The Education Ministry on Sunday warned personal organizations opposed to organizing Holocaust heritage trips for schoolchildren of official government trips that have been canceled since June due to a diplomatic dispute with Poland.
In a letter to private companies, Dudi Shokaf, head of youth missions in Poland, said the state may not guarantee some protection on such trips and may not be able to help teams if they encounter disorder abroad.
He said personal organizations had the strength to send teams of top school academics to Poland, warning them of legal action if they had to carry out their plans.
“The ministry reserves the right to take all legal action at its disposal against the relevant parties, delegation organizers, service and others,” the letter reads.
Annual educational trips, involving thousands of young Israelis, have been suspended because of the pandemic; in June, Israel said they would not resume because Poland’s right-wing government sought to control the program.
“They tried to dictate what is allowed and what cannot be taught to young Israelis who pass into Poland and with which we cannot agree,” then-Foreign Minister Yair Lapid told a news conference.
Poland’s Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz accused young Israelis of receiving a “negative image” of Poland, due to armed guards accompanying youth groups, visits aimed solely at the Holocaust and lack of contact with young Poles.
“There are also threads that seem to [suggest] that Poland is an anti-Semitic country and for that reason it is harmful here,” Przydacz told Radio RMF24.
He said a new intergovernmental agreement specifies in which cases guards with loaded weapons are likely to be present. Warsaw has been seeking such a deal for months, Przydacz said.
Poland would also like young Israelis to meet their Polish peers and perceive their centuries of Polish Jewish history.
In August, Poland said it had proposed its election plan to resume travel, but drew no reaction from Israel.
The Education Ministry said the program would be renewed in the near future.
Poland was invaded and occupied by Adolf Hitler’s regime in 1939 and has never had a collaborationist government. Members of the Polish resistance and the government-in-exile fought to warn the world of the bloodbath of the Jews, and thousands of Poles risked their lives to help the Jews. .
Young Israelis historically went to Poland in the summer between grades 11 and 12 to stop at former Nazi camps to learn more about the Holocaust and commemorate those murdered.
However, Holocaust researchers have collected enough evidence of Polish villagers who murdered Jews fleeing the Nazis, or of Polish blackmailers who preyed on defenseless Jews for monetary gain. Six million Jews, adding up to almost all of Poland’s approximately 3 million Jews, were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. the Holocaust, and the main Nazi death camps were in Poland.
These accounts of mourning have been a source of wonderful tension between Israel and Poland, which also have relations.
It has long been regarded as a vital milestone in Israeli education, and before the COVID-19 pandemic, some 40,000 Israeli academics participated each year. About 7,000 registered to pass last summer, according to the Ministry of Education.
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