Leaders of Poland’s Jewish community said Polish Jews are ready to cooperate with the country’s new president.
Andrzej Duda won the May 24 presidential elections in Poland. Duda, whose father-in-law Julian Kornhauser is a well-known Polish Jewish poet, garnered 51 percent of the vote. His opponent, former president Bronislaw Komorowski, received 48 percent.
Duda, a conservative politician, criticized Komorowski’s apologies in recent years for the massacre that Polish farmers perpetrated against their Jewish neighbors in Jedwabne. The 1941 Jedwabne pogrom, in which dozens of Jews were burned alive by villagers who trapped them inside a barn, was exposed in the early 2000s by the historian Jan Gross.
According to Duda, the entire Polish nation cannot be blamed for war crimes. He called Komorowski’s apologies an “attempt to destroy Poland’s good name.”
Duda is a member of the right-wing Law and Justice Party.
“I hope that the new president will go the way of one of his predecessors, Lech Kaczynski, with whom I had a chance to cooperate on many occasions and whom I considered a friend of Polish Jews,” said Piotr Kadlcik, Jewish activist and board member of the Warsaw Jewish Community. — jta