Earlier this year, President Donald Trump was criticized for spending only fifteen minutes in Israel’s Holocaust memorial. But that’s far more time than he gave to another memorial for the Third Reich’s Jewish victims this week.
On Thursday, a breaking news report from Haaretz revealed that Trump would not be stopping at the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes memorial during his two-day trip to Poland. The memorial commemorates the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the 750 Jewish residents of the Warsaw ghetto who took up arms to resist Nazi troops that had arrived to deport the entire population of the ghetto to concentration camps.
Jewish community leaders in Poland have criticized Trump’s decision not to visit the monument. A statement cosigned by the President of the Jewish Community of Warsaw, the President of the Union of the Jewish Communities in Poland, and Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, released on Thursday, condemning the snub.
“We deeply regret that President Donald Trump, though speaking in public barely a mile away from the Monument, chose to break with that laudable tradition. We trust that this slight does not reflect the attitudes and feelings of the American people,” said the statement. It also notes that every U.S. president since 1989 has made a point of visiting the memorial.
Ivanka Trump, who is Jewish, did visit the monument and laid a wreath at its base with Schudrich. She called the experience “deeply moving” in an Instagram post, and failed to mention her father’s slight. Schudrich said that her visit was “very, very important,” but reiterated that her father’s snub was “sad.”
Unknown iFrame situation
Meanwhile, instead of visiting the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument, Trump gave a speech at the nearby Warsaw Uprising Monument, which commemorates Polish resistance fighters who rebelled against the Nazis in 1944, rather than the Jewish resistance fighters of the ghetto.
Trump’s decision to skip the Ghetto Uprising monument reflects ongoing problems with anti-Semitism in his administration. The Trump administration has refused to condemn anti-Semitic hate crimes, engaged in Holocaust denial, and let a State Department office to monitor anti-Semitism around the world go unstaffed.
Haaretz also noted in its report that Trump’s speech “seemed to embrace the Polish right wing narrative according to which the Poles were merely victims of the Nazis and did not play a proactive role in the slaughter of Jews.”
To make matters worse, he also mentioned the ghetto uprising alongside the ghetto itself in a list of “evils beyond description” endured by “the Polish people.”
Trump on Hitler and Stalin invading Poland: “That’s trouble. That’s tough.” pic.twitter.com/prE4uOhVnV
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 6, 2017
Annabel Thompson is an intern with ThinkProgress.