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Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism
(JTA) – For days, students and police at Cleveland State University had been trying to figure out who stole a banner belonging to a campus Palestinian rights group.
The banner, which belonged to the student group Palestinian Human Rights Organization, read “CSU Solidarity for Palestinian Rights” and was illustrated with an outline of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip collectively emblazoned in the Palestinian flag. A dove holding an olive branch appeared on top of the image.
Then, on Jan. 19, police charged their top suspect: a local Orthodox rabbi, whose presence on campus had become all too familiar. A few days later the man confessed to the theft on Instagram, announcing that he had stolen the banner from the school’s student center “as an act of civil disobedience.”
“This incitement to annihilation of Israel should have never been permitted at CSU,” Rabbi Alexander Popivker, a 46-year-old Cleveland Heights resident whose neighborhood is six miles from the school, wrote on social media accompanied by a picture of the flag he stole.
It was far from Popivker’s only recent run-in with local university students.
A former Chabad-Lubavitch emissary in Naples, Italy, who now works in the Cleveland area as a handyman and part-time rabbi for a Russian-speaking Jewish community, Popivker has become known around town as a vigilant and omnipresent pro-Israel advocate. He can often be spotted counter-protesting at local pro-Palestinian demonstrations, or putting on displays of his own, with his wife Sarah on hand filming every contentious encounter.
One major theme of his protests, and his worldview, as he explained to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Palestinians and Nazis are the same thing.”
For the last year, Popivker had been making weekly trips to Cleveland State, occasionally accompanied by other students or community members, to give public demonstrations that elaborate on that idea — sometimes with the aid of swastika-emblazoned props. In the early going, the university provided him with police protection and said his visits to campus were protected by free speech laws.
But he also sought out students online and in-person whom he deemed to be “brainwashed” by anti-Zionist messaging. One such online campaign against a law student prompted the student to file an order of protection against Popivker last fall, an order supported by a prominent Jewish dean at the university. Popivker promptly violated the order by returning to campus.
Cleveland State University main campus, Cleveland, Ohio. (Getty Images)
In late January, university authorities had enough. They arrested Popivker and, following a hearing, declared him persona non grata on campus, banning him from the university grounds for at least two years. Popivker has also been banned from nearby Case Western Reserve University, where he had advocated before focusing on Cleveland State.
In the midst of a nationwide university climate in which pro-Israel advocates claim Jewish students face regular antisemitic harassment for their real or perceived Zionist beliefs, here was a documented case of the opposite: a Jew and outspoken Zionist, who has no affiliation with the schools at which he advocates, accused of harassing anyone he perceived as a threat to Israel, including students who had never sought him out directly.
The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has spoken out numerous times against Popivker and praised university police for arresting him; a petition the group backed, labeled “Stop harassment on campus” and mentioning Popivker by name, has garnered close to 700 signatures.
Jewish groups, including civil rights groups, have been less forthcoming about situation. Hillel International declined to comment for this story, and the directors of Cleveland’s regional American Jewish Committee and Jewish Community Relations Council offices did not return requests for comment. Jewish on Campus, a nationwide university antisemitism watchdog group that tracks what it defines as anti-Zionist social media harassment of Jewish students, also did not return a request for comment.
Jared Isaacson, the executive director of Cleveland Hillel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the center was “not very familiar with this story.” Cleveland Hillel coordinates Jewish student life at a consortium of Jewish universities including Cleveland State and Case Western, where its student center is located, as well as at least one other school where Popivker has made his presence on campus known in some form.
But, Isaacson said, “Cleveland Hillel is deeply committed to countering antisemitism and hate in all forms, and we believe that no student — Jewish or otherwise — should ever feel threatened or intimidated because of their identity.”
Popivker says he has support from the New York-based Lawfare Project, which bills itself as an “international pro-Israel litigation fund.” He told JTA that the organization “is watching over my cases and providing guidance.”
In a statement, the Lawfare Project called Popivker “a Jewish civil rights activist” but did not confirm that it is backing him, saying only that the group is “currently reviewing the matter.”
