perpetrators”.
However, the law was condemned as “baseless” by Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as well as the Jerusalem-based Yad Vashem Memorial Institute, which warned that it would impede Holocaust research and debate.
In late February, Poland’s chief rabbi joined leading Jewish organisations in expressing outrage over a “growing wave of intolerance, xenophobia and anti-Semitism” that had found its way into public media outlets and statements by members of parliament and state officials. They warned that condemnations by Polish leaders would “ring empty” without action “to stop the spread of evil.”
The Polish bishops said St John Paul II had urged Christian nations to “uproot from their mentality all unjust prejudices about Jews and other symptoms of anti-Semitism”.
CNS