The lawsuit states: "During the waiting time at the airport between 6:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., the plaintiffs were not given drink vouchers and sandwiches, and they had to purchase them with their own money. Worse still, this was an official Ministry of Education delegation, when it's known that among the plaintiffs are kosher observant students who practically couldn't eat anything during the wait, since kosher food couldn't be purchased at the Warsaw airport."

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A devastating fire broke out on Sunday morning at the Marywilska 44 shopping complex in Warsaw's Bialoleka district, housing 1,400 shops and service outlets. The fire brigade reported that more than 80% of the vast complex was ablaze, prompting the deployment of 50 teams, including chemical and environmental rescue specialists, to carry out rescue operations.

Polish authorities reported a fire at the Marywilska 44 shopping center in Warsaw as of the morning of May 12. A warning has been issued for nearby residents to stay home and close their windows. pic.twitter.com/fC1h2Yehp5

— Farnak (@Farnakyboy) May 12, 2024

Magdalena, a resident of Warsaw, told Israel Hayom, "The smell of smoke from the fire could be felt miles away." Footage aired by the private broadcaster TVN24 showed thick black smoke billowing over the area, as the flames engulfed the shopping center. According to a police spokesperson quoted by the PAP news agency, no injuries were reported. Authorities also issued a text message warning to Warsaw residents, advising them to stay indoors with windows closed due to the fire.

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Foreign Ministry officials on Sunday criticized Foreign Minister Yair Lapid's move to recall Israel's top diplomat from Poland and downgrade diplomatic relations with the European ally as misguided and detrimental, saying it would entail heavy and unnecessary diplomatic costs.

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Israel and Poland are mired in a diplomatic row over approval of a law that restricts the rights of Holocaust survivors or their descendants to reclaim property seized by the country's former communist regime.

The Foreign Ministry also said it was recommending that the Polish ambassador, who is on vacation at home, not return to Israel.

"Poland today approved – not for the first time – an immoral, antisemitic law," said Lapid, whose late father was a Holocaust survivor.

As for Poland's ambassador to Israel, "He should use the time he has on his hands to explain to the Poles what the Holocaust means to Israel's citizens and the extent to which we will not tolerate contempt for the memory of those who perished and for the memory of the Holocaust. It will not stop here," Lapid said.

Polish President Andrzej Duda earlier on Sunday signed the law, which, as stated, addresses appropriations done by the communist government that ruled Poland from the end of World War II until 1989.

The law itself says nothing about the Holocaust or World War II. Instead it establishes that any administrative decision issued 30 years ago or more can no longer be challenged, meaning that property owners who had their homes or business seized in the communist era can no longer get compensation.

It is expected to cut off for all time the hopes of some families – both Jewish and non-Jewish – of reclaiming property seized during that era.

Poland is one of the five strongest countries in the European Union, and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki threatened that "If the Israeli government continues to attack Poland in this way, it will also have a very negative impact on our relations – both bilaterally and in international fora."

He added: "Israel's decision to lower the rank of the diplomatic representation in Warsaw is groundless and irresponsible, and the words of Yair Lapid… raise the outrage of every honest person," he said in a Facebook post.

"No one who knows the truth about the Holocaust and the suffering of Poland during World War II can agree to such a way of conducting politics," Morawiecki argued. "Using this tragedy for the needs of partisan interests is shameful and irresponsible."

The belief is that Morawiecki could pursue anti-Israel resolutions in the EU and other international bodies in response to Lapid's combative line.

The Polish foreign ministry said in a statement that it disapproves of the Israeli Foreign Ministry's behavior, adding that the government "will take appropriate political and diplomatic actions, bearing in mind the principle of symmetry in bilateral relations."

"The steps taken by Israel are seriously damaging our relationship," the Polish ministry also said.

The view held by some Israeli diplomats is that a more measured approach toward Warsaw would be have been more appropriate and that such an extreme deterioration of relations should have been avoided. The Polish law, while they agree is problematic, simply perpetuates the situation that exists in all European countries except for Germany.  "The Poles did publicly what other countries are doing quietly," said one Israeli diplomat involved in the matter.

Lapid slammed Morawiecki's threats as "antisemitic."

"The negative impact on our ties began the moment that Poland chose to begin passing laws aimed at harming the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish people in 2018," said Lapid in a statement on Sunday evening. "Gone are the days when Poles harmed Jews without consequence. Today, Jews have a proud and strong country of their own. We do not fear antisemitic threats, and have no intention of turning a blind eye to the shameful conduct of the anti-democratic Polish government."

