Acting Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz's claim that Poles "suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers' milk," which created a diplomatic spat between Israel and Poland, has also angered the Polish Jewish community.
Jewish leaders in Poland said on Monday that they were offended by Katz's comment, which he made during the weekly i24NEWS-Israel Hayom election program on Sunday. Katz was quoting a famous statement by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir when discussing a controversial Polish law that makes it a civil offense to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust.
The leaders issued a statement Monday saying that accusing all Poles of anti-Semitism slighted thousands of Poles honored by Israel's Holocaust memorial center, Yad Vashem, for helping Jews during the Holocaust.
Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, and Union of Jewish Religious Communities head Monika Krawczyk said Shamir and Katz's comments "were unjust already when they were first said, in 1989."
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki branded the remarks "racist and unacceptable" and said he would not send his foreign minister to the Visegrád Group summit that was scheduled to take place in Israel this week.
Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosted his Czech, Slovakian and Hungarian counterparts Tuesday in a series of sit-downs that replaced the high-profile summit in Jerusalem.
The first gathering outside Europe of the Visegrád Group was supposed to be a crowning achievement for Netanyahu in his outreach to central and eastern Europe to counter the traditional criticism Israel faces in international forums. But it dramatically unraveled over a bitter exchange between Poland and Israel over how to characterize Polish behavior toward its Jewish community during and after World War II.
In place of the summit, Netanyahu held back-to-back meetings with Slovakian Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán before hosting all three for lunch at his official residence.
In the wake of Poland's decision, the prime ministers of the other three countries will hold bilateral meetings with Netanyahu in Jerusalem but no official summit will be held.
Meanwhile, the American Jewish Committee expressed hope on Monday that years of reconciliation work between Poland and Israel would not be undone by a new dispute over the Holocaust.
American Jewish Committee CEO David Harris said Monday that "competing historical narratives" had strained the two countries' relations before.
Harris says such disputes usually result from "varying assessments of the magnitude of anti-Semitism in Poland, especially before and during World War II."
The latest tension with Poland comes just days after Netanyahu caused a stir while visiting Warsaw. During that visit he was quoted as saying that "the Poles" collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust, leading to outrage among local officials. Netanyahu later issued a clarification saying that he was misquoted and that he actually said "Poles."
