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Official: Poland’s Jewish past underrepresented

By · August 29, 2008

Poland’s former president said his country’s rich Jewish past is underrepresented.

Poland needs “to show that the common life of Poles and Jews here was very rich, very intensive and very interesting,” Aleksander Kwasniewski, the current head of the European Council on Tolerance and Reconciliation, told Reuters Thursday.

Kwasniewski also said it was a problem that “for many Jewish communities around the world, Poland is associated with the Nazi Holocaust. That is a dramatic part, but only a part, of this whole history.”

Poland was once a sanctuary for Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere in Europe, but over 90 percent of its Jewish population of 3 million was murdered in the Holocaust.

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