Netanyahu to open new Holocaust display at Auschwitz
Mr Netanyahu (L) met his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk in Warsaw on Wednesday
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is to open a new, permanent Holocaust exhibition at the Auschwitz death camp site in southern Poland.
The display in Block 27 places the former camp in the broader context of the Nazis' systematic attempt to wipe out Europe's Jewish population.
It is being overseen by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust institute.
Earlier in Warsaw, Mr Netanyahu accused Iran, one of Israel's strongest foes, of planning a new Holocaust.
The original Jewish exhibition at Auschwitz dated back to the 1960s and had fallen into neglect, prompting the Israeli government to decide recently on a revamp.
Children's testimony
An estimated 1.1 million Jews, together with some 200,000 people of other ethnicity, died in Auschwitz and the adjacent Birkenau camp, in gas chambers or from starvation, disease and forced labour.
Correspondents say the new display features:
- a 360-degree montage of the pre-war Jewish life
- recreated drawings of some of the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust
- recorded survivor testimonies
- massive volumes of books listing the names of some 4.2 million Jewish victims that Yad Vashem painstakingly managed to recover
On a visit to the Polish capital on Wednesday, Mr Netanyahu warned that Iran was now a major threat to the Jews.
Iranians are going to the polls on Friday to elect a new president, with the hard-line incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, not eligible for a third term.
Mr Netanyahu said the Iranian election on Friday would "change nothing" in the Islamic republic's alleged quest for nuclear weapons.
"This is a regime that is building nuclear weapons with the expressed purpose to annihilate Israel's six million Jews," he said. "We will not allow this to happen. We will never allow another Holocaust."
Tehran denies seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
Iran is viewed as threat in Israel because of its aggressive rhetoric, its support for militant groups in the region, its arsenal of long-range missiles and its nuclear work.
However, critics of the Israeli prime minister have accused him of citing the Holocaust too frequently in the context of Iran.
Aluf Benn, editor of liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote in aneditorial last week: "Shoah [Holocaust] warnings have taken over the political and military discourse."
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