The group, which frequently files lawsuits on behalf of students who allege antisemitism on their campuses, said in a statement to JTA that the order of protection was a “double standard” that “should be alarming to anyone who cares about the fight against Jew-hatred.”
Lawfar recently settled a multi-year lawsuit with San Francisco State University over student reports of antisemitic harassment on campus stemming from anti-Zionist activists disrupting an event featuring the mayor of Jerusalem. The settlement compelled the university to hire a coordinator of Jewish student life.
Popivker will have his work cut out for him if he fights the charges. He had exhibited “behavior detrimental to the university community” by stealing the Palestinian banner and separately affixing an Israeli flag to university property, Matthew Kibbon, Cleveland State’s associate vice president of facility services, wrote in the university’s decision declaring him persona non grata.
The rabbi “was not banned for the content of his speech, but how he chose to exercise it,” a Cleveland State spokesperson told JTA in a statement. The university also provided JTA a list of recent campus police interactions with him, including the initial Jan. 11 report of the banner’s theft; Popivker’s visit to campus on Jan. 18, during which police advised him that the student’s order of protection did not permit him to be there; and his return visit on Jan. 25, during which he was arrested.
From Popivker’s perspective, he is simply speaking out on Israel’s behalf for a campus that has a large pro-Palestinian activist presence but few Jewish students. (There are fewer than 200 Jewish undergraduates on Cleveland State’s campus out of 11,784 students, according to Hillel International.) His goal is to educate, he says, informed by his status as a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union. And he believes he is being targeted by local pro-Palestinian activists, who, he said, have gone after his kippah and Israeli flags.
“I never attacked anyone. I never raised my hand up to anyone,” he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, saying that he was motivated by civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. “I’m going to a public university. I’m staying in the free speech zone. And I raise awareness about what’s going on. There’s a bunch of students that have become my friends that come to study with me regularly.”
One of those students, senior Tyler Jarosz, told JTA he became friends with Popivker after seeing him visiting campus to advocate for Israel. Not knowing much about Jews or Israel himself — “I thought Israel was a very peaceful state,” Jarosz said — the student was taken with Popivker’s demonstrations and said he learned a great deal from them.
“He didn’t just lecture me like a teacher would,” Jarosz said. “He was actually very engaging. He asked questions.”
Jarosz said he never witnessed the rabbi harassing anyone on campus, and said he always tried to engage people in peaceful dialogue, despite what he described as harassment directed at him by some Muslim students. He recalled one Popivker visit to campus for Israel’s independence day, when the rabbi was offering falafel to students, and said he witnessed one student throw the falafel back at him and threaten to “rape” him.
Other students tell a different story. One campus paper, the Cauldron, reported that the rabbi has targeted visibly Muslim and Arab students on campus, demanding to know their views on Israel. Popivker “makes me wary of coming into campus,” a student member of the Palestinian Human Rights Organization group told the Cauldron. “I’m forced to be on constant edge and take the longer way to class in order to avoid him.” Another student told a different campus newspaper, “It’s almost as though he deliberately looks for Palestinian individuals just to target them.”
The chair of the law school’s National Lawyers Guild student chapter told the Cleveland Jewish News that their group’s efforts to engage Popivker in reasonable dialogue failed when he began using “racial slurs and insulting language.”
A swastika Alexander Popivker drew on a Palestinian scarf (alleged by some students to be a keffiyeh, or ritual Muslim prayer scarf) while mounting a pro-Israel demonstration on the campus of Cleveland State University. Popivker then shared the image to his Instagram, Feb. 3, 2023. (Screenshot)
In images from one Popivker demonstration, the rabbi can be seen drawing a swastika with a Sharpie marker on what the Cauldron reported was a keffiyeh, a scarf worn by Arabic men, but which Popivker told JTA was a Palestinian scarf with no spiritual significance. He has also yelled phrases including “Palestinians are Nazis” and “Palestinians are the KKK,” and constructed a stage with images further linking Palestinians to Naziism, according to reports. Popivker’s own Instagram videos show him approaching groups of students to argue about Israel as he films them, calling some of them “terrorists” when they go after his flags. One of his video captions mentions “a Middle Eastern looking student.”
