Aleksander Kwasniewski, two-term president of Poland from 1995 to 2005, has been named the 2010 recipient of the Irena Sendler Memorial Award by the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture in San Francisco.
The award, to be presented in Warsaw Wednesday, June 30, is granted to a non-Jewish Polish person who has worked to foster Jewish cultural renewal in Poland. The ceremony takes place during weeklong festivities celebrating the San Francisco–Krakow sister-city relationship.
Elected in 1995, Kwasniewski was a major force behind the passage of the new Polish constitution and brought Poland into NATO. He supported the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, due to open in 2012, and restored Polish citizenship to people, mostly Jews, disenfranchised throughout the Communist era.
He was also the first Polish president to publicly apologize for the country’s role in atrocities committed against Jews during the Holocaust.
The award was created in memory of the late Irena Sendler, a Righteous Gentile who saved more than 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto.