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Yad Vashem denounces Poland’s demanded additions to Israeli student trips as ‘inappropriate’
(JTA) — When Israel and Poland agreed to resume Israeli youth trips to Polish Holocaust sites last month, their agreement stipulated that new sites be added to the students’ itineraries, including some that document Nazi crimes against non-Jewish Poles. Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and history authority, is now calling those additions “inappropriate” and “problematic.”
In statements to Haaretz published on Monday, leading historians condemned the development, arguing that the new trip rules advance what they call Poland’s track record of obscuring its Holocaust record.
The new list of required sites for students to see are “dubious at best and controversial at worst,” said Havi Dreifuss, a Tel Aviv University history professor affiliated with Yad Vashem. She added that some of the sites “ignore documented aspects of Poles’ involvement in the murder of Jews,” or even “glorify Poles who were involved up to their necks in the murder of Jews.”
“What you have there is the ‘Polish wish-list’ of where Israeli youth should go,” said Jan Grabowski, a professor who studies Polish-Jewish Holocaust history and has been prosecuted in Poland over some of his research conclusions. “It reads like a Holocaust denier’s dream.”
Youth trips to Holocaust sites in Poland have long been part of a longstanding educational program in Israel. They were suspended last year amid a series of diplomatic spats between Poland and Israel fueled mostly by a push by Poland’s right-wing government to highlight German crimes against Poles during World War II. Historians around the world have argued that the campaign — which included multiple laws that drew harsh responses from Jerusalem — has also sought to downplay Polish crimes against local Jews before, during and after the Holocaust.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was critical of those recent Polish laws, but since assembling the most right-wing government in Israel’s history earlier this year, lawmakers have pushed for renewing ties. After meeting with his Polish counterpart last month, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen declared that the countries’ “crisis” in relations was over. Cohen and Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau signed an agreement stating that Israeli youth trips to Holocaust sites in Poland would resume, pending approval in the Knesset, or Israel’s parliament. Poland also agreed to reinstate its ambassador to Israel.
Soon after the signing, Poland’s deputy foreign minister noted in a statement that Israeli students would learn on the trips “what [Poland] as a country and as a nation have been through and what we have survived.” The Israeli students will also meet with Polish youths, Paweł Jabłoński added, “to combat negative stereotypes that exist in Israel regarding Poland.”
Now details are being released to the public, Haaretz reported. In addition to touring Jewish-specific sites, students will also be required to visit at least one site per trip related to “other crimes of World War II,” which include museums focused on Nazi crimes against non-Jewish Poles.
Included in the list of additional sites is the Markowa Ulma-Family Museum of Poles Who Saved Jews in World War II —which tells the story of a Polish family who were killed for hiding eight Jews in their house. Other museums that highlight the “forsaken” or “doomed” Polish soldiers who rebelled against Communist forces in the aftermath of the war. Grabowski said that many of those soldiers were “ruthless murderers of Jews during and after the war.”
Israel’s education ministry and Yad Vashem both said that they have not agreed to modify the trips.
“Every tour that took place in the past can take place exactly as it was and with no changes in the future. The Poles have asked to add sites to the list, yet there is no such commitment to tour one site or another,” the ministry wrote in a statement to Haaretz.
Yad Vashem wrote that students sent through its programs “will not visit any site that is suspected of twisting the history of the Holocaust or promoting a historically incorrect narrative.”
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The post Yad Vashem denounces Poland’s demanded additions to Israeli student trips as ‘inappropriate’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ to Convene at WH on Feb. 19, One Day After Trump’s Meeting with Netanyahu
US President Donald Trump speaks to the media during the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from one of the member states confirms to i24NEWS that an invitation has been received for a gathering of President Trump’s Board of Peace at the White House on February 19, just one day after the president’s planned meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The meeting comes amid efforts to advance the implementation of the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire, following the limited reopening of the Rafah crossing, the expected announcement on the composition and mandate of the International Stabilization Force, and anticipation of a Trump declaration setting a deadline for Hamas to disarm.
In Israel officials assess that the announcement is expected very soon but has been delayed in part due to ongoing talks with the Americans over Israel’s demands for the demilitarization of the Gaza Strip. Trump reiterated on Thursday his promise that Hamas will indeed be disarmed.
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If US Attacks, Iran Says It Will Strike US Bases in the Region
FILE PHOTO: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi meets with Omani Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi in Muscat, Oman, February 6, 2026. Photo: Omani Ministry of Foreign Affairs/ Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
Iran will strike US bases in the Middle East if it is attacked by US forces that have massed in the region, its foreign minister said on Saturday, insisting that this should not be seen as an attack on the countries hosting them.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi spoke to Qatari Al Jazeera TV a day after Tehran and Washington pledged to continue indirect nuclear talks following what both sides described as positive discussions on Friday in Oman.