Duda said Saturday that he had analyzed the matter carefully and decided to sign the law to end legal uncertainty and fraud linked to properties whose ownership remains in doubt decades after their seizure.

The law does not distinguish between Jewish and non-Jewish claimants, and Duda said he strongly objected to anyone suggesting that the law was directed specifically against Jews who survived the Holocaust.

"I unequivocally reject this rhetoric and say it with all my strength," Duda said. "Linking this act with the Holocaust raises my firm objection."

Before World War II, Poland was home to Europe's largest Jewish community of nearly 3.5 million people. Most were murdered in the Holocaust and their properties confiscated by the Nazis.

Some of the small numbers of Polish Jews who survived faced violence and persecution at Polish hands after the war, driving many to immigrate to countries including the United States and Israel.

Poland's post-war communist authorities seized many of those properties, along with the property of many non-Jewish owners in Warsaw and other cities.

When communism fell in 1989, it opened up the possibility for claimants to try to regain family properties. Some cases have been resolved in courts, but Poland has never passed a comprehensive law that would regulate restituting or compensating seized properties.

Complicating the matter, some criminal groups in past years have falsely claimed to represent rightful owners, obtaining valuable properties through fraud, and later evicting tenants from the properties.

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"I am convinced that with my signature the era of legal chaos ends – the era of re-privatization mafias, the uncertainty of millions of Poles and the lack of respect for the basic rights of citizens of our country. I believe in a state that protects its citizens against injustice," Duda said.

The legislation was widely supported across the political spectrum in Poland.

The last major diplomatic crisis between Israel and Poland erupted in 2018 when Warsaw introduced a law that many in Israel viewed as an attempt to suppress discussion of crimes that Poles committed against Jews during the German occupation of World War II. The law was eventually watered down and has not been applied.

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Two Polish historians are facing a libel trial for a scholarly examination of Polish behavior during World War II, a case whose outcome is expected to determine the fate of independent Holocaust research under Poland's nationalist government.

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A verdict is expected in Warsaw's district court on Feb. 9 in the case against Barbara Engelking, a historian with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research in Warsaw, and Jan Grabowski, a professor of history at the University of Ottawa.

It is the first closely watched Holocaust speech case since Poland sought to pass a law in 2018 that would have criminalized the act of blaming Poland for Germany's Holocaust crimes. Those criminal penalties were dropped in favor of civil penalties after the legislation sparked a major diplomatic dispute with Israel.

The current case is instead a civil libel case tried under a pre-existing law, yet many scholars believe it will set an important precedent for freedom of Holocaust research.

Since it won power in 2015, Poland's conservative ruling party, Law and Justice, has sought to discourage investigations into Polish wrongdoing during the wartime German occupation, preferring instead to almost exclusively stress Polish heroism and suffering. The aim is to promote national pride, but critics say the government has been whitewashing the fact that some Poles also collaborated in the murder of Jews.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum said the legal effort "constitutes a serious attack on free and open research."

A number of other historical institutions have condemned the case as the verdict nears, with the Paris-based Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah describing it Tuesday as a "witch hunt" and a "pernicious invasion into the very heart of research."

The case centers on a 1,600-page, two-volume historical work in Polish, "Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in Selected Counties of Occupied Poland," which was co-edited by Grabowski and Engelking. An abridged English version is due to be published in a few months.

Grabowski and Engelking say they see the case as an attempt to discredit them personally and to discourage other researchers from investigating the truth about the extermination of Jews in Poland.

"This is a case of the Polish state against freedom of research," Grabowski told The Associated Press on Monday.

Grabowski, a Polish-Canadian whose father was a Polish Holocaust survivor, has faced considerable anti-Semitic harassment by nationalists, both online and at lectures in Canada, France and elsewhere.

Polish officials, including the country's ambassador to Israel, Marek Magierowski, argue that it is only a civil case and that it represents no threat to freedom of speech. Magierowski, in a letter to the representative of Holocaust survivors in Israel, expressed his concern about the anti-Semitic slurs that have erupted in connection to the case.

The niece of a man in the village of Malinowo, whose wartime behavior is briefly mentioned, is suing Grabowski and Engelking, demanding 100,000 zlotys ($27,000) in damages and an apology in newspapers.

