Noa Kirel accepted an invitation on Thursday from the Polish Foreign Ministry to visit Poland after her recent comments about her family being killed in the Holocaust caused upset in the country.
Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski said that the singer had accepted an official invitation to visit Poland after her comments at the end of the Eurovision..
Jablonski expressed excitement on Friday in a tweet announcing that Kirel, who represented Israel and took third place in the Eurovision grand finale in Liverpool on May 13, will visit his country.
“Thank you @noakirel for accepting my invitation to visit Poland again,” he wrote. “I hope that together we will use this opportunity to discuss history, commemoration of the victims of Holocaust and other WWII crimes, and also the futer – how to inspire Polish & Israeli youth to learn about history and get to know each other. Against false stereotypes.”
✅ Bardzo się cieszę, że @noakirel przyjęła moje zaproszenie do Polski – i że będziemy mogli porozmawiać o historii naszych narodow, o upamiętnieniu ofiar Holokaustu i innych zbrodni II Wojny Światowej, a także o przyszłości – zwłaszcza o tym jak sprawić, by młodzi ludzie w… https://t.co/uVmZqAMoXB
— Paweł Jabłoński (@paweljablonski_) May 25, 2023
The invitation for Kirel to visit Poland came a week ago, according to Jablonski, who in a tweet on May 20 wrote:
Jewish Youth from all over the world participating in the March of the Living seen at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp site in Poland, as Israel marks annual Holocaust Memorial Day, on April 16, 2015. (credit: YOSSI ZELIGER/FLASH90)“And Mrs. @noakirel herself will be invited to Poland – the invitation will be sent in the coming week – primarily to understand why she thinks about our homeland in this way, to explain why it is painful for us and why we do not agree to it to talk about the common history of our nations – and to see with her own eyes the places where Nazi Germany committed cruel crimes against Poles and Jews in our country.”
What were Kirel’s comments on Polish role in the Holocaust?
Kirel faced backlash from Poland after she commented on her Eurovision performance’s connection to the Holocaust.
In an interview with Israeli news site Ynet, Kirel spoke about her experiences throughout Eurovision, and what it had been like to achieve so much success throughout the competition.
Commenting on the 12-point score (the highest possible) given to her by Poland’s jurors, the young pop sensation said that her “real victory was putting Israel on the map, leaving a mark and making my country proud of me. Also, to receive 12 points from Poland after almost the entire Kirel family was murdered there in the Holocaust is a great achievement.”
Polish parliament member Anna Maria Żukowska, directing her complaints at the Israeli Embassy in Poland via Twitter, asked: “Does this statement reflect the level of Holocaust education in Israel? Do young people in Israel think that the Holocaust was caused by Poland, over which a young Israeli citizen can achieve a moral victory after many decades, or what?”
In a follow-up tweet, she added that “perhaps [Kirel] has something to say about the points received from Germany,” in a reference to the fact that neither the German jury nor the public granted Israel any points during the final.
Jablonski also responded to Kirel’s comments, writing in a long-form tweet that “the fact that many people in Israel consider Poland to be a co-perpetrator of German crimes – rather than their victim – is often not the result of bad will so much as it is a result of lack of knowledge and incomplete education.
“There are many reasons for this, but one of them was certainly the organized trips of Israeli youth to Poland, which, unfortunately, confirmed the image of our country’s participation [in the Holocaust] for many years.”
Jablonski continued, turning his attention to the new format he recently introduced for Israel’s trips to Poland in which students will also visit one site recommended by the Polish government.
“We are starting a long process that will certainly not produce results immediately – but at the same time, I am sure that in the long run, it will allow us to build good Polish-Israeli relations, based on truth and mutual understanding that both our nations were victims of German crimes.
He concluded the series of tweets with an invitation for Kirel to visit Poland.
Despite having the largest number of Righteous Among the Nations – that is, non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust – most historians consider the long history of antisemitism among a sizeable portion of Poland’s citizens a contribution to the Nazis’ ability to murder 90% of its pre-war 3.3 million Jewish population.
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