The head of a pro-Israel ministry says the government of Poland is trying to whitewash history with the passage of a law that regulates Holocaust speech.

On Tuesday, Poland's president signed the controversial legislation that makes it a crime – punishable by prison time – to accuse the Polish nation of any responsibility for Nazi crimes during World War II. The bill, passed earlier by both houses of the Polish Parliament, has been criticized by both Israel and the United States.

In an effort to assuage criticism, the Polish leader has agreed to allow the bill to be evaluated by Poland's constitutional court, leaving open the possibility it could be amended.

Poland's authorities have described the bill as an attempt to protect the country's reputation from what it believes is confusion about who bears responsibility for Auschwitz and other death camps Nazi Germany set up in occupied Poland. But critics of the bill say Polish authorities at the time were complicit.

In fact, "it's whitewashing history," says Laurie Cardoza-Moore, founder of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations.

Cardoza-Moore

"The fact that this government would pursue this initiative is the height of arrogance and pride," she adds. "They can't clear their names – they're still guilty, they still turned their backs. There were over three million Jews who died in Poland – three million! [The Polish government] stood by. They ended up helping to kill those Jews."

And Cardoza-Moore says after the war the Polish government continued to persecute the Jews.

"When Jewish families came back to their homes, there were people living in them – and the government at the time revoked their citizenship and told them they could not come back," she explains. "This is part of Polish history as well. Are we going to start whitewashing this information from the history books in Poland?"

The law takes effect 14 days after it is officially published, but it wasn't immediately clear when that will be.