"There were more antisemitic insults and comments this past week than in all my 20 years of being a tour guide in Poland," Rabbi Rafi Ostroff, a part-time Poland tour guide and Head of the Gush Etzion Religious Council, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Rabbi Ostroff just returned from Poland, where he took a group of students on a Holocaust education tour, something he has been doing two or three times a year for two decades.
"It's not only learning about the Holocaust but learning about Jewish life beforehand and therefore what was lost."
In his whole time running such trips, Ostroff says he has felt "no tension at all" and, on the contrary, felt "very safe."
"If you try and compare Poland to other countries in Europe it's much better; you can walk around with Jewish signs. I've never felt any threat."
He recalled an interview with Israeli media where the interviewer said, 'We all know Poles are antisemites,' something Ostroff dismissed. "There always was and may always be antisemitism in Poland," he told the Post, "but I meet and work with a lot of Polish people and I call them the guardians of Jewish history."
On nearly every trip, Ostroff is in touch with the Forum of Dialogue - the oldest Polish non-profit dedicated to improving Polish/Jewish relations and preserving Jewish life.
Increase in antisemitism
However, this changed last week.
"Either the situation with the war has deteriorated so badly, or it's that antisemites now feel there is a legitimacy to their antisemitism, and are now letting it rise to the surface." In any case, Ostroff experienced antisemitism several times during the trip.
While the group were walking through Krakow on Shabbat, cars were "driving past and people were leaning out and shouting slurs such as 'Free Palestine.'"
In Warsaw, Ostroff was standing next to a marketplace when a 70-year-old woman walked up, spat on him, and then walked away.
"This incident caused me a lot of sorrow," he told the Post.
Another shocking incident occurred in the Polish capital; the group was heading to the 'Oneg Shabbat' archive site - a secret archive created in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his collaborators.
"A local woman came and asked us if we were going to pray there. I told her, 'No, we aren't coming to pray there, we are coming to visit the site.' She replied: 'You should go there and pray for the people you are murdering in Gaza."
In all of these instances, the group was wearing or carrying nothing that indicated they were from Israel, no flags or the like. They were simply identified as Jews, Ostroff explained.
"Labelling every Jew as a murderer is antisemitic," he said. "I don't think every Pole is an antisemite, or every Pole was a collaborator during the Holocaust, so if I don't think that, why do you think that about every Jewish person?"
He noted the irony of being Polish and experiencing antisemitism while also talking about what happened to Jews, and talking about the Poles who snitched on the Jews. Jews were also murdered by Poles after the Holocaust, notably during the July 1946 Kielce Pogrom, where a mob of Polish soldiers, police officers, and civilians murdered at least 42 Jews and injured over 40.
"A large majority of Poles stood by [during the Holocaust] and failed the moral standards expected of human beings." He cited examples of countries such as Bulgaria that protected their Jewish population and refused to turn them in.
"It's about time the relationship between Jews and Poles is amended," Ostroff said. "We need to strengthen those forces within Poland that side with Israel, and maybe finally Poles will recognize what they did during the war."