JERUSALEM — Polish and Israeli officials met on Thursday to address the diplomatic rift that erupted over a new Polish law that makes it a crime to blame Poland for the Holocaust, a measure that Israeli officials have likened to Holocaust denial.

The law, adopted last month over the furious objections of Israel and scholars from around the world, makes it a crime to blame “the Polish nation” for the Holocaust and other World War II atrocities carried out by the Nazis during their occupation from 1939 to 1945.

It was the Nazis who oversaw the exterminations — by means of mass shootings, gas chambers, starvation and slave labor — that claimed the lives of some six million Jews. But the role of Polish collaborators, participants and enablers in the Nazi-run system of mechanized death remains a subject of fraught historical inquiry.

Poland’s right-wing government says its goal is to defend the nation from slander, but scholars say the result is to stifle inquiry and reconciliation.