Poland’s Przemysław Czarnek and Israel’s Yoav Kisch approved the document during their talks in Warsaw on Wednesday, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
At a joint news conference, the Polish education minister said the declaration represented ”a bilateral agreement based on relations of partnership.”
Czarnek said: “It’s an agreement that concludes … our talks on the restoration of Israeli youth trips to Poland and Polish youth trips to Israel.”
The Polish education minister stressed the need for “excellent relations between Poland and Israel,” adding that “forward-looking relations must be forged" by young people in the two countries, the PAP news agency reported.
Shared history
Czarnek told reporters that, under the declaration, “young Israelis and young Poles must above all get to know our shared culture and the common history of the two nations.” He added that “two-thirds of the Jewish population" once lived in Poland.
The Polish education minister also said that his country "has been and will always remain, a space of freedom, also in the religious sense.”
Czarnek argued that contacts between young Poles and Israelis would give them an opportunity "to learn about the shared history" of their nations, "the history of Poland, with its Jewish community,” as well as about “today’s Poland and today’s Israel.”
He noted that Israeli youth trips had been restored "after a prolonged hiatus," and so young Jews were able to attend Tuesday’s March of the Living at the site of the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland and Wednesday’s 80th anniversary of World War II’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Czarnek declared: “I am convinced that young Poles will also be making similar visits to Israel soon.”
He told reporters that “Polish youngsters, most of whom have a Christian background, must get to know the roots of Christianity, and the roots of Christianity are precisely there, in the Holy Land, in the state of Israel.”
Looking to the future while remembering the past
Referring to Polish-Israeli relations, Czarnek said: “The things that connect us are of absolutely the greatest importance and there are many more things that connect us than the things on which we diverge.”
He added: “We definitely share one tragic, dramatic thing, namely the period of World War II. Germany attacked Poland, which was home to Jews as well.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s Kisch told reporters he was “pleased” that the Polish and Israeli education ministries had struck an agreement to ensure “that we remember about the past and are able to act together in the future.”
He stated, as quoted by the PAP news agency: "It’s very important for us to educate our youth. To bring them here to see the sites where the Nazis ... sought to carry out the ‘final solution to the Jewish question.'"
Polish education minister invited to visit Jerusalem
The Israeli education minister encouraged young Poles to visit his country to see the Holy Land, and also invited Poland’s Czarnek to visit Jerusalem.
On Tuesday, Kitsch attended the March of the Living at the site of the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland.
Last month, Poland and Israel signed an agreement that allows for the resumption of Israeli youth trips to Poland, while at the same time guaranteeing Poland the right to organise youth trips to Israel along the same lines, according to officials.
Rite of passage
Young Jewish Israelis traditionally take summer trips to Poland, including visits to former Nazi-built death camps to study the Holocaust and pay tribute to those murdered, The Times of Israel has reported.
The trip has long been considered a rite of passage in Israeli education and, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, some 40,000 Israeli students participated each year, according to the timesofisrael.com website.
However, in June last year the tours were halted due to a dispute over their content and security issues, according to news reports.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, tvp.info