In an op-ed for the Israeli Haaretz newspaper, Poland’s ambassador to Israel, Marek Magierowski, argues that no other nation takes “such scrupulous care ... of the material legacy of the Holocaust.”

In his piece, the ambassador referred to an ongoing dispute between Prof Havi Dreifuss and Prof Daniel Blatman, whereby the former “is not particularly enthusiastic” about the latter’s acceptance of the Polish government’s offer to become the chief historian of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum which is due to open in 2023.



Prof Dreifuss has previously said that by accepting the position, Prof Blatman had effectively given “his consent to help the Polish government distort the history of the Holocaust.”



Mr Magierowski points out what, in his opinion, is a paradox. “Had we not decided to establish the Museum of the Warsaw Ghetto, this exchange would have never occurred. There would be no articles in Haaretz, no acrimonious controversies. But the Polish government did choose to honor the Jews who tried to preserve their dignity in that mundane inferno. And it invited Israeli scholars to contribute their expertise,” he writes, calling this “another conscious gesture of a state in which Jews had lived for hundreds of years and whose culture imbued Poland’s.”



The ambassador clearly acknowledges that “Prof Dreifuss is fully entitled to express her views about the policies of the current Polish government,” but suggests that her criticism of Prof Blatman is guided by “political prejudices,” pointing out that she had also been offered the job by the Polish government, but had declined.

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According to Prof Dreifuss, Prof Blatman “validates historical distortion” by addressing the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto as “Polish citizens.” In the ambassador’s opinion it is “a moot point” to what extent Jews might have felt unwelcome in Poland, as they were in possession of Polish citizenship and, as a consequence, the legitimacy of whether they were Poles or no is entirely out of the question.



“We are lucky to have a large, vivacious community of Polish Jewry in Israel. Some of them are in their eighties and nineties, speaking impeccable Polish and profoundly embedded both in Polish and Jewish culture,” the ambassador writes.



In an emphatic conclusion to his argument, Mr Magierowski asserts that he cannot recall “any European country in which the head of state regularly presides over ceremonies commemorating the dark chapters of the history of their relationship with the Jewish community” or “any other country where such scrupulous care is taken of the material legacy of the Holocaust.”