Cleveland State increased its safety protocols as a result of Popivker’s activities, locking some additional entrances around campus. But much of his activities have been online, too.
Last fall Popivker trained his attention on a law student who was involved with campus Palestinian rights groups and had made some anti-Israel posts online, including sharing an image of a child whom pro-Palestinian groups claimed had been a victim of an Israeli bombing, and sharing a socialist group’s post quoting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
Documents show that Popivker emailed and called the student’s employer and law school seeking to have her disciplined for her beliefs, writing among other things that she was a “mouthpiece of terrorism and racism against Jews.” He also made Instagram posts targeting her. In response, the student filed for and received the order of protection against him, which Popivker later claimed was unwarranted because he had never met the student in person.
In its statement to JTA, the Lawfare Project homed in on this sequence of events, saying that Popivker’s decision to email the student’s school and employer about what he believed to be antisemitic social media posts was “a tool routinely used by civil rights activists to fight discrimination.”
Popivker asked Jarosz to send a letter attesting to his character for the order of protection hearing, which he did. “Alex understands and respects everyone of every background that he comes across,” the student wrote in his letter. “I have personally witnessed the demonization they have done of him.” Speaking to JTA weeks later, Jarosz said the court case was “bogus,” but said he was unaware of the emails, social media records and phone transcripts reviewed by JTA showing that Popivker had contacted the student’s employer and school.
At the order of protection hearing, a transcript of which Popivker sent to JTA, a key witness who advocated for the restriction was law school dean Lee Fisher, a former attorney general and lieutenant governor of Ohio. Fisher is Jewish.
“We share a hatred of antisemitism,” Fisher told Popivker during the hearing, according to the transcript. The dean also identified himself as “pro-Israel, very much so.” But Fisher made clear he was critical of Popivker’s activities on campus. Asked by Popivker about a specific social media post the student had made, Fisher responded, “Even if she made a mistake by posting it, it did not warrant the kind of reaction I believe that you had.”
Fisher had also met with Popivker previously, in a session mediated by a local rabbi who was a friend of Popivker. “I told him that I was concerned for the health and safety of our students,” the dean said during the hearing. He had implored Popivker to stop his campus activities, but the rabbi refused.
It’s the initial order of protection, which Popivker said had already effectively banned him from campus, that the rabbi says he truly opposes. He saw it as evidence that “they were basically working together with Palestinians” to “cover up the fact that they have an antisemitic group that openly propagates a destruction of Israel.” Popivker visited campus several times after receiving the order of protection but was permitted to stay with only a warning from campus police, Jarosz recalled.
This state of affairs lasted until the rabbi stole the Palestinian student group banner to, he said, “shine a light on this antisemitism.” Popivker described to JTA how he entered the student building, walked up to the third floor where he knew the banner was, and used scissors to remove it and take it with him: “Clip, clip, clip.” He was subsequently thrown in jail — his second such stint in Cleveland for pro-Israel activities, he said, criticizing local law enforcement for not providing him with kosher food while he was behind bars.
Outside of campus, Popivker is active in other areas. Last year, he organized a GoFundMe to support the family of a former classmate of his who was killed by an Islamic State supporter in a terrorist attack in Beersheba, Israel. He also applied to fill a January vacancy on the Cleveland Heights city council, but later withdrew his application.
After being barred from Cleveland State University, Rabbi Alex Popivker took to holding his anti-Palestinian protests on a street outside a local casino. (Courtesy Popivker)
While Popivker may preach nonviolence, his social media activity points to more radical ideologies, as well. On Instagram, he has shared an image of the flag of the Jewish Defense League, an extremist Jewish group that advocates violence against enemies of Jews, founded by convicted terrorist Rabbi Meir Kahane, as well as an image with a logo of Im Tirtzu, a right-wing Israeli group that has in the past been accused of inciting violence against Israeli human rights groups. Popivker told JTA he is not a member of either group, but that “if I think it’s aligned with what I believe in, I’ll share it.”
