Fierce anti-Semitic slurs & swastika appear on Krakow ghetto wall (PHOTOS)

A hateful message was sprayed on a wall of the former Krakow ghetto, one of the largest in Nazi-occupied Poland, adding more fuel to the simmering feud between Israel and the Eastern European country.

The graffiti, which read “w***e Jews, get the f**k out of Poland” alongside the swastika, was discovered on Tuesday in the historic center of Krakow. The municipal authorities painted over the graffiti, sprayed with a tar-like substance, on the day it was found, but photos quickly spread across social media.

Police searched the vicinity but failed to find anyone involved in spray-painting the graffiti, which appeared on the wall amid Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) celebrations. The news comes just days after a similar hate-filled message was written on a Jewish cemetery wall in the nearby town of Tarnow.

In recent months, Poland has seen a string of anti-Semitic and far-right incidents which have sparked outrage at home, among them articles by a Polish weekly describing the “names, anthropological features, appearances and methods of operation” of Jews, along with their “disinformation activities,” and far-right marches at Auschwitz that called for a “fight against Jewry” in Poland.

There has also been an array of incendiary statements made by politicians of both countries which have resulted in a crisis in Israeli-Polish relations.

Last year, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki drew the ire of Tel Aviv by claiming there were “Jewish perpetrators” in the Holocaust, while refusing to accept the notion of “Polish concentration camps.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired back, saying “the Poles collaborated with the Nazis.”

As the spat lingered, the then-Israeli foreign minister tested the limits of diplomatic etiquette, accusing the Poles of “suckling antisemitism from their mothers’ milk.” As a result, high-profile visits by Polish officials were cancelled and several bilateral projects frozen.

Tel Aviv and Warsaw managed to defuse tensions, which nevertheless flared up again in late September, when a media report alleged that Polish President Andrzej Duda attributed Israel’s “anti-Polish rhetoric” to rising antisemitism in his country. However, his spokesperson denied the report, calling it “not only inaccurate” but “plainly not true.”

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