Shevah Weiss’s comments follow a controversy in Poland over the World Holocaust Forum scheduled to take place on January 23 at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
The conference about the mass extermination of Jews by Germany in World War II is being organised by Russian businessman Moshe Kantor, Polish public broadcaster’s tvp.info website reported.
tvp.info quoted Weiss, a former head of the Yad Vashem Institute, as saying that the conference had been organised as a form of “bartering with history”.
“This is not the way to do it,” he added.
Weiss was speaking at a meeting between Polish President Andrzej Duda and members of the Jewish community in Poland in Warsaw on Wednesday.
Duda has previously said that at the upcoming Jerusalem conference he needed “to be able to speak alongside other presidents” in order to present the “historical truth, which, unfortunately, has been falsified recently.”
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Paweł Jabłoński said earlier this week: “It is unacceptable, at a conference dedicated to the Holocaust, for Vladimir Putin to be one of key speakers and for Poland's president not to be able to speak.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin recently suggested that Poland was partly responsible for the outbreak of World War II, and claimed that the Soviet Union helped “save lives” after it invaded Poland in 1939 following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between the USSR and Nazi Germany.
The comments triggered anger in Warsaw. Duda on Tuesday accused Putin of “post-Stalinist revisionism” and of trying to shift the blame for the outbreak of World War II onto Poland.
Referring to Germany, the Forum of Polish Jews website has said that “the principal Holocaust perpetrators” will be given a voice at the Jerusalem conference but Poland will not.
(pk)
Source: www.tvp.info