EJP strongly opposes Poland with Holocaust laws

Poland’s parliament passed a law that would prevent former Polish property owners, including Holocaust survivors and their descendants, from regaining property expropriated by the country’s communist regime.

EJP condemned the legislation, with EJP Chairman Vadim Rabinovich saying it “damages both the memory of the Holocaust and the rights of its victims.”

He also said the legislation “disgraces the history of the Jewish people, the memory of Holocaust victims and the Polish nation itself.”

“We implore you — as Polish citizens, as public leaders, as humans — to acknowledge the crimes and act to fix them. Not just for the sake of the victims’ memory and respect for the survivors, and not for the sake of the relations between our countries, but for Poland. Acknowledging history, not rewriting it, is the act that would increase the respect for the Polish nation.”

The adopted amendment to Poland’s administrative law would prevent property ownership and other administrative decisions from being declared void after 30 years. It affects Jewish and non-Jewish owners who had properties seized in the communist era.

In the case of the former Jewish owners, at stake in many cases are the homes or business of families who were wiped out in the Holocaust and whose properties were later seized by Poland’s communist-era authorities.