Warsaw Jews slam absence of Ghetto monument from Trump’s visit
Published July 5, 2017
(JTA) — Leaders of Polish Jews criticized President Donald Trump for not including a stop at a monument for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the itinerary of his visit to Poland.
The rebuke Wednesday by Polish Chief rabbi Michael Schudrich, Anna Chipczynska, the president of Jewish Community of Warsaw, and Leslaw Piszewski, the president of Union of Jewish Communities of Poland, came in a joint statement. In it, the undersigned called the absence of a presidential visit to the Monument to the Heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto a “slight.”
According to the statement’s authors, “ever since the fall of Communism in 1989, all U.S. presidents and vice presidents visiting Warsaw had made a point of visiting” that site, representing Americans “who had played such a central role in bringing down Fascism,” at a “universal commemoration of the victims of the Shoah, and condemnation of its perpetrators.”
Trump landed in Poland Wednesday ahead of the G20 meeting in Germany later this week. He will commemorate the horrors of World War II in Poland, his aides told The Washington Post, on Thursday, when he is scheduled to deliver a speech at the city’s Warsaw Uprising Monument on Krasinski Square.
However, that monument celebrates the acts of resistance fighters from the general population of Poland, who launched a bloody rebellion against the Germans in 1944. The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, situated approximately a mile east of Krasinski Square, commemorates specifically Jewish partisans who rose up against the Germans in a doomed uprising in 1943.
The visits by U.S. presidents to the monument for the Jewish rebellion were gestures that to Polish Jews “meant recognition, solidarity and hope,” the three leaders of Polish Jewry wrote. “We deeply regret that President Donald Trump, though speaking in public barely a mile away from the monument, chose to break with that laudable tradition, alongside so many other ones. We trust that this slight does not reflect the attitudes and feelings of the American people,” they added.
