President Donald Trump speaks at Krasinski Square on Thursday in Warsaw, Poland. | Evan Vucci/AP Photo Trump hands a victory to Polish nationalists Historians and observers say the president's decision to break with tradition by skipping a trip to Warsaw's Holocaust memorial plays into the ruling party's message.

President Donald Trump is unlikely to suffer politically at home for making history abroad as the first sitting American president in decades to visit Warsaw while forgoing a stop at the city’s monument to the Jewish Ghetto Uprising.

But the president’s decision to skip that symbolic visit was seen as handing a victory to Poland’s right-wing nationalist ruling party: The Law and Justice party has been highlighting the role of the Poles who fought against Nazi Germany while downplaying the persecution of 3 million Polish Jews who perished in the Holocaust.


Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who has defended Trump’s right to fire former FBI director James Comey, called it a “mistake not to go” to the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes.

“The Polish leadership these days is minimizing the Holocaust, and minimizing the Polish role,” Dershowitz said in an interview. “It would have sent a powerful message about Western civilization, which is what Trump is promoting. The Polish government wants to focus on nationalism — and that focuses on what happened to people of Polish, not Jewish, ethnicity.”

Trump appeared to bolster the government’s desired narrative by visiting only the memorial to the Warsaw uprising while ignoring the Ghetto memorial less than a mile away.

“From this government’s point of view, to be Polish is to be ethnically Polish, speak the Polish language, and be Catholic,” Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, program director at Warsaw’s Museum of the History of Polish Jews, said in an interview. “This is how they approach Polish history.”

That view was highlighted by the location of Trump’s major address: Krasinski Square, site of a monument commemorating Warsaw’s 1944 uprising against the Nazis. It is not the typical backdrop for major events that take place in the European city: The bigger square that typically plays host to large crowds in Warsaw is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

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“His visit was carefully orchestrated to be consistent with the right-wing government in Poland,” added Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. “From their point of view, all that mattered is the monument to the Warsaw Uprising, a story of Polish heroism and martyrdom.”

Trump appeared to play into that focus in his speech. “Amid that hell on earth, the citizens of Poland rose up to defend their homeland,” Trump told the cheering and chanting crowd that filled the small square. “I am deeply honored to be joined on stage today by veterans and heroes of the Warsaw Uprising.”

He added: “This monument reminds us that more than 150,000 Poles died during that desperate struggle to overthrow oppression.”

In his speech, Trump also mentioned the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and “the deaths of nearly one in five Polish people. A vibrant Jewish population — the largest in Europe — was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation.”

Ahead of Trump’s arrival, leaders of Poland’s Jewish community, including the chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, publicly rebuked the visiting world leader for what they called an international “slight.”

“We deeply regret that President Donald Trump, though speaking in public barely a mile away from the monument, chose to break with that laudable tradition, alongside so many other ones,” the Polish Jewish leaders wrote in a public letter. “We trust that this slight does not reflect the attitudes and feelings of the American people.”

But at home, Republican Jews who have been pleased with Trump’s policies when it comes to Israel defended him, chalking up the oversight to the tight scheduling that goes into any presidential foreign travel.

“I’m not troubled at all,” said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, which counts Trump megadonor Sheldon Adelson as a board member. “It’s hard to do everything. The president gave a very explicit reference in his speech to the suffering of the Jewish people.”

Brooks added that it was significant that Trump visited Israel on his first trip abroad as president, and delivered a speech about the lessons of the Holocaust after visiting Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Political insiders close to the Trump administration said they did not expect the incident to have any aftershocks for the president at home, in part because most American Jews are not Trump supporters to begin with.

In last year’s election, Trump lost 70 percent of the Jewish vote to Hillary Clinton, according to a poll conducted by the liberal American Jewish lobbying group J Street. That was compared with just 25 percent who voted for a Republican nominee who during the campaign tweeted a Star of David image next to a pile of cash to bash his opponent.

White House officials highlighted Ivanka Trump’s visit to the Ghetto Uprising Memorial and the museum, where the high-profile first daughter, who is a practicing Modern Orthodox Jew, laid a wreath and participated in a 30-minute tour.

“She was interested in contemporary Jewish life [in Poland], and the rabbi was with us, we had a conversation about that,” said Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who helped lead the tour. “She was gracious and sincere.”

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said Ivanka Trump made the rare move of asking to see both sides of the memorial — not just the side that commemorates the 750 Jewish resistance fighters who held out for a month against the German army in 1943, but the less visited side of the monument memorializing the 300,000 Jews shipped to the Treblinka death camp in the summer of 1942. “I would like to see the other side,” Ivanka Trump told her on the tour.

That was some solace for the people invested in keeping alive the memory and history of the Polish Jews wiped out during the Holocaust. “I have to deal with what we got, not what we didn’t get,” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett said of Ivanka Trump’s visit and the president’s absence. “Is the glass half-empty, or half-full? We know it’s only half a glass.”



CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to clarify Prof. Alan Dershowitz's position on Trump.