According to evidence presented in the book, Edward Malinowski, an elder in the village, allowed a Jewish woman to survive by helping her pass as a non-Jew. But the survivor's testimony is also quoted as saying that he was an accomplice in the deaths of several dozen Jews. Malinowski was acquitted of collaborating with the Germans in a postwar trial.

The niece, Filomena Leszczynska, 81, has been backed by the Polish League Against Defamation, a group which is close to the Polish government and has received grants in the past.

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That organization argued that the two scholars are guilty of "defiling the good name" of a Polish hero, whom they claim had no role in harming Jews, and by extension harming the dignity and pride of all Poles.

Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called "Night Without End" a "meticulously researched and sourced book ... that details thousands of cases of complicity by Poles in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust."

"The proceedings against these two scholars of international repute are nothing more than an attempt to use the legal system to muzzle and intimidate scholarship on the Holocaust in Poland," Weitzman said.

Germany occupied Poland in 1939, annexing part of it to Germany and directly governing the rest, killing millions. Unlike other countries occupied by Germany, there was no collaborationist government in Poland. The pre-war Polish government and military fled into exile, except for an underground resistance army that fought the Nazis inside the country.

Yet some people in Poland collaborated with the Germans in hunting down and killing Jews, in many cases people who had fled ghettos and sought to hide in the countryside.

Grabowski said "Night Without End" is "multi-faceted, and it talks about Polish virtue just as much. It paints a truthful picture."

"The Holocaust is not here to help the Polish ego and morale, it's a drama involving the death of 6 million people, which seems to be forgotten by the nationalists," he said.

A deputy foreign minister, Pawel Jablonski, described the case as a private matter.

"It is everyone's legal right to seek such a remedy before [a] court if they feel that their rights have been infringed by [another] person or entity," Jablonski told the AP in an statement Monday. "The government is not involved in the proceedings, it is a private matter to be decided by the court."

Yet those who fear that the case could stifle independent research take a different view.

"The involvement in this trial of an organization heavily subsidized with public funds can be easily construed as a form of censorship and an attempt to frighten scholars away from publishing the results of their research out of fear of a lawsuit and the ensuing costly litigation," said Zygmunt Stepinski, director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Maciej Swirski, the head of the organization, said no public money was used to fund the legal case.

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This special livestreamed concert, which will be presented by a network of more than 100 organizations across the United States and world, commemorates the 75^th anniversary of the end of World War II and the 77th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

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More than 100 supporting museums and partner institutions – from 26 states and countries, including Belarus, Canada, France, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland and South Africa – will air the 90-minute event, which begins at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (9 p.m. in Israel).

The concert can be watched here, with no need to register ahead of time: wearehere.live

Actors, musicians and civic leaders to be featured include actress and talk-show host Whoopi Goldberg; star soprano Renée Fleming; musician Billy Joel; pianist Lang Lang; sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer; actress Lauren Ambrose; Broadway star Lea Salonga; opera star Joyce DiDonato; actress Mayim Bialik; soprano and curator Julia Bullock; conductor and pianist Christian Reif; Broadway actor Steven Skybell; mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard; baritone Lester Lynch; and more.

"We are all inspired by the example set in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Partisan Song, which begins and ends this program, speaks to the fight for social justice and fundamental human rights," said Bruce Ratner, chairman of the board at the Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

"Both the recent COVID-19 pandemic and the centuries-old pandemics of racism and anti-Semitism highlight the need for resistance and resilience," said Sing for Hope co-founder Camille Zamora.

"In this time of rising anti-Semitism and global crisis, the themes of resistance, resilience and hope are more important than ever, and 'The Partisan Song' takes on even more resonance," said National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene artistic director Zalmen Mlotek and executive director Dominick Balletta.

"The song begins with the words 'Never say this is the final road for you,' and ends with the words 'We Are Here.' It is the song that binds together those who fight for justice."

The program will also feature an interview by The Forward editor in chief Jodi Rudoren with Nancy Spielberg, Roberta Grossman and Sam Kassow about their film, "Who Will Write Our History," which chronicles the story of Oneg Shabbat, the group that daringly preserved the history of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Forward is the event's media sponsor.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which 13,000 Jews died fighting Nazi oppression in April and May 1943, was the largest single act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org. 

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The entry for the camp, also known as "Konzentrationslager Warschau," said that the gas chamber there killed "well above 212,000, mainly Poles and several thousand of non-Polish."

