(Jewish Group) 'Happy hour' for Holocaust deniers? Yad Vashem chief anticipates...

[Behind the Aegis]

‘Happy hour’ for Holocaust deniers? Yad Vashem chief anticipates the death of the last survivor.

The chairman of Yad Vashem decried the stifling of a Holocaust scholar in Poland this week as “a new low” in attempts to suppress discussion about the complicity of Poles in the persecution and murder of Jews.

In a wide-ranging phone interview with the Forward Thursday, Dani Dayan also critiqued a video posted this week by Poland’s ruling party that he said wrongfully invoked images of Auschwitz. And he spoke about the new U.S. plan to combat antisemitism and the challenge of teaching about the Holocaust once its survivors have all passed away.

But Dayan’s concerns focused on Poland this week. A right-wing member of the Polish parliament on Tuesday grabbed the microphone as Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski was about to deliver a lecture in Warsaw, and smashed it against the podium as he knocked over loudspeakers. The lecture did not happen.

“This act of vandalism is more than an ugly attack on an internationally renowned scholar. It is an attack on academic freedom, on the historical record, and on Holocaust remembrance,” Dayan said in a statement.

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