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Why Poland’s president canceled his menorah lighting — and how the West helped make that happen
As we grapple with the horrific massacre of Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Bondi Beach, Australia, another assault on a Jewish holiday tradition is occurring halfway across the world. It’s not violent, thankfully, but it sure is ominous.
This Hanukkah, the night is darker over Warsaw.
For the past decade, each December, a menorah burned in Poland’s presidential palace. It was a gesture of tolerance and interfaith friendship as well as a token of recognition for the five million Jews killed in Poland during the Holocaust.
But this Hanukkah, the candles remained unlit as Karol Nawrocki, the country’s new president, fulfilled a key campaign promise: end the menorah lighting. “I take my attachment to Christian values seriously, so I celebrate holidays that are close to me as a person,” he said.
“I take my attachment to Christian values seriously, so I celebrate holidays that are close to me as a person,” Nawrocki said, when explaining why he wouldn’t continue the tradition, a move seen as pandering to the country’s far right.
It’s never a good sign when a European leader rides to power by turning his back on Judaism. Unfortunately, Nawrocki’s decision is only the latest in a series of disturbing events. Last month, his political ally delivered a speech at the gates of Auschwitz, proclaiming “Poland is for Poles, not Jews.” Meanwhile, this July, plaques blaming murdered Jews for their fate were erected at the site of an infamous 1941 massacre.
It’s an astonishing turnaround for a country that only a few years ago was extolled as a paragon of Holocaust remembrance, but it didn’t come from nowhere. Indeed, it’s what happens when the West ignores warning signs of antisemitism in an ally.
Nawrocki became president this summer after beating a pro-EU opponent in a tight election. His candidacy alone raised alarm bells. A historian by trade, Nawrocki had supported legislation whitewashing the fact that some Poles killed Jews in the Holocaust; he also denounced respected scholars who brought up Poland’s dark past as purveyors of “disgusting attacks” on the country’s reputation.
Then came Nawrocki’s decision to ally himself with Grzergorz Braun, an openly antisemitic member of the European Parliament who’d accused Jews of controlling Poland and conducting ritual sacrifices of Christians. In 2023, Braun physically extinguished a menorah in the Polish parliament, proclaiming the sacred Jewish ceremony a “Satanic cult.”
In order to triumph in the extraordinarily close presidential election (the final vote was decided by less than two percentage points) Nawrocki courted Braun, turning the antisemitic firebrand into a kingmaker. In order to prove his bona fides to Braun’s supporters, Nawrocki said he would end the annual presidential menorah lightings.
Last month, several prominent figures including Poland’s justice minister decried Braun’s diatribe at Auschwitz. Nawrocki, however, has remained notably silent.
Western silence enabled this
How could such disquieting developments occur, especially in an EU and NATO member? Part of the reason has to do with a crucial mistake made by Israel and international Jewish groups.
In January 2018, Poland’s parliament passed a law making it a crime to accuse Poles of complicity in the Holocaust. This salvo against Holocaust remembrance triggered condemnations from the US State Department, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jewish organizations.
A few months later, Warsaw softened the law by making it a civil offense, reducing the penalty from imprisonment to a fine.
Netanyahu, eager to restore relations with Poland, touted the downgraded law as a victory; several Jewish groups joined him.
But the legislation itself, not the penalty, was the problem. Whether criminal or civil, Warsaw was still institutionalizing Holocaust revisionism, arming itself with a mechanism to persecute those who challenged its narrative.
The West essentially acquiesced to government-sponsored Holocaust distortion, as long as it didn’t carry prison time. Yehuda Bauer of Israel’s central Holocaust museum succinctly described this capitulation as a “betrayal.”
Is it any wonder Nawrocki felt emboldened to get in bed with an overt Holocaust denier, pledged to end menorah lightings, and had chosen to say nothing in response to Braun’s chilling anti-Jewish tirade two weeks ago? If we in the West stay silent, why shouldn’t he?
A menorah is merely a symbol, of course, but given the explosion of antisemitism across Europe, even a symbolic light would be welcome.
“To discontinue the tradition of lighting the Hanukkah candles by the President would meant to give in to the demands of antisemites and more broadly, to further undermine the respect for minorities in Polish society,” Rafal Pankowski, Warsaw-based political scientist and head of the “Never Again” anti-hate organization told me.
There are still a few nights left in Hanukkah – perhaps there’s still time for Western leaders to ask Nawrocki to dispel the darkness. We could sure use it.
