WARSAW 

A spat between Poland and Israel broke out on Sunday after an online post by Israel's official Holocaust memorial institution triggered a backlash, with senior Polish officials pushing for corrections.

Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based World Holocaust Remembrance Center, posted a message on US social media company X saying: “Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear a distinctive symbol to isolate them from the surrounding population.”

The message provoked a wave of criticism in Poland. Commentators pointed to a familiar frustration: the conflation of Poland with World War II’s German-occupied Poland.

The dispute, though superficially about terminology, taps into deeper anxieties around historical memory, sovereignty, and the politics of the region.

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, interjected directly beneath the original post: “Please clarify that you mean ‘German-occupied Poland’.”

Maciej Wewior, Foreign Ministry spokesman, posted a reply, quoting in full the corrective statement by Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum: “If anyone should know the historical facts, it is Yad Vashem. They should be fully aware that Poland was occupied by Germany at the time, and it was Germany that introduced and enforced this antisemitic law.”

Shortly after the backlash, Yad Vashem issued a corrective post, stating that the wording had been revised to emphasize that the order was issued “by Nazi Germany in the territory of German-occupied Poland.” The revision aimed to clarify the distinction between the occupying regime and the Polish state. This update appears to have been accepted by Polish officials, though tensions remain elevated.

Poland and Israel have been locked in intermittent conflict over Holocaust language for nearly a decade. For Poland, maintaining the distinction between Nazi occupation and Polish state agency is essential. The country lost its sovereignty in Nazi Germany’s 1939 invasion and did not legislate anti-Jewish laws.

The 2018 “Holocaust law” crisis — when the Polish government attempted to criminalize suggestions of Polish complicity — still echoes in the background. Though the current administration is more liberal, the sensitivity remains.