10 August 2007
The Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, has condemned the recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery, calling it an act of hate against both Jews and Poles. About 100 gravestones at a large Jewish cemetery in the southern town of Czestochowa were found smeared with Nazi symbols and slogans over the weekend, in what the Jewish community has described as one of the worst cases of such desecration in Europe in many years.
In a letter to the head of the Jewish cultural and social association of Czestochowa, Halina Wasilewicz, the President wrote "This act of aggression is unusually shocking, especially because the Czestochowa graveyard belongs to one of the most impressive Jewish cemeteries in Poland. This act of hate serves not only an act of aggression against the place and respect for the dead, but against the heritage of Czestochowa, against the common history of its Polish and Jewish residents."
Kaczynski has won praise from Poland's Jewish community in the past for supporting Jewish cultural projects and for condemning past acts of anti-Semitism. Poland's chief rabbi, Michal Schudrich, said the president's latest letter also sends an important message, that “while anti-Semitism does exist in Poland, as it does tragically in other countries, in today's Poland such hatred will never be tolerated,"
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