The Polish bill on the return of World War II raises a queue with Israel

Poland and Israel are increasingly involved in Polish law, with critics saying it will make it harder for Jews to recover property lost in World War II and beyond.

The Polish constitutional court ruled in 2015 that the deadline for filing an administrative decision (often the purpose of refund claims) should be set.

On Thursday evening, the lower house of the Polish parliament approved a bill that sets limits for 10 to 30 years to some of the challenges, and received an angry response from Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.

Lapid said the proposed changes were “a direct and painful violation of the rights of Holocaust survivors and their descendants,” and that Poland was making a “serious mistake.”

“No law will change history. The new Polish law is shameful and will seriously damage relations between the two countries, “he wrote on Twitter.” Israel will remain as a defensive wall that protects the memory of the Holocaust and the honor of the Holocaust survivors and their property. “

Pawel Jablonski, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, rejected it, saying Lapid’s statement should be “certainly denounced” as showing “bad will and, above all, a profound lack of knowledge.”

“Poles and Jews were victims of German cruelty [the second world war]. [The] The law passed by the Sejm parliament protects victims and their heirs from fraud and ill-treatment and establishes the 2015 Constitutional Court ruling, ”he wrote on Twitter.

The Polish Jewish community was once the largest in the world, with more than 3m on the brink of World War II. But it was wiped out by the Nazis after Germany invaded and occupied Poland in 1939.

Claims for restitution were effectively blocked in the post-war communist era, but since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, families who lost property sought refund or compensation.

However, unlike other Central European countries, Poland has not adopted a comprehensive law on recovery, despite several attempts to do so, and property claims can take years to resolve.

In addition to Israel’s angry reaction, the still-proposed changes, which are expected to be approved by the Polish Senate and signed by the president, have also received criticism from the US.

Earlier this week, Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna published an excerpt from a letter sent to the lower house of the Polish parliament by Bix Aliu, the U.S. head of business in Warsaw, in which the United States expressed “deep concern” over the bill.

“If exceeded, [it] it would cause irreparable damage to Polish Holocaust survivors and their families, ”he wrote.

The U.S. embassy in Warsaw did not want to confirm or deny the contents of the letter.