Poland just showed its ugly face.
Rabbi Rafi Ostroff has spent 20 years leading Holocaust education tours through the country. He thought Poland was different from the rest of Europe — safer, friendlier, a place where Jews could walk openly.
Not anymore.
“This week I heard more antisemitic abuse than in all my years as a tour guide,” he said after returning home.
In Krakow, his students were walking quietly on Shabbat when cars slowed, windows opened, and strangers leaned out to scream “Free Palestine” like it was a battle cry.
In Warsaw, a 70-year-old woman marched up to the rabbi, spat in his face, and kept walking.
Then came the most twisted comment of all. On the way to the historic “Oneg Shabbat” archive site, a local woman demanded to know if they were going there to pray. When Ostroff explained they were just visiting, she snapped: “You should pray for the people you are murdering in Gaza.”
The group carried no Israeli flags, no symbols at all — just the wrong religion for the wrong streets.
“Every Jew labelled a murderer. That’s antisemitism,” Ostroff fired back. “I don’t call every Pole a collaborator — so why is every Jew a killer in their eyes?”
The rabbi says the hate feels bolder now, fuelled by war and legitimized by those who excuse it. And it’s bitterly ironic: he came to teach about the Holocaust and found himself living a smaller, modern version of it.
He hasn’t forgotten history either — the Poles who sold out their Jewish neighbours, the Kielce Pogrom where Polish police, soldiers, and civilians butchered 42 Holocaust survivors in 1946.
“Enough denial,” Ostroff said. “It’s time Poland owned up to its past and stood with the Jews instead of spitting in their faces.”
