BREAKING NEWS

Simon Wiesenthal Center considers travel advisory for Poland

WARSAW - Jewish human rights organization Simon Wiesenthal Center said on Wednesday it was considering issuing a travel advisory for Jews urging them to limit their visits to Poland after the country's relations with Israel were strained.
This month Poland sparked international criticism, including from Israel and the United States, when it approved a law that imposes jail terms for suggesting the country was complicit in the Holocaust.
Some three million Jews who lived in pre-war Poland were murdered by the Nazis during their occupation of the country. They accounted for about half of all Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Poland's nationalist ruling party says the new law is needed to ensure that Poles are also recognised as victims, not perpetrators, of Nazi aggression. It notes that the Nazis also viewed Slavs as racially inferior and that many Poles were killed or forced into slave labour during the German occupation.
"In wake of the controversial new Holocaust Law in Poland and the anti-Semitism it has unleashed that has left the Jewish community shaken, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) is considering issuing a Travel Advisory for world Jewry," the organisation said in a statement issued late on Wednesday.
"A Travel Advisory would urge Jews to limit their travel to Poland only to visit ancestral graves and Holocaust-era Death Camps," the NGO named after legendary Nazi hunter who died in 2005 said.