134: President Reuven Rivlin of Israel defies Poland's Holocaust Remembrance laws on Polish soil

Jonny Gould's Jewish State

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In this exclusive interview, Reuven Rivlin, the tenth president of Israel pushes back on Polish law on remembering the Holocaust in Krakow. President Rivlin was among world leaders in politics and industry at the European Jewish Association’s delegation to Auschwitz-Birkenau and taking part in a symposium on the growing threat of antisemitism in Europe, entitled NEVER AGAIN: Lip Service or Deep Commitment?

Also with us, former French prime minister Manuel Valls, a strong voice against antisemitism and Israel’s minister of the diaspora, Amichai Chikli. In 2018, Poland amended their domestic laws on National Remembrance to penalise speech in public laying responsibility for the Holocaust to Poland or the Polish nation.

There was international outcry, relations between Israel and Poland were frozen. Israeli school trips to Poland’s death camps were suspended. The tours are back now - although the law still applies. Poland was the first country invaded and occupied by Adolf Hitler. Members of Poland’s resistance and government-in-exile did try to warn the world of the mass killing of Jews, thousands of Poles risked their lives to do so.

However, Holocaust researchers have collected overwhelming evidence of Poles who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis, or Polish blackmailers who preyed on helpless Jews for financial gain. Nearly all of Poland’s roughly 3 million Jews, were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, and the major Nazi death camps were in Poland. And in telling the truth with me in Krakow, the president challenges Polish law directly. President Rivlin’s a Jerusalemite and says it gives him a unique skill in dealing with allcomers in Israeli society, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Armenians, Druse, you name them.

As a new Polish government contemplates overturning the laws of a previous administration, Reuven Rivlin tells it like it is. Enjoy this conversation with Israel’s tenth president.

Jonny Gould’s Jewish State is proudly supported by Dangoor Education.

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