Poland summons 'Israel’s' ambassador over controversial Holocaust post

• Poland summoned 'Israel’s' ambassador over a controversial Yad Vashem tweet.
• Warsaw argued the post failed to clarify Nazi Germany, not Poland, forced Jews to wear star badges.

Poland summoned 'Israel’s' ambassador Yaakov Finkelstein on Monday in response to a social media post by Yad Vashem, 'Israel’s' Holocaust memorial institute, which Warsaw said misrepresented historical facts by implying that Polish authorities forced Jews to wear star badges during World War Two.

The controversy erupted after Yad Vashem tweeted that Poland was the first country where Jews were compelled to wear “a distinctive badge to isolate them from the surrounding population.” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski criticized the post for failing to clarify that Poland was under Nazi German occupation at the time.

Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear a distinctive badge in order to isolate them from the surrounding population. #OTD 23 November 1939 Hans Frank, the governor of the Generalgouvernement issued an order that all Jews aged 10 and above must wear a white… pic.twitter.com/yUlOGIiaUC

— Yad Vashem (@yadvashem) November 23, 2025

“Since the misleading post has not been amended, I have decided to summon the ambassador of Israel to the foreign ministry,” Sikorski wrote on X.

Yad Vashem responded by reposting the original tweet with a clarification, stating, “As noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities.”

Poland, occupied by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1945, stresses that the persecution of Jews on its territory, including in Auschwitz-Birkenau, was carried out by German occupiers. More than three million of Poland’s 3.2 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, accounting for roughly half of all European Jewish victims.

“This is clearly reflected in our material. Any other interpretation misreads our commitment to accuracy,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, wrote on X, emphasizing that the institute presents “the historical realities of Nazism and WW2, including countries under German occupation, control or influence. Poland was indeed under German occupation.”