A Polish diplomat tasked with enhancing communication with Jews around the world has been fired after he criticized his government’s controversial law regarding Holocaust speech, the Associated Press reported.
Jaroslaw Nowak, the plenipotentiary for contacts with the Jewish diaspora, was quoted in an interview with the UK Jewish News saying of the 2018 law that regulates what can be said about Poland’s role in the Holocaust that it “is one of the stupidest amendments that was ever done by any law.”
Nowak, who has taken part in Polish-Jewish dialogue for four decades, also criticized the Polish government, saying that it should enact a law on the restitution of property. Poland recent passed a law that essentially ended the ability of those who had property confiscated by the communists from launching claims, a change that dealt a blow to many Holocaust survivors and their heirs hoping to restitute lost property.
On Monday, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lukasz Jasina said on Twitter that Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau had fired Nowak on Saturday.
Nowak was fired the day after his interview with the Jewish News was published.
The Polish law would have originally handed a potential prison sentence to someone who accused the country of complicity in the Holocaust. It was later revised to remove the prison term of up to three years.
In 2020, when Poland further passed a law that restricted the ability of Holocaust survivors and their heirs to reclaim lost property confiscated during the era in which Poland was ruled by communists, diplomatic relations between the country and Israel were dealt a large blow that is still being felt.
Commenting on the situation in the interview, Nowak said: “I think at some point Poland will have to really come to the conclusion that we have to do something about [restitution].”