Washington: A Polish-language weekly, Only Poland, was reportedly spotted at Poland’s Parliament on Wednesday with a front-page offering to inform readers “How to spot a Jew.”
Listed were markers such as “Names, anthropological features, expressions, appearances, character traits, methods of operation” and “disinformation activities.”
The list of supposedly Jewish traits was accompanied on the front page by a headline reading “Attack on Poland at a conference in Paris,” a reference to a Holocaust conference held in Paris last month.
The article ran with a photo of Jan Gross, the Polish and Jewish Princeton scholar who wrote Neighbours: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, the seminal text on a massacre of the Jewish people of Jedwabne by their non-Jewish neighbours during the Nazi occupation in Poland.
In 1996, Gross was the recipient of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland; in 2012, the ruling party, Law and Justice, considered stripping him of the award.
Gross did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“‘How to spot a Jew’ is particularly upsetting and awful,” Jonathan Ornstein, director of Krakow’s Jewish Community Centre, said.
“I don’t think it necessarily represents mainstream Polish thinking at all. It’s an extreme publication, an extreme far right publication.”
Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, echoed, “It’s a completely marginal paper. Doesn’t make it right, doesn’t make it less ugly, but it’s a completely marginal paper.”
On Thursday, Andrzej Duda, president of Poland, said in a statement, “Situations such as this publication are absolutely marginal in Poland. Nonetheless each and every one of them deserves condemnation, including the one in question.”
Read the article in The Sydney Morning Herald (from The Washington Post).