Foreign Minister Yair Lapid announced at a briefing on Wednesday that youth trips to Poland were banned over attempts to manipulate educational content presented to Israeli delegations.
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Lapid said that Poles "can't tell us what to teach Israeli children," according to The Jerusalem Post. The official assured that Israel "will not allow this" to happen.
"The Poles wanted to mess with the content of the trips and what can or can't be said to Israeli children visiting," the minister was quoted as saying. "That endangered the trips this summer," he added.
The decision was made by the Education Ministry earlier on Tuesday as an official letter was sent to high school principals informing them about the cancellation of youth trips to Poland. The ministry explained the ban was imposed due to disputes over securely informing students during the trip.
Lapid in turn referenced Polish laws about the Holocaust that "harmed" the relations between the two countries. In 2018 Poland adopted a law that prohibits discussing Poles' actions against Jews during the Holocaust.
In 2021 the country also passed a Holocaust restitution law that restricted the ability of Jews to recover property seized by Nazi German occupiers and retained by post-war communist rulers. As Israel strongly opposed the law, Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski said that his country would reexamine educational trips by Israeli youth for allegedly spreading hatred of Poland.\
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Later in December 2021 the Polish Foreign Ministry ordered the country's Academy of Sciences to disclose any contacts members have taken with researchers in Israel or at the Israeli embassy in Warsaw. The directive also applied to researchers at other government agencies.
However, Lapid noted that despite those tensions, the relations between the two countries have recently improved due to the Polish cooperation on the Ukrainian border that allowed Israeli citizens to evacuate after the Russian invasion.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