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There is no historical evidence of German gas chambers ever existing in Warsaw, making the entry arguably the longest-running hoax ever uncovered on the online encyclopedia. Even the Wikipedia entry for extermination camps had KL Warschau listed alongside Auschwitz for over 12 years.

The page was written in August 2004 by late Wikipedia editor Krzysztof Machocki, a spokesperson for the Polish branch of Wikimedia, and was completely rewritten this August. The hoax was discovered by an Israeli editor with the username Icewhiz who rewrote the article to reflect the truth.

The false facts pertaining to the death-camp hoax included real facts associated with concentration camps.

Haaretz said that Icewhiz's claims reveal the existence of what seems to be "a systematic effort by Polish nationalists to whitewash hundreds of Wikipedia articles relating to Poland and the Holocaust."

According to Professor Havi Dreifuss, head of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum, "This baseless story … is sadly gaining traction today as part of a wider attempt in Poland to distort the history of the Holocaust. By pulling another 200,000 victims out of thin air, they're trying to equate what happened to the Jews during the Holocaust to what happened to Poles during the Holocaust."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Earlier this year, the World Jewish Congress condemned the burning of an effigy of Judas in the Polish town of Pruchnik and hundreds of far-right supporters marching in Warsaw against a US law on restitution of Jewish property seized during or after World War Two.

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Poland was home to one of the world's biggest Jewish communities before it was almost wiped out by Nazi German occupiers who set up death camps such as Auschwitz on Polish soil.

"[The Polish Foreign Ministry] condemns acts of aggression carried out by or against foreigners in Poland. The matter of the beating of [Israeli] citizens by foreigners on Polish territory is being clarified by the police," the ministry said in a tweet published on Sunday.

The Israeli students were attacked around 5 a.m. on Saturday a spokesman for the Warsaw police told Reuters, adding that two of those attacked were hospitalized while four in total were injured.

"We noticed some pushing and shoving, and from the window we heard cursing," Yotam Kashpizky, one of the students who was attacked, told Israel's Channel 13 TV on Sunday, adding that his nose and eye socket were broken.

Kashpizky's twin brother, Barak, condemned the attack in a Facebook post on Sunday, adding that the attack was carried out by a "group of Arabs."

The police spokesman did not confirm the nationality of the attackers.

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Those still living today, 80 years after the start of World War II, were children or young adults during the war and in most cases helped their parents in the dangerous job of hiding and feeding Jews. During the German occupation, those caught aiding Jews were punished with the execution of entire families.

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Today, the rescuers are in their 80s and 90s, and they arrived at the event in Warsaw helped by their children, with some in wheelchairs.

"On behalf of the Jewish people, I thank you for your noble deeds so many years ago, for when most turned their backs on their Jewish neighbors, you did not," Stanlee Stahl, the foundation's executive vice president, told those gathered. "You will always be remembered in our prayers, for you didn't just save the Jewish person 75 years ago, you made it possible for generations to be born."

Giving one example, she singled out two brothers in attendance, Andrzej and Leszek Mikolajkow, who with their parents saved a Jewish mother, father and two sons. One of those sons ended up moving to Israel and having 12 sons of his own, and the family today numbers 300.

"You made it possible for hundreds if not thousands of people to be alive today," Stahl said. "You have helped repair the world."

All of the rescuers have been recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial.

According to Yad Vashem's website, 27,362 people have been recognized to date as "Righteous Among the Nations," even though there are certainly many more who helped Jews who haven't been recognized because they were killed or there were no survivors to alert Yad Vashem to their actions. The country with the largest number of acknowledged rescuers, with far over 6,000, is Poland, which was home to Europe's largest Jewish community before World War II.

The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous pays monthly stipends to elderly rescuers in Eastern Europe, many of whom live on pensions of only a few hundred dollars a month in Poland and far less in Ukraine and elsewhere. Last Christmas each rescuer got an additional $1,500, a gesture that goes far beyond just symbolic help, and the group has also helped them with medicines and hearing aids.

Warsaw is the only place in Europe where there are enough of them in one place to bring together. On Sunday, there were about 30 in attendance.

Anna Bando, who heads an organization of the Polish rescuers, thanked the Jewish group for remembering them so many years later, at a time when she says "we are leaving this world" and so many people no longer remember the war. Another rescuer wept at the beginning of the ceremony from the sorrow she felt of so many people of her generation being gone, including the Jewish family she helped save and remained close to for many years. The last member of that group passed away not long ago at age 101.

