The American Jewish Committee called for a “swift political response” following the raising of plaques at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland which falsely accuse Jews of being responsible for Soviets killing Poles during the pogrom that occurred there 84 years ago this week. 

At least 340 Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in the massacre at Jedwabne on July 10, 1941. Marking the anniversary of the attack on Thursday, right-wing activist Wojciech Sumliński and his supporters illegally placed plaques in English and Polish several yards from the memorial, offering a revisionist account of what happened at the site. 

One of the plaques reads, “After the Soviets took over eastern Poland, Jews assumed administrative roles and, knowing the local realities, denounced Polish patriots who were then deported and murdered by the Soviets. Only the German attack on the Soviet Union halted these repressions. Then the Germans began killing Jews just as they had previously killed Poles by the millions.”

A separate group of right-wing extremists also disrupted a memorial ceremony at the site on Thursday with loudspeakers, screens showing a film denying the history of the massacre and threats to the Jewish community gathered at the memorial. 

“What happened today in Jedwabne is not only a disgrace to the memory of the victims, it is a test for Poland’s democracy,” Agnieszka Markiewicz, the AJC’s central Europe director, said in a statement. “The normalization of antisemitism, especially from elected officials like Grzegorz Braun, demands more than silence,” said Markiewicz, referring to Poland’s far-right lawmaker who on Thursday stated in a radio interview, “ritual murder is a fact, and Auschwitz with gas chambers is a fake.” 

“It demands moral clarity, legal accountability, and swift political response. Remembrance without responsibility is not remembrance at all,” Markiewicz said. 

The USC Shoah Foundation called the plaques “the most egregious perversion of [distorting] history, as it suggests that Jews collaborated with both Soviet and Nazi authorities against non-Jewish Poles. Such ahistorical, amoral claims are not only historically indefensible, but they are also a moral slander against the lives of those murdered during the Shoah and an affront to their memory.” 

Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, called for “the relevant Polish authorities to remove this offensive installation and to ensure that the historical meaning of the site is preserved and respected.” 

“Yad Vashem is profoundly shocked and deeply concerned by the desecration of historical truth and memory at the Jedwabne memorial site in Poland, where new plaques were recently installed in an apparent attempt to distort the story of the massacre of Jews.”