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Efraim Shamir: "I'm part Polish, part Israeli. To recover my integrity, the two parts must be reunited."
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WARSAW (AFP)---Israeli rocker Efraim Shamir on Thursday regained Polish citizenship stripped 40 years ago by Poland's then communist regime during the anti-Semitic purges of 1968.
"I'm part Polish, part Israeli. To recover my integrity, the two parts must be reunited," Shamir said, quoted by the Polish PAP news agency.
As a child the musician left the southern Polish city of Bytom with his family as one of thousands of Jews exiled by Poland's communist leaders.
This March the Polish government announced simplified terms on which Polish Jews exiled in 1968 can regain citizenship of Poland, a member of the European Union since 2004.
The announcement was made to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1968 anti-Semitic purges, provoked by student revolts in March of the same year.
Between 15,000 and 20,000 Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors or their children, were stripped of their jobs, private property and citizenship before being forced out of the country.