The post Why Poland’s president canceled his menorah lighting — and how the West helped make that happen appeared first on The Forward.
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PEN America president, defending Israel’s critics, resigns after report warns of threats to Jewish authors
(JTA) — The president of PEN America resigned over the weekend in protest of a report on boycotts targeting Jewish and Israeli authors, part of yet another round of internal division over Israel at the literary free-speech institution.
Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian-American novelist and Bard College professor, told The Atlantic he was stepping down because he believed the PEN report, “A Silent Moratorium,” failed to defend the free-speech rights of participants in the movement to boycott Israel.
“It’s the First Amendment that allows all of us to engage in boycotts, not PEN America,” Mengestu told the publication. “PEN America as a free expression organization is supposed to defend that right.”
The author did not respond to multiple Jewish Telegraphic Agency requests for comment, but in an Instagram post Monday alluded to an interest in creating a new organization to rival the prominent nonprofit, which defends the free expression rights other writers.
In response to an interview request, PEN sent a statement to JTA saying it was “grateful” for Mengestu’s leadership and would “respect” his decision. The statement also alluded to PEN’s own past turmoil: “We tell hard stories, in politically challenging moments, about writers from a range of perspectives, even when it’s uncomfortable for us given our own recent history.”
In its report, published on its blog, PEN described “Jewish and Israeli writers who feel that the mainstream literary world is increasingly shutting them out because of their identity, nationality, or views.” Interview subjects include several Israel critics, as well as literary agents who assert that they face more difficulties signing Jewish authors after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and amid the subsequent war in Gaza. The report also repeatedly cited a JTA report about a 2024 viral list of “Zionist” authors to boycott.
Among other details, PEN’s report revealed that Israeli novelist Etgar Keret and public radio host Ira Glass had cancelled a planned live event in Australia over fears of threats and protest.
“This silencing and exclusion of writers is a threat to what PEN America is fundamentally committed to defending: a culture of free expression for all,” according to the report.
In addition to the report, PEN also altered its institutional policy toward cultural boycotts, which the organization has long opposed. Although its report on Jewish authors asserted that boycotts “threaten the free expression rights” of their targets, the revised guidelines say that the group will also defend the right of writers to participate in boycotts.
Mengestu’s resignation comes at a perilous moment for Jews facing cultural boycotts, both within the standard-bearers of PEN and elsewhere. PEN’s Jewish former longtime CEO stepped down in 2024 following months of blowback from rank-and-file authors who felt the organization was insufficiently critical of Israel and caused PEN to cancel a festival for global authors.
Since the leadership change, PEN leadership has published and retracted a condemnation of a boycott effort trained at an Israeli comedian and also published a report cataloguing Israel’s “cultural destruction in Gaza.”
Mengestu had assumed the role of board president in 2025. But PEN’s report about Jewish and Israeli writers on Thursday, he wrote, “makes clear that [change] will not happen.”
The Anti-Defamation League said it was “deeply troubled” by Mengestu’s resignation Monday. “Freedom of expression means opposing efforts to boycott, silence, or exclude writers because of their identity or nationality,” the organization tweeted, saying that the author’s decision to leave PEN over his objections to the report on Jewish authors “sends a chilling message.” Jewish authors also objected.
“Imagine running a free expression org and resigning because it refuses to blacklist authors based on their nationality,” the author David Zweig wrote on X, musing whether Mengestu would object to boycotting authors from his birth country: “Ethiopia doesn’t exactly have a good human rights record.”
In response to The Atlantic’s story that quoted sources from inside PEN who were critical of his resignation, Mengestu wrote a lengthy Instagram post Monday in which he stated, “This piece is about trying to suppress constitutionally protected speech,” criticized past PEN reports critical of the BDS movement, and added, “What PEN America fails to understand is that boycott is a form of dialogue.”
He announced his intention to “help make something better,” receiving affirmative comments from notable authors including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Angela Flournoy, Jewish pro-Palestinian novelist Jess Row and Pulitzer Prize-winner Benjamin Moser, author of a forthcoming history of Jewish anti-Zionism.
Other Jewish authors on the left were among those defending Mengestu’s decision to step down.
“Dinaw is one hundred percent correct that this kind of fake victim propaganda can be used to support anti-Boycott legislation which violates the First Amendment and is everywhere as popular support for Palestinians grows,” author Sarah Schulman wrote on Facebook. Calling PEN’s blog about Jews “one of those fake anti-semitism pieces,” Schulman added, “If PEN wants to survive, they have to get out of the Israel/Zionism business.”
