Poland’s foreign minister has summoned Israel’s ambassador to Warsaw after a social media post by Yad Vashem — Israel’s official Holocaust museum — sparked renewed diplomatic tensions over Poland’s role during World War II.

Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski announced Monday that Ambassador Yaakov Finkelstein was being formally summoned following a post on the platform X in which Yad Vashem highlighted that Jews in Poland were the first to be forced to wear identifying armbands under Nazi rule.

The post read: “Poland was the first country where Jews were forced to wear a distinctive badge in order to isolate them from the surrounding population,” alongside a link to an article detailing the November 23, 1939 decree by Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of the German-controlled General Government. The order mandated that all Jews aged 10 and above wear a white armband marked with a blue Star of David.

Sikorski objected to the wording of the post, arguing that it failed to explicitly state that Poland was under Nazi occupation at the time.

“Poland was German-occupied,” he wrote on X, saying this point must be clearly stated to avoid misleading historical implications. Yad Vashem subsequently reposted the original post with clarification: “As noted by many users and specified explicitly in the linked article, it was done by order of the German authorities.”

However, Sikorski deemed the clarification insufficient. “Since the misleading post has not been amended, I have decided to summon the ambassador of @Israel,” he wrote.

The dispute is the latest chapter in an ongoing diplomatic clash over Holocaust memory, specifically the extent to which Polish society and institutions participated in or resisted Nazi persecution. Poland has pushed back aggressively in recent years against statements it says suggest Polish responsibility for Nazi crimes, while Israeli institutions have insisted on documenting historical nuance — including cases of Polish collaboration — alongside persecution and rescue efforts.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)