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Hundreds of academics and institutions, including Yad Vashem, condemn Polish government’s attack on Holocaust historian
(JTA) — A Polish political feud over Holocaust history has widened into an international condemnation of the government’s attempts to silence a leading scholar on Polish-Jewish relations during World War II.
More than 300 academics and institutions around the world — including Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust history authority and memorial — issued a statement condemned the Polish government-led attacks against Polish historian Barbara Engelking, director of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, for publicly stating that Poles “failed” during the Holocaust and Jews were “unbelievably disappointed with Poles during the war.
One letter in support of Engelking released Thursday and signed by 11 Israeli organizations, such as Yad Vashem, the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum and Massuah Institute for the Study of the Holocaust, decried her critics’ attack on “academic freedom and historical facts.”
The dispute reflects the governing Law and Justice party’s ongoing push for a patriotic narrative of the past that scholars such as Engelking say erases Polish crimes against Jews during the war. The party’s campaign on this front led to a years-long series of diplomatic spats with Israel.
The latest fracas began on April 19, the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Engelking made an appearance on the country’s largest private television station, TVN.
“Poles had the potential to become allies of the Jews and one would hope that they would behave differently, that they would be neutral, kind, that they would not take advantage of the situation to such an extent and that there would not be widespread blackmailing,” she said, adding that Poles today exaggerate how much they helped Jews during the war.
In response, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki lashed out at Engelking in a nearly 900-word tweet, accusing her of expressing an “unwarranted opinion” that distorted reality. He emphasized that the Nazi Germany’s destruction of the Polish state is what enabled the murder of 1.1 million Polish Jews during the Holocaust, and he suggested that those who did not sufficiently acknowledge Polish efforts to aid Jews during the war “commit a crime on human valor, heroism, on good,”
In addition, the government’s broadcasting regulator announced it would conduct legal proceedings against TVN, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, over the Engelking interview because “if the guest on a program is lying, the journalist must tell viewers that it is a lie.”
Poland’s education minister, Przemysław Czarnek, threatened to defund Engkelking’s research institute, which is part of the Polish Academy of Sciences, claiming he did not wish to support her insult to the Polish nation. Joining the chorus of critics was a member of the European Parliament from Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, Dominik Tarczyński, who said he would file for a request for Engelking to be criminally prosecuted for insulting the Polish nation with her remarks. Tarczyński made headlines in 2019 when he told CNN that antisemitism does not exist in Poland.
This is not the first time Engelking has come under attack by the right-wing Law and Justice-led government for expressing her views on Polish attitudes during the Holocaust. In 2018 she co-edited a book, “Night Without End: The Fate of Jews in German-Occupied Poland,” about Polish betrayals of Jews during the war which was widely condemned by Polish officials as diminishing Polish suffering under the Nazi occupation.
It is estimated that the Nazis murdered up to between 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles about 3 million Jewish citizens of Poland.
There are more than 7,000 Poles recognized by Yad Vashem for aiding Jews during the Holocaust, about a quarter of all those the memorial has recognized as Righteous Among the Nations. In German-occupied Poland, those who aided Jews, as well as their families, were killed by the Nazis.
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The post Hundreds of academics and institutions, including Yad Vashem, condemn Polish government’s attack on Holocaust historian appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Says ‘Clock Is Ticking’ for Iran
US President Donald Trump speaks about research into mental health treatments in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, April 18, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
US President Donald Trump on Sunday threatened consequences for Iran if its leaders do not act quickly.
“For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
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Netanyahu Warns Israel Prepared for ‘Any Scenario’ with Iran, Vows to Defeat Drone Threat in Lebanon
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a press conference at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Aug. 10, 2025. Photo: ABIR SULTAN/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Speaking at a special government meeting marking Jerusalem Day at the Knesset Museum, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israeli forces in Lebanon are holding and clearing territory while confronting a growing threat from fiber-optic FPV drones. He said he convened a special team with the defense minister and civilian and military experts, telling them they have “no budget limit” to find a solution. “Whatever it costs, it costs,” Netanyahu said, adding that he has “no doubt that Israel will be the first country to deliver a complete solution to this problem.”
