In response to a recent joint statement by the leaders of Israel and Poland announcing that Poland's controversial Holocaust law – which prohibits accusing the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes committed during World War II – was amended to remove criminal sanctions, the Education Ministry has announced that school trips to Poland will now include curricula devoted to Poland's role in the Holocaust.
The decision to update the curriculum of Israeli students' visits to Poland comes directly from Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who announced that the school system would not teach students about the joint statement from the Israeli and Polish governments regarding the amended law, which many in Israel oppose on the grounds that it distorts history.
A training program designed to prepare group leaders for the difficult trip to Auschwitz, which Israeli high schools offer every year, will now be overhauled to include material on the Polish population's treatment of Jews prior to, during, and after the war.
The students will also learn about the Poles' extensive collaboration with the Nazis – locals who informed the Nazis about Jews in hiding, locals who handed Jews over to the Nazis, and Polish citizens who murdered Jews themselves. The new material will also cover the heroic acts of Polish Righteous Among the Nations – gentiles who risked their own lives to save Jews.
The new study materials will complement the existing content of Israel's traditional school trips to Poland, which already includes visits to sites that are supposed to inspire debate - the cemetery in Kielce, for example, a small town where Poles carried out a pogrom against Jews when the war was over.
Dozens of Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust and wanted to go back to their homes in Kielce were killed by their former neighbors over a blood libel that Jews used the blood of Christian children in religious rites.
"In light of Poland's attempt to whitewash the Poles' acts against Jews during the Holocaust, we will add to our instruction of the subject," Bennett said. "Many Poles helped the Nazis and murdered Jews during the Holocaust – it's an incontrovertible fact."
"This truth will be presented to Israeli students exactly as it happened so they can learn in depth what took place in Poland," he said.
