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Berkowicz held up a defaced Israeli flag in which the Star of David had been replaced with a swastika.
By United with Israel Staff
As Israel and Jewish communities around the world honored the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis on Holocaust Remembrance Day, a far-right Polish lawmaker delivered an openly antisemitic display inside the country’s parliament.
Speaking from the parliamentary rostrum on Tuesday, MP Konrad Berkowicz accused Israel of “genocide” and declared that “Israel is the new Third Reich.”
He then held up a defaced Israeli flag in which the Star of David had been replaced with a swastika, a direct desecration of a Jewish symbol and a blatant comparison between the Jewish state and Nazi Germany.
The incident drew sharp responses from Israeli and American officials, given the timing and nature of the display.
Israel’s embassy in Poland condemned what it described as “an antisemitic horror in the Polish parliament.”
“On Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Polish MP desecrated the Israeli flag and compared the Jewish symbol and the Jewish state to the Nazis, instead of showing solidarity with Holocaust victims,” the embassy said.
“As Holocaust survivors march in Auschwitz today, this vile anti-Jewish act is especially appalling,” the statement continued, calling on Polish authorities to “act now to address this disgrace and remove this moral stain.”
We condemn in the strongest terms today’s antisemitic horror in the Polish Parliament by MP Berkowicz.
On Israel’s official Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Polish MP desecrated the Israeli flag and compared the Jewish symbol and the Jewish state to the Nazis, instead of showing…
— Ambasada Izraela (@IsraelinPoland) April 14, 2026
The United States ambassador to Poland, Tom Rose, also responded forcefully on X. “SHAME SHAME SHAME on YOU!!” the ambassador wrote, adding that “we Jews aren’t so easy to push around anymore” and that Israel and its allies “defend ourselves with all our strength without apology.”
The act underscores how antisemitism continues to manifest through the distortion of Holocaust memory, including the use of Nazi imagery against Jews and the Jewish state.
The incident carries particular weight in Poland, once home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, where roughly 3 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
Against that backdrop, the display in parliament was not just political provocation but a clear act of antisemitism at the highest level.
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