What did the Chief Rabbi of Poland say?
There’s a storm brewing over the political positions of Michal Kaminski, particularly regarding his relations to the National Revival of Poland, aka NOP, and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne.
The NOP is now regarded by just about everyone as a nasty bunch of anti-Semites (their manifesto includes a line from Mein Kampf – “Jews will be removed from Poland, and their possessions will be confiscated”). It is a Third Positionist organisation.
Jedwabne was the site of a pogrom in which between two hundred and fifty & four hundred Jews were burned alive in 1941. Initially, it was thought that the massacre had been carried out by Nazi troops, but it later turned out to have been carried out by Poles with the assistance of an Einsatzgrup. In 2001, President Kwaniewski went to Jedwabne, in a controversial move, to apologise for the crimes of six decades earlier. One of the people who opposed the apology was Kaminski.
It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr Kaminski has changed the positions he held in the past, but he cannot and should not deny them. He says that when he was in NOP it was not anti-Semitic; however, it was using the Chrobry sword as a symbol, which had been the logo of the National Radical Camp Falanga that advocated Catholic totalitarianism (as in Spain’s FET y de las JONS). Either way, there is a lot of confusion.
To add to this, the Jewish Chronicle reports that the Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, feels he was misrepresented by the New Statesman when
The New Statesman has printed the text of an email from Rabbi Schudrich, that says
I do not comment on political decisions. However, it is clear that Mr Kaminski was a member of NOP, a group that is openly far right and neo-nazi. Anyone who would want to align himself with a person who was an active member of NOP and the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne (which was established to deny historical facts of the massacre at Jedwabne) needs to understand with what and by whom he is being represented.
Assorted others are weighing in – Next Left and Progress – but Will ‘Left Foot Forward’ Straw has five interesting questions for Rabbi Schudrich:
1. How can a former member of “a group that is openly far right and neo-nazi” also be a “friend of Israel”?
2. Has any member of the British Conservative party been in contact to ask you to make this new statement?
3. Has anyone who works for Policy Exchange been in contact to ask you to make this new statement?
4. Has anyone from the Polish Law and Justice party been in contact to ask you to make this new statement?
5. Do you have a view on Michal Kaminski’s statement that: “If you are asking the Polish nation to apologise for the crime made in Jedwabne, you would require from the whole Jewish nation to apologise for what some Jewish communists did in eastern Poland.”
I await the answers with interest.
xD.
October 29th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
Oh my gosh, XXI century and still talking about this issue. Sometimes I think mankind is doomed.