Israel has expressed anger at the decision of Poland’s president to sign a bill that would set limits on the ability of Jews to recover property seized by Nazi German occupiers and retained by post-war communist rulers.
Before World War Two, Poland had been home to one of the world’s biggest Jewish communities, but it was almost entirely wiped out by the Nazis and Jewish former property owners and their descendants have been campaigning for compensation.
Up to now, Jewish expatriates or their descendants could make a claim that a property had been seized illegally and demand its return, but Polish officials argued this was causing uncertainty over property ownership.
In 2015 Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled there should be specific deadlines after which administrative decisions over property titles could no longer be challenged. Changes to the law were adopted by the Polish parliament earlier this week.
The bill sets a 30-year limit for restitution claims.
The issue of Jewish property rights in Poland is further complicated because, unlike other EU states, it has not created a fund to give compensation to people whose property was seized.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett condemned the law and said Israel would not simply stand by at its approval. “It is a shameful decision and a disgraceful contempt for the memory of the Holocaust,” he said in a statement.
Israel’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, said: “Poland today, for the first time, approved an anti-Semitic and immoral law.” In response, the head of Israel’s embassy in Warsaw was being called back immediately, he said.
