Holocaust survivors and scholars said the international community’s abandonment of the Jewish state belies its promises to learn from the genocide.
By Canaan Lidor in Oswiecim, Poland, JNS
As world leaders and dignitaries gathered Monday at the Auschwitz Museum for a Holocaust commemoration ceremony, Shaul Spielmann, 93, wondered about the sincerity of their gesture.
From his home in Ashkelon, Israel, the Vienna-born survivor of Auschwitz asked JNS: “How can those world leaders speak of remembering the Holocaust even as they relentlessly persecute the only Jewish state, Israel, and want to arrest its leaders and soldiers for the crime of insisting on surviving?”
Spielmann’s question echoes those of a growing number of critics, who struggle to reconcile promises to remember the lessons of the Holocaust internationally with what they view as a betrayal of the Jewish people and state by the international community and its leaders and institutions.
In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27, the day that Red Army troops liberated Auschwitz in 1945, as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It’s now commemorated worldwide, though Israel and Jewish communities in the Diaspora commemorate the Holocaust mainly on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, which occurs in the spring, midway between Passover and Israeli Independence Day.
In the leadup to Monday’s ceremony at Auschwitz marking 80 years since its liberation, Polish media reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be arrested if he set foot in Poland, in accordance with the warrant issued last year for alleged war crimes by the International Court of Justice, which has jurisdiction in Poland.
Polish President Andrzej Duda later clarified that Netanyahu would not be arrested. Netanyahu, who is recovering from surgery and overseeing a tense ceasefire on two fronts, did not travel to Poland, where Israel is being represented by Education Minister Yoav Kisch.
The uncertainty around the arrest warrant—which Israel said was an expression of antisemitism and the U.S. called a miscarriage of justice—underlined the tension between the international community’s commitment to remember what happened to Jews in the Holocaust and its indifference or hostility to their fate now.
Holocaust survivors attend the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army 80 years ago, in Oswiecim, Poland, on Jan. 27, 2025. Photo by Sergei Gapon/AFP via Getty Images.
Sympathy for dead Jews
“Those who refuse to help Israel today are echoing the despicable behavior of those who refused to help Jews during the Holocaust,” Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, told JNS.
The U.N.’s attacks on Israel, in its resolutions and through its International Court of Justice, are “outrageous” and “make a mockery of International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” he added. “What’s the use of sympathy for dead Jews if the U.N. is ready and willing to endanger live Jews?” asked Medoff.
Such skepticism intensified following the international reaction to Oct. 7, 2023, when about 6,000 Hamas-led terrorists invaded Israel, murdering some 1,200 people— the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—and abducting another 251.
The attack prompted other terrorist groups and Iran to join the aggression, leading Israel to respond. It plunged the region into a regional war that only recently abated, at least temporarily, due to ceasefires with Lebanon and Hamas.
Despite support and expressions of solidarity of Israel by the U.S. under then-President Joe Biden and its other Western allies, the limits of their support soon became obvious. The United States sent massive aid to Israel but denied it crucial munitions and attempted to block elements of its response to the attacks. France, Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom and others imposed partial or full arms embargoes on Israel.
In all of those countries and beyond, the terrorists’ attacks on Israel inspired a wave of antisemitic attacks on local Jews. Many believe that the perpetrators of those attacks were emboldened by their government’s actions on Israel.
Ireland, Belgium, and Spain are among the 15 countries that have accused Israel of perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians at the International Court of Justice, a U.N. tribunal that is separate from the International Criminal Court. Israel, the United States and other countries have rejected the allegations.
The Irish prime minister attended Monday’s event at Auschwitz, along with his counterparts from Canada, Croatia, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, as well as the presidents of Germany, Austria, Finland, Italy, Switzerland and Ukraine. Dozens of former prisoners also attended, many of them Jewish, wearing striped scarves resembling the infamous uniforms they wore here are prisoners.
Shocking to our children and grandchildren
“The rampant antisemitism that’s spreading among the nations is shocking, shocking to all to our children and our grandchildren,” said Tova Friedman, who survived Auschwitz as a child and now lives in New Jersey. “Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for its very existence and way of life,” she observed in a speech at the main ceremony.
Frail and aging, some survivors were brought in wheelchairs to the heated tent where the ceremony was held. Earlier, some of them used the relatively mild weather to tour the camp, aided by relatives who helped them negotiate muddy paths flanked by mounds of melting snow.
Another survivor, Frank Lowy, spoke of the importance of commemorating the Holocaust at Auschwitz, where the Nazis and their helpers murdered 1 million Jews out of the 6 million murdered in the Holocaust.