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Church of England backs study of Palestinian Christian document accusing Israel of genocide
(JTA) — The Church of England’s legislative body voted Monday to encourage churches across England to engage with a document produced by Palestinian Christians that accuses Israel of genocide despite requests from Jewish organizations and Britain’s chief rabbi to reject it.
The document is titled “Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide” and is also known as Kairos II, after the Palestinian Christian movement Kairos Palestine that produced it. It describes Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide, states that Israel is a “colonial enterprise built on racism,” and says decades of “occupation,” “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” are at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The vote on Monday does not adopt the accusations as church doctrine but says the church should hear the documents as “heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” and to engage with them in order to better understand the conflict.
Ahead of the debate in York, several Jewish organizations expressed concerns, and Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis asked Synod members to reject the amendment. Mirvis called Kairos II “deeply concerning” and that it “risks undermining decades of careful relationship-building” between Christians and Jews.
“It is truly shocking that a document which purports to speak in the name of truth contains so much falsehood,” he said.
Afterwards, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Phil Rosenberg, issued a statement calling the passage of the motion “highly problematic.”
“Kairos Palestine may come from a place of genuine pain, but the falsehoods and distortions of Kairos II, including its erasure of Jewish identity and experience, is a prescription for more division and not the answer to conflict in the Middle East,” he said.
“This document reflects the pain and trauma of the Palestinian people. As a pastor, I hear the cry of our Palestinian Christian sisters and brothers — a cry that rises from the ruins of Gaza, and from the violence and oppression of the West Bank,” she said.
She added, ”I also hear the concerns of the chief rabbi, the co-leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism, and the Board of Deputies, and I thank them for their honesty.” She said the church remained opposed to antisemitism and committed to safety for Israelis as well as Palestinians.
The Synod debate followed Mullally’s visit to the West Bank in June, where she met Palestinian Christian communities in Birzeit. During the visit she said, “I will use my role as Archbishop to seek the peace you desire and the freedom you deserve.”
The debate marks the ascendance of Israel-related issues in another major church, after the Catholic Church’s Pope Leo XIV angered Jewish groups soon after being elected last year by endorsing an investigation into whether Israel committed genocide in Gaza.
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Mike Pence denounces alleged arson of Israeli flag in his Indiana hometown
(JTA) — Former Vice President Mike Pence has weighed in against antisemitism after officials in his Indiana town say a costly fire may have been caused by arson to an Israeli flag displayed on a local barn.
The alleged arson broke out early Friday morning, damaging a historic home in Zionsville, Indiana, where Pence lives, and causing an estimated $150,000 in damages, according to the Zionsville Police Department.
Zionsville Mayor John Stehr said during a press conference on Friday that officials believed the fire began when an individual set fire to an Israeli flag that had been displayed outside the building alongside an American flag. The town later announced that the FBI had joined the investigation and that officials were examining whether the arson “may have been motivated by bias” but said no determination had been made.
“Absolutely despicable,” Pence tweeted on Sunday. “There can be no tolerance in America for Antisemitism or political acts of violence, and it is heartbreaking to see in our adopted hometown of Zionsville, Indiana. We thank God no one was hurt and urge anyone with information to contact law enforcement.”
Pence has long cast himself as a staunch supporter of Israel, including after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, and has also repeatedly spoken out against antisemitism in the conservative movement and beyond.
Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks also condemned the alleged arson in a post on X Saturday. “Antisemitism will not be tolerated. Not in Zionsville. Not in Indiana. Not anywhere,” Banks wrote. “Thank you to the federal, state, and local officials working to bring the perpetrators of this despicable arson attack to justice.”
On Sunday, the Jewish community in central Indiana hosted a rally condemning the alleged arson attack, chanting, “We will stand up,” according to local outlet Fox 59. While Zionsville does not have a large Jewish community of its own, other suburbs of Indianapolis have significant Jewish populations, and Zionsville is also the longtime home of a Reform movement summer camp, the Goldman Union Camp Institute, which is in session now.
“The founding fathers founded a country where we have the ability to resolve differences among each other; we don’t do it by firebombing homes,” rally organizer David Schiller told Fox 59. “It’s inexcusable and unacceptable.”
The Zionsville Police Department did not respond to an inquiry from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency about the status of the investigation on Monday.
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