Warsaw ghetto vandal to speak at Momentum's Corbyn festival

A woman who spray-painted graffiti “tainted with anti-semitism” on one of the last surviving walls of the Warsaw ghetto will speak at a Momentum event alongside the Labour Party conference this month.

Ewa Jasiewicz, a British anti-Israel activist, caused outrage with her “desecration” of the site, where an estimated 92,000 Jews died and 300,000 more were held before being transported to death camps.

Jasiewicz will speak from the platform at Momentum’s politics and arts festival, The World Transformed, which will take place in parallel with Labour’s conference in Liverpool. Other speakers will include Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor.

The ghetto was almost razed by the Germans in 1943, but in 2010 Jasiewicz and another activist, Yonatan Shapira, sprayed the words “Liberate all ghettos” and “Free Gaza and Palestine” on one of the few original walls.

Describing themselves as “civilians with little else in our hands aside from our solidarity and a spray can”, Jasiewicz and Shapira said it was a “small act of unarmed resistance” against how Israel had “co-opted” the Holocaust to serve “agendas of colonisation and repression”.

At the time, Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, described the graffiti as “tainted with anti-semitism”.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/warsaw-ghetto-vandal-to-speak-at-momentums-corbyn-festival-0rr8m7wqb