Popivker says that, for now, he’s done with his brand of “civil disobedience” and won’t be making his weekly visits to Cleveland State’s campus. “I do have five wonderful boys and a loving wife, and as much as Cuyahoga [County’s] jail is an educational experience in life in many ways, I do not want to go there every week,” he said.
Instead, days after his arrest and campus ban, Popivker posted a photo of himself with an Israeli flag to social media — this time outside a casino a mile away from campus.
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The post Rabbi arrested, banned from Cleveland universities over his anti-Palestinian activism appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The real Holocaust history behind ‘Papillon,’ the Oscar-nominated short about a star Jewish swimmer
(JTA) — At first glance, “Papillon” (Butterfly), the 15-minute Oscar-nominated animated short by veteran French filmmaker Florence Miailhe, may appear like a meditative journey through water and memory. An elderly man swims in a hand-painted sea, flashing back to childhood memories of being bullied and a loving mother who makes it all right.
As he cuts through the water and moves through time, the fuller context emerges: The sun-soaked beaches appear to be North Africa, the boy becomes a champion swimmer, a swastika tells you that he is competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the soundtrack echoes with taunts of “Jew” and “kike.”
The film is based on the extraordinary real life of Alfred Nakache, a Jewish athlete whose story of resilience under Nazi persecution has previously been told in two French documentaries but is seldom remembered today.
Born in 1915 in French Algiers (his family immigrated from Iraq), Artem “Alfred” Nakache became one of France’s most celebrated swimmers in the 1930s, specializing in the butterfly stroke — a full-bodied lunge that looks like a bird, or butterfly, in flight. His success brought him to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he competed under the shadow of rising antisemitism in Nazi Germany (and was part of a freestyle relay team that didn’t medal, but finished ahead of the Germans).
Under Vichy, the Nazi puppet regime, Nakache was stripped of his French nationality and forced out of Paris. He joined the resistance underground while still competing for Vichy. On Nov. 20, 1943, Nakache and his wife and daughter were arrested by the Gestapo, and the family was separated at Auschwitz. Only Alfred survived. He later endured the death march to Buchenwald before liberation.
Despite these unimaginable losses, Nakache returned to swimming after the war, competing at the 1948 London Olympics. (He, gymnast Agnes Keleti and weightlifter Ben Helfgott are the only known Jewish survivors to have competed in the Olympics after the war.)
Nakache remained a swimmer the rest of his life, and died of a heart attack after a swim in the sea near the Spanish-French border in 1983.
Miailhe, a 70-year-old animator known for her labor-intensive oil and pastel on glass technique, has a personal connection to Nakache’s legacy. As a child, she took swim lessons with his younger brother Bernard and heard stories of his triumphs long before she understood their full historical weight. The end credits explain that her father also knew Alfred, whom he met in the resistance during the war.
“I hope people will be moved by Alfred Nakache’s story and rediscover it, because it’s not well-known in France,” Miailhe said in an interview with Deadline. “Also, we are living in some very troubled times in a world where racism and antisemitism are back.”
Produced by Oscar-winning animator Ron Dyens alongside Luc Camilli for Sacrebleu Productions and XBO Films, Papillon took roughly 100 days to animate — a testament to the craftsmanship that makes every frame an essay on the various qualities of water. The film has earned a César nomination (the French Academy Award) and a nomination at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, and won the International Competition for best animated film at the Grand Prix at Stuttgart.
Amid the horrors of the Holocaust, the animated short also depicts the camaraderie among the athletes who swam — and stood — by Nakache’s side before and after the war.
“Some people denounced the Nakache family [to the Gestapo], but others saved Alfred when he returned from the camps,” Dyen told Deadline. “The whole tragedy of human duality is ultimately reflected in Nakache’s story.”
The post The real Holocaust history behind ‘Papillon,’ the Oscar-nominated short about a star Jewish swimmer appeared first on The Forward.
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Laura Loomer and other Jewish conservatives sound alarm over Tucker Carlson’s White House access
(JTA) — Jewish figures on the far right are increasingly expressing concerns about President Donald Trump’s handling of an antisemitism rift among the Republican party, after its instigator Tucker Carlson reportedly visited the White House for the third time in weeks on Monday.
