For Israel, the participation of so many world leaders is a point of pride: Only the funerals of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Shimon Peres attracted more, officials say. But the turnout also points to the seriousness with which anti-Semitism is viewed in the West and in Israel, and offered representatives of countries considered hotbeds of anti-Jewish hatred a chance at least to demonstrate their revulsion for it on a global stage.

Dampening that sense of international single-mindedness, however, was a noisy row between Russia and Poland over their roles in the start of World War II, now playing out on Israeli turf.

Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, was invited to the Jerusalem gathering but declined to attend over a perceived snub: He was not given a speaking slot, though Mr. Putin was.

The two have been engaged in a bitter dispute for months, with each accusing the other of trying to rewrite — and weaponize — history: Mr. Putin has sought to portray the Soviet Union as having saved the world from Nazism, and to ignore its own 1939 nonaggression pact with Germany, framing Poland as more a perpetrator than a victim of the Holocaust. Mr. Duda argues that the Soviet agreement with Germany paved the way to war, and that Mr. Putin is reviving Stalinist propaganda as a modern-day cudgel.

“I am sorry to say this, but President Putin is knowingly spreading historical lies,” Mr. Duda said in an interview with Israeli public television that aired Tuesday. Lithuania’s president, Gitanas Nauseda, who has made similar accusations against Mr. Putin, pulled out of the Jerusalem event on Tuesday.

Fueling speculation that the gathering in Israel was being given a pro-Russian tilt was that its main organizer was Viatcheslav Moshe Kantor, a Russian-Jewish billionaire with close ties to Mr. Putin who leads the World Holocaust Forum Foundation. But Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, said in an interview that Mr. Kantor had not exerted any such influence.