Warsaw, Poland – President Obama was confronted Friday with a plea from a Polish Jew to support Israel just moments after he landed in the country where Nazis staged the Holocaust.
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Marking the first stop in his two-day visit to Poland, United States President Barack Obama visited the memorials where tens of thousands of Jews were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War.
About two dozen members of the city’s Jewish community gathered to watch the ceremony, and Obama greeted them afterward. Taking his extended hand, a woman told him, “It’s the only Jewish state we have and we trust you,” Monika Krawczyk told the President on his first visit to Poland.
“I will always be there for Israel,” Obama replied.
Obama also told a man in a kippa, the Jewish skullcap, “We will always be there,’’ the US support for Israel “I promise.’’
Obama also planted a kiss on Halina Szpilman, the widow of Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman, whose harrowing story was the subject of Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning movie “The Pianist.”
Obama’s first stop was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where he laid a wreath and then shook hands with smiling Polish veterans of World War II – and Polish soldiers who fought alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The President also laid a wreath at the memorial to the doomed Jewish Ghetto fighters, who rose up in Warsaw against the Nazis in 1943.
“What a wonderful visit,” said Obama, who promised to return in two years with his daughters for the opening of the Jewish heritage museum.
Obama had first planned to come to Poland last year for the funeral of President Lech Kaczynski, who was killed in a plane crash along with other Polish leaders. But Obama’s visit was scrapped six hours before his departure because of a volcanic ash cloud over Europe that disrupted air travel. The president visited a memorial to the 96 who died in the crash on his way out of town on Saturday.
After a long week with a crowded agenda, Obama seemed more than ready to head home. The tired-looking president paused midway through his answer to a Polish reporter to ask the man to repeat parts of his question.
The president had been counting down the days until his return to Washington.
“One more day,” he told reporters traveling with him Friday in France.
He only says so, for our vote.
Rabbi Schudrich the chief rabbi of Poland is known to be a tireless Askan for Jewish cemeteries in Poland, because of him hundreds of cemeteries in Poland were saved from total destruction.