The visit, reported by Punchbowl News journalist Jake Sherman, came days after his combative interview with Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, ignited antisemitism allegations and a diplomatic row with Arab leaders.
After the interview Carlson also appeared on Saudi state-owned TV, during which he called Israel’s Gaza war a “land grab” and repeated his past claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “evil and destructive.” Carlson has ties with both Saudi Arabia and Qatar, where he has said he intends to buy property and has hosted high-profile events.
Laura Loomer, a far-right Jewish activist, has staked out a warpath against Carlson’s continued welcome in the Trump administration.
“It seems like a suicide mission for any Christian or Jew who doesn’t idolize Hitler to keep donating to the GOP,” Loomer tweeted late Monday. In a follow-up, she wrote, “It’s like I woke up one day and 90% of the people I’ve come to know on the right over the last 10 years have morphed into different people.”
Loomer’s explosion of anger and angst is significant because she has boasted of close ties to Trump and has appeared to hold some sway over White House hiring. In the past, when she has targeted administration staffers or potential hires, many have been spiked quickly. Now, as she raises alarms about Carlson and antisemitism on the right, the White House has remained silent.
“It’s shocking that I have to say this, but the GOP has a major identity crisis right now, the GOP has a growing Jew hate and foreign influence problem, and the party seems to be in a struggle session with Neo Nazis who they aren’t explicitly rejecting,” Loomer tweeted. “My advice is for people to not donate at this time till we get clarity from the party on what the party’s position is on these issues.”
Other Jewish figures on the far right, including radio host Mark Levin and pro-Israel activist Sloan Rachmuth, sided with Loomer against Carlson.
“He should be condemned by the White House, not invited to it,” Levin tweeted.
Carlson’s reported White House visit was one of several he has made since increasingly using his show to lean into friendly interviews with conspiracy theorists and white nationalists, including Nick Fuentes. Seen as a bellwether of conservative influence with close ties to Vice President JD Vance, Carlson’s broadsides against Israel and increasing embrace of antisemitic talking points have paralleled a similar rise in such sentiments among younger GOP voters, and caused serious concern among many Jewish conservatives.
Huckabee himself, in damage control following his comments in the interview, has publicly urged the Trump administration to cut ties with his former Fox News colleague.
“I hope they quit letting him into the White House because, quite frankly, this is a person who is doing serious, significant damage to President Trump and to the administration,” the ambassador told the Christian Broadcasting Network, hours before Carlson was spotted at the White House.
At least one other Trump appointee has also spoken out to defend Huckabee and condemn Carlson.
“Am I the ONLY member of the Trump’s [sic] Administration defending AND supporting Ambassador Huckabee?” Leo Terrell, chair of the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, tweeted Monday.
Following the Huckabee interview, the influential Israeli-American conservative activist Yoram Hazony said Carlson’s earlier visits to the White House had come at the invitation of Trump, who Carlson said was worried that the burgeoning antisemitism rift would drive voters to the Democrats in the midterm elections this fall.
Hazony, whom Carlson mentioned in the video of his Huckabee interview, said Carlson had asked him for help mending fences but that he had come away unconvinced that Carlson wanted to make any changes.
“I explained to him that I can’t do much to help him, because just about every Jew I know believes he’s been waging a savage campaign against Jews, Judaism, and Israel for the past 18 months — and that most think his aim is to drive Jews and Zionist Christians out of the Trump coalition and out of the Republican party,” Hazony wrote on X.
Carlson requested Hazony set up a meeting with Netanyahu, Hazony claimed; he declined to do so. While at first Hazony said he was open to conversing with Carlson in the name of “building coalitions,” he has changed his mind.
“In Tucker’s case, the private person turns out to be exactly who we’ve been seeing in public,” he wrote. “Whatever his motives for turning his podcast into what seems to be a circus of anti-Jewish messaging, right now that project is clearly more important to him than helping the administration keep its coalition together so it can govern effectively and win elections in 2026 and 2028.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, condemned Carlson and praised Huckabee on Monday. He had previously said Carlson should not be invited to the White House.