Due to sanctions on Russian-annexed Crimea, the organization can no longer send money, however, to a small group of rescuers there, a situation that Stahl described as distressing in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Before the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, the group was helping five people there.

At one point, she received a letter from a Jewish woman in Israel who was rescued by a woman in Crimea, begging her to send money. But with US sanctions in place, it is illegal to do so.

During the Warsaw event, Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, asked God to bless them, and described them as a "model for the kind of people that God wants us to be."

Israeli Ambassador-designate, Alexandre Ben-Zvi, paid his respects, while the US deputy chief of mission, Bix Aliu, who is of Albanian heritage, paid tribute to their extraordinary courage. In personal remarks, Aliu described meeting an elderly rescuer in Albania, a Muslim majority country that was the only country in Europe where the number of Jews was larger at the end of the war than before due to a nationwide effort to save Jews.

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According to the post, the two Israelis were part of a delegation of young Israelis who were out at one of the city's nightclubs. Kashpizky said his twin brother, Yotam, suffered broken bones to his face.

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Kashpizky wrote, "Around 4 a.m. the members of the delegation left the club. Most had already gotten into a taxi to go back to the hotel, and then a group of Arabic speakers approached them and asked if they were Israelis. When they said they were, they were attacked, and [the assailants] shouted 'F*ck Israel.' Yotam stopped his taxi and got out and headed toward his friends to break it up and calm things down.

"An Arab guy, who was apparently wearing brass knuckles, punched him, and Yotam was knocked out. Then another friend got out of a different taxi and tried to help, and he was thrown up against a parked car. When the girls started screaming, the bunch of Arabs got out of there."

"Luckily, the incident ended with fractures to [Yotam's] nose and outer eye. Yotam came back to Israel to have his injuries treated. The Israeli Embassy in Poland and the Foreign Ministry sent us to handle things with the Polish police. Not a single representative of Israel arrived to help."

The Foreign Ministry said in response to the allegations that "the attack has been brought to the attention of the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem and the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw."

"The consul inquired about the injured, offered any help necessary, and recommended that they file a complaint with the local police. The ministry is looking into the incident and will decide on what steps should be taken with local authorities," the ministry said.

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Light was projected Thursday night onto the modern glass building situated where the synagogue used to stand. For two hours, a grand building fronted by classical Greek-style columns was returned virtually to a city where most traces of a large pre-war Jewish community have vanished. Archival recordings of the synagogue's cantor, Gerszon Sirota, revived the sounds of Jewish Warsaw. Sirota died in the ghetto.

The light-and-sound show was the work of Polish multimedia artist Gabi von Seltmann, who wants Polish society to remember the large Jewish community that was once an integral part of a multicultural country. It was organized by Open Republic, a group that fights anti-Semitism.

"Awaking memory in Poland to me also means to teach empathy, because when there is empathy there is no fear anymore," von Seltmann said.

The synagogue "re-creation" happened for the second year as part of commemorations for the anniversary of the uprising, which is Friday, with many other observances taking place throughout the day. This year it took place the night before so as not to interfere with Shabbat and the Passover holiday, which begins Friday evening.

Von Seltmann's grandfather was a Polish school director killed at Auschwitz along with many other members of the Polish intelligentsia. Her husband, whose last name she has taken, is the grandson of one of the SS officers who inflicted atrocities on occupied Poland. The couple have written and spoken publicly about their own love story, framing it as a story of generational reconciliation.

"If we don't work on memory, we will put it on the shoulders of the next generations. They will have problems. Their children will have problems," von Seltmann said.

The Great Synagogue was opened in 1878 as a place of worship for followers of Reform Judaism, with Polish — not Hebrew — the language of services. The use of choral and organ music marked another break from Orthodox tradition. It was the largest synagogue in a city where a third of the population was Jewish.

The Warsaw Ghetto uprising broke out April 19, 1943, when about 750 young Jewish fighters armed with just pistols and fuel bottles attacked a much larger and heavily armed German force that was "liquidating" the ghetto, meaning deporting its inhabitants to the Treblinka death camp.

In their last testaments, the fighters said they knew they were doomed but wanted to die at a time and place of their own choosing. They held out nearly a month, longer than some German-invaded countries did.

The Germans razed the Warsaw Ghetto and killed most of the fighters, except for a few dozen who managed to escape through sewage canals to the "Aryan" side of the city. They blew up the Great Synagogue in a symbolic victory gesture.

To this day, the Jewish revolt endures as a powerful symbol of resistance central to Israeli national identity.

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