Netanyahu also said he would speak with President Donald Trump to hear his impressions from his trip to China and discuss Iran and various regional scenarios. “There are certainly many possibilities; we are prepared for any scenario,” he said, adding that Israeli authorities remain vigilant regarding Iran.
Over the weekend, Israel eliminated Izz ad-Din al-Haddad, whom Netanyahu described as “number one in Hamas’s military wing” and a “master murderer,” responsible for the killing, injury, and kidnapping of thousands of Israeli civilians and IDF soldiers.
Netanyahu said Israel now controls 60 percent of the Gaza Strip and reiterated that the operation’s objective is to ensure Gaza will “never again pose a threat to Israel.” He added that Israel has fulfilled its promise to return all hostages, including “the hero of Israel, the late Ran Gvili.”
“Every single architect of the massacre and the hostage-taking will be eliminated down to the last one, and we are very close to completing this mission,” he said.
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Pacific Palisades Jews, displaced by fire, reopen their synagogue as part of returning home
(JTA) — Sixteen months after the fires that devastated the Pacific Palisades and uprooted hundreds of Jewish families, congregants of Kehillat Israel are returning to their synagogue.
On Friday, hundreds of congregants are carrying their Torah scrolls back into the building that became a symbol of the Los Angeles neighborhood that was devastated by fire in January 2025.
While the synagogue suffered significant smoke damage from the fires, the building, constructed in 1950, remained standing, providing desperately needed continuity for the roughly 250 congregants who lost their homes and 250 others who were temporarily displaced.
All three of the synagogue’s clergy members, including Rabbi Daniel Sher, lost their homes in the fires, a tragedy that Sher said imbued Friday’s reopening ceremony with mixed emotions.
“It’s a mixed blessing. I’m going to move back into my place of work before I break ground on my home,” Sher told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But Judaism knows how to survive hardship, and so our job is to take this tradition and take 1000s of years of understanding that and put it into action.”
The reopening of the synagogue after months of repairs and renovations will also carry added weight as it coincides with a celebration honoring Cantor Chayim Frenkel and his wife, Marsi, for 40 years of service to the congregation.
“I feel very honored and proud,” Frenkel told JTA. “They’re dedicating the new ark to me and my wife, so that’ll be something in perpetuity that I’m honored to — if I’m blessed with grandchildren — to have them go in there and say, my daddy and my grandfather participated in working with others to create a very meaningful and a very loving and a very heimish shul filled with Yiddishkeit, a Zionistic, just a beautiful community.”
In the months after the fires, Kehillat Israel became what Frenkel jokingly called a “wandering” congregation, holding services in the Santa Monica mall while its religious school borrowed space from a Los Angeles public school. Clergy also held b’nai mitzvah services in neighboring synagogues, homes, hotels and even a restaurant.
“I can’t help but feel like it was this strangely entrepreneurial, energetic space in which this initial point of grief and loss very quickly manifested into a communal excitement and connection and has changed the way we will forever operate as a community, even once we’re back in our own sacred space,” Sher said.
Frenkel said that many of his congregants had told him that the “one of the main reasons they’re coming back to the Palisades to rebuild is because the synagogue did not burn.”
“That was a huge component for them to go through the rebuilding process, because they knew they had their synagogue,” Frenkel said.
As some congregants prepare to move back to the area, Sher said he had received hundreds of donated mezuzahs that clergy plan to distribute to families returning to rebuilt homes, helping them rededicate their spaces after months of displacement.
“For the families, the home is a mikdash me’at, it’s a small sanctuary, and I always tell our kids that there is an invisible bridge that leads from the synagogue directly to their home,” Frenkel said. “And now that their homes have burned or are being rebuilt, those bridges are being rebuilt, and that mezuzah is helping create that.”
But even as some of the congregation remains displaced around Los Angeles, Sher said the reopening ceremony was about much more than restoring a building. Instead, he said, it serves as a declaration that the community was “still here,” and that they had “never actually left.”
“For us as people who work there, but for congregants who have put a piece of their emotional connection into that building, they get something to still remain as home,” Sher said. “So our reopening isn’t just that statement, it’s saying, if you want home to be there still, it is.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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