“Tucker Carlson has a long history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories and lies about Jews and the Jewish state,” Greenblatt tweeted. “His recent interviews continue to amplify hate and launder falsehoods. None of this is new. It’s just pathetic. I appreciate Ambassador @GovMikeHuckabee’s effort to engage in good faith and set the record straight. Unfortunately, I’m not surprised at the outcome.”
Some non-Jewish GOP lawmakers have started to join their Jewish colleagues on the right in condemning Carlson, or antisemitism more forcefully.
“I used to respect Tucker Carlson but after watching his interview of @GovMikeHuckabee I am appalled,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman of Indiana wrote on X. “Tucker gave ample platform and time to Nick Fuentes to share his anti-Semitic vitriol, but constantly interrupted, was impatient, disingenuous, argumentative and disrespectful to Huckabee.”
Stutzman added, “Carlson suggesting all ‘Jews’ do a DNA test in order to live in Israel is repulsive and smacks of ignorance regarding the oldest faith practice in the world combined with the worst kind of exclusionary prejudice and elitism.”
In a slightly more coded message, Alabama Sen. Katie Britt tweeted Monday, “We must continue to call out and condemn antisemitism at every turn. Proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters at home and abroad.” Britt did not mention Carlson or Huckabee by name. By contrast, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, an established foe of Carlson’s who was also on the receiving end of a tough interview over Israel, has retweeted several pro-Huckabee and anti-Carlson posts following the interview.
The Trump administration has not commented publicly on the interview or its backlash. Trump staffers have reportedly been working behind the scenes to assure Arab leaders that Huckabee’s comments during the interview, in which he suggested Israel has a divine right to much of the Middle East, do not represent official administration policy.
The drama has raised a range of issues beyond the antisemitism rift, including the fact that Carlson’s son works for Vance and about Carlson’s relationships with Saudi Arabia and Russia, both of which are promoting interviews on state media about Carlson’s criticism of the Trump administration.
Carlson is keeping up his streak elevating fringe GOP figures amid the controversy, posting a new interview Monday with outsider Iowa gubernatorial candidate Zach Lahn.
“We have a Christian form of government, but we have elected people that are not following that custom and religion in Christianity,” Lahn told Carlson in the interview. “And so you’re going to have a constitutional crisis. You’re going to have fraud all over the place.”
For Loomer, the moment is existential for right wing-Jews. “The GOP has made it very clear over the last few years that Jewish voters on the right are not welcome, we are not appreciated, and we will not be given basic respect,” she tweeted.
“There’s some elected officials in the GOP who would be ok with seeing Jews mass murdered,” Loomer continued, without naming names. “As a lifelong Republican, this is very alarming to me.”
The post Laura Loomer and other Jewish conservatives sound alarm over Tucker Carlson’s White House access appeared first on The Forward.
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Documentary about Jews killed by their Polish neighbors after the Holocaust could be banned in Poland
(JTA) — A documentary about the murder of five Jews in a Polish town is being threatened with a ban in Poland — not because they were killed in the Holocaust, but because they weren’t.
The Jews at the heart of “Among Neighbors,” from California-based filmmaker Yoav Potash, died six months after the end of Nazi occupation. They were among a handful of survivors from Gniewoszów, a town where about 1,500 Jews made up half the population before World War II. When they returned home in 1945, they were killed by their Polish neighbors.
Since premiering at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival in November 2024, “Among Neighbors” has been screened in six countries and qualified for Academy Award consideration. But its release on TVP, the Polish public broadcaster, has prompted uproar from right-wing politicians and a national investigation.
Potash stumbled into making “Among Neighbors” on a 2014 trip to Gniewoszów, where he planned to document a modest rededication ceremony for the Jewish cemetery. As he began talking with the oldest residents, one woman, who has since died, told him that Jews were killed there well after the war.
“That just really struck me as a very different kind of story, because it was not the Germans doing the killing, it was the Poles,” said Potash. “It was not during the war, it was well after, when it should have been a time of peace.”
When “Among Neighbors” appeared on televisions across Poland in November 2025, it was hit with backlash from the office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian who led nationalist efforts to rewrite Poland’s Holocaust history. His Law and Justice party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023, promoted historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk now leads the Polish government with a centrist coalition, but Nawrocki has been a counterweight to Tusk since he was elected last year.