While Araqchi said no date had yet been set for the next round of negotiations, US President Donald Trump said they could take place early next week. “We and Washington believe it should be held soon,” Araqchi said.
Trump has threatened to strike Iran after a US naval buildup in the region, demanding that it renounce uranium enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear bombs, as well as stopping ballistic missile development and support for armed groups around the region. Tehran has long denied any intent to weaponize nuclear fuel production.
While both sides have indicated readiness to revive diplomacy over Tehran’s long-running nuclear dispute with the West, Araqchi balked at widening the talks out.
“Any dialogue requires refraining from threats and pressure. (Tehran) only discusses its nuclear issue … We do not discuss any other issue with the US,” he said.
Last June, the US bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, joining in the final stages of a 12-day Israeli bombing campaign. Tehran has since said it has halted uranium enrichment activity.
Its response at the time included a missile attack on a US base in Qatar, which maintains good relations with both Tehran and Washington.
In the event of a new US attack, Araqchi said the consequences could be similar.
“It would not be possible to attack American soil, but we will target their bases in the region,” he said.
“We will not attack neighboring countries; rather, we will target US bases stationed in them. There is a big difference between the two.”
Iran says it wants recognition of its right to enrich uranium, and that putting its missile program on the negotiating table would leave it vulnerable to Israeli attacks.
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My university wants me to sign a loyalty oath — am I in America or Vichy France?
As a historian of modern France, I have rarely seen a connection between my everyday life in my adopted state of Texas and my work on my adopted specialization: the period we call Vichy France. Apart from the Texan boast that the Lone Star Republic is bigger than the French Republic, and the small town of Paris, Texas, which boasts its own Eiffel Tower, I had no reason to compare the two places where I have spent more than half of my life.
Until now.
Last week, professors and instructors at the University of Houston received an unsettling memo from the administration, which asked us to sign a statement that we teach rather than “indoctrinate” our students.
Though the administration did not define “indoctrinate,” it hardly takes a PhD in English to read between the lines. Indoctrination is precisely what our state government has already forbidden us from doing in our classes. There must not be the slightest sign in our courses and curricula of references to diversity, identity and inclusion. The catch-all word used is “ideology,” a term Governor Greg Abbott recently invoked when he warned that “Texas is targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation. We must end indoctrination.”
This is not the first time in the past several months that I have been reminded of what occurred in France during the four years that it was ruled by its German occupiers and Vichy collaborators.
Very briefly, with Germany’s rapid and complete defeat of France in 1940, an authoritarian, antisemitic and collaborationist regime assumed power. Among its first acts was to purge French Jews from all the professions, including high school and university faculties, and to impose an “oath of loyalty” to the person of Marshal Philippe Pétain, the elderly but ramrod straight and clear-headed hero of World War I.
The purpose of the oath was simple and straightforward: By demanding the fealty of all state employees to the person of Pétain, it also demanded their hostility to the secular and democratic values of the French republican tradition. Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority of teachers signed the oath —even the novelist and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, who needed her salary as a lycée teacher, as did the writer Jean Guéhenno, a visceral anti-Pétainist who continued to teach at the prestigious Paris lycée Henri IV until he was fired in 1943.
Vichy’s ministers of education understood the vital importance that schools and universities played in shaping citizens. Determined to replace the revolutionary values of liberty, equality and fraternity with the reactionary goals of family, work and homeland, they sought to eliminate “godless schools” and instill a “moral order” based on submission to state and church authorities. This radical experiment, powered by a reactionary ideology, to return France to the golden age of kings, cardinals and social castes came to an inglorious end with the Allied liberation of the country and collapse of Vichy scarcely four years after it had begun.
The French Jewish historian Marc Bloch — who joined the Resistance and sacrificed his life on behalf of a very different ideology we can call humanism — always insisted on the importance of comparative history. But comparison was important not because it identified similarities but because it illuminated differences. Clearly, the situation of professors at UH is very different from that of their French peers in Vichy France. We are not risking our jobs, much less our lives, by resisting this ham-handed effort to demand our loyalty to an anti-indoctrination memo.
But the two situations are not entirely dissimilar, either. Historians of fascism like Robert Paxton remind us that such movements begin slowly, then suddenly assume terrifying proportions. This was certainly the case in interwar France, where highly polarized politics, frequent political violence and a long history of antisemitism and anti-republicanism prepared the ground for Vichy. In France, Paxton writes, this slow, then sudden transformation “changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity.”
As an historian of France, I always thought its lurch into authoritarianism was shocking, but not surprising. After all, many of the elements for this change had existed well before 1940. But as a citizen of America, I am not just shocked, but also surprised by official demands for affirmation and conformity. One day I will find the time to think hard about my naiveté. But the time is now to think about how we should respond to these demands.
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