“I think it’s very important what they’re doing here in the Auschwitz-Birkenau, and having this huge function and having thousands and thousands of people come. You bring the issue of hatred to the fore, and anybody who comes here sees what it can do,” Lowy told JNS.
Lowy donated a cattle wagon to the museum in memory of his father, Hugo. In May 1944, an SS guard beat Hugo Lowy to death because he had refused to leave behind a bundle carrying his tefillin and tallit. “I am always filled by strength and determination when I recall the sacrifice my father made,” Lowy said.
In an interview he gave at the museum’s studio, he stressed Israel’s role in assuring the survival of the Jewish people. Lowy recently left Australia for Israel and now lives in Tel Aviv, he said. “I am proud to live in the Jewish state, where the Jewish people can live and defend itself and thrive forever and ever,” said Lowy, who was born in what is now Slovakia.
Many survivors at the event in Auschwitz mentioned Israel, and a moderator for the museum’s studio said during an interview with Kisch that the word “genocide” is “abused against Israel,” thereby “diminishing the importance” of what happened at the camp.
Anti-Israel abuse
Elsewhere, some Holocaust commemorations on Jan. 27 this year featured anti-Israel abuse, critics said.
In Ireland, Jewish protesters were dragged out of commemoration because they stood up and silently turned their backs to President Michael Higgins—whom Israel has accused of antisemitism—when he said the ceasefire with Hamas was “belated.”
In Milan, Italy, the Jewish community boycotted the city’s Holocaust commemoration event to protest the inclusion of anti-Israel co-organizers.
“In Italy and beyond, Jews start to ask: ‘Why should we participate in this day of remembrance, when there are people that the following day, go rally with friends of Hamas. Some Jews say it’s better to shut down this day of remembrance because it’s useless,” said Davide Romano, director of the Jewish Brigade Museum of Milano.
Romano, who has stopped attending Jan. 27 commemorations in recent years due to abuse of the Holocaust’s memory, proposed to institute instead of the U.N.-designated Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Antisemitism.
The initiative to designate Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day came from Ron Adam, a former ambassador of Israel to the U.N., whose efforts led to the passing of General Assembly Resolution 60/7, designating the memorial day.
Adam “had the right idea,” Medoff said, as “the international community does have a moral responsibility to acknowledge and commemorate the Holocaust.”
But “right from the start, there were worrisome signs of politicization, when the UN officials involved in drafting resolution 60/7 refused to include the word ‘antisemitism,’” added Medoff.
Global failure
The international community and the U.N.’s “betrayal” of Israel makes its Holocaust memorial day “practically meaningless,” said Efraim Zuroff, a Holocaust historian and prominent hunter of Nazis.
The global failure—except in the United States, Germany and the Soviet Union—to prosecute Nazi war criminals also belies the international community’s stated commitment to drawing lessons from the Holocaust, Zuroff argued.
While working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Zuroff sent hundreds of names of Nazi war criminals to authorities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and other countries where perpetrators fled. The U.S. deported 109 war criminals.
In Canada, the first trial of a perpetrator was also the last, after the judge accepted the defendant’s defense that he was only following orders. It created a precedent that prevented convictions.
Meanwhile, Poland has passed laws that make it illegal to accuse Polish people of complicity in Nazi crimes, despite a wealth of evidence of this phenomenon, alongside thousands of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews. This move has led many to question Poland’s suitability to host the Jan. 27 event at its state museum and to commemorate the Holocaust more broadly.
That law is “deeply troubling,” Medoff said, as is the Polish government’s “minimalist stance on the restitution of Jewish property.” The mixed signals from Polish officials about possibly arresting Israel’s prime minister have sparked “widespread uneasiness in the Jewish world and “Poland’s failure to satisfactorily address these issues could cast a shadow over Holocaust commemorations there,” he added.
Netanyahu focused on the tension around Israel’s treatment in a tweet he posted on Monday.
“On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I call on all civilized nations to confront antisemitism wherever it appears—on college campuses, city streets, or international forums like the ICC,” he wrote.
“Founded in the shadow of the Holocaust, the ICC has disgraced itself with antisemitic attacks on Israel. Hamas are the new Nazis, and we are committed to defeating them once and for all. The Jewish state will always stand as a safe haven for Jews worldwide.”
Yacov Livne, Israel’s ambassador to Poland, told JNS that, despite attempts to distort the memory of the Holocaust to target Israel, the tides are turning on the distorters.
“There’s a growing realization in the United States, in Europe and beyond, that, just as Jews were in the Holocaust merely the first victims of Nazism, Israel is only the first victim of the fanatic jihadism that it is not facing,” said Livne.