Six days after “Among Neighbors” aired on TVP, Agnieszka Jędrzak, a minister in Nawrocki’s office, attacked the broadcaster on X. Calling the documentary “historical anti-Polish manipulation,” she said “a television station that has ‘Polish’ in its name should not be broadcasting it.”
Jędrzak oversees state awards and Polish diaspora relations. Before joining the president’s office, she spent 15 years working at the Institute of National Remembrance — previously headed by Nawrocki — which gained a reputation for advancing nationalist narratives about the Holocaust. According to Jędrzak’s government profile, she led the IPN as it “responded to defamatory statements which damaged the reputation of Poland and the Polish nation.”
A probe into “Among Neighbors” launched after the Ordo Iuris Institute, a far-right Catholic think tank, filed a complaint with the National Broadcasting Council, comparable to the Federal Communications Commission in the United States.
“The narrative presented in the documentary film ‘Among Neighbors’ clearly undermines values important to Poles, such as historical truth,” the institute said in November. “Above all, the film creates a false image of Poles as a nation co-responsible for the German genocide of Jews during World War II. What is particularly outrageous is the fact that the production was released by Polish Television.”
The National Broadcasting Council responded by opening an investigation into the film.
“Among Neighbors” was made over the course of a decade that largely spanned the Law and Justice regime. In 2018, the country passed a law that outlawed accusing Poland or the Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes. The infraction has since been downgraded from a crime punishable with prison time to a civil offense, but the law remains in effect.
For Potash, reactions to the film from right-wing nationalist officials were “not surprising at all.”
“They have adopted this mindset where there’s an almost sacred sense that Poles during World War II were either victims or heroes,” he said. “Any story that anyone tells that contradicts that, or that adds that some Poles were perpetrators, is anathema to that.”
TVP has stood by the film and continues to air it. The network has been backed by the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, whose representatives sent a letter of support to the TVP Program Council’s chair, Barbara Bilińska.
“Among Neighbors” unfolds around a man and a woman who grew up in Gniewoszów. In the last breaths of their lives, they seek to answer questions that have possessed them for 80 years — he as the Jewish child of Holocaust survivors who were killed in their hometown, and she as a Polish eyewitness to the murders.
In a statement, TVP said the reckonings of these two people were neither “anti-Polish” nor “a judgment of the entire Polish nation.”
“We are open to dialogue regarding historical memory and believe that even difficult topics allow society to understand the fuller context of past events,” said TVP. “As a public broadcaster, we have a duty to facilitate such conversation and not shy away from presenting those fragments of history that require reflection and civic courage.”
Beyond Gniewoszów, “Among Neighbors” touches on a wave of murders that struck Jews returning home to cities and towns across Poland after liberation from the Nazis. In the most notorious instance, 42 Jews in the southeastern town of Kielce were killed by a mob of Polish residents, soldiers and police officers in July 1946. The Kielce pogrom convinced many survivors they had no future in Poland, spurring an exodus.
A film dramatizing the Kielce pogrom drew protests from Polish Americans, and the Berlin office of its Jewish producer was destroyed by an arson in 1996, the same year the Polish government formally apologized for the pogrom.
“Among Neighbors” confronts the simultaneous intimacy and violence woven through small towns, where Poles lived and worked with Jews, where their children played with Jewish children, and where some Poles also killed their Jewish neighbors. That complex relationship still rests under the surface of skirmishes over Poland’s history.
Konstanty Gebert, a journalist interviewed in the film, compared the relationship between Poland and its Jews to the phenomenon of phantom limbs — the sensation that a body part remains attached after it has been amputated.
“Poland is still suffering from its Jewish phantom pains, and Jews are suffering from their Polish phantom pains,” said Gebert. “Until those two amputated hands can actually shake — and I don’t know how you do that to amputated limbs — but I know that if you don’t, we’ll be still standing there, swallowing painkillers for a pain that cannot be relieved, because the amputated limb is gone and it still hurts.”
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