World leaders gather in Jerusalem for Auschwitz liberation anniversary

Dozens of world leaders gathered in Jerusalem on Thursday to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, amid a backdrop of rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States.

Israel has hailed the World Holocaust Forum at the Yad Vashem memorial centre as the biggest international gathering in its history.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting on the sidelines of the conference with his Israeli counterpart Reuven Rivlin, said xenophobia and anti-Semitism must be opposed everywhere, regardless of who is behind the hatred.

"You just said that it's not known where anti-Semitism ends," Putin told Rivlin, referring to remarks the Israeli president made at their meeting. "Unfortunately we do know this - it ends with Auschwitz."

The high-profile guest list includes U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, French President Emmanuel Macron, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Britain's Prince Charles.

However, the president of Poland, where the death camp was built by the Nazi German occupiers during World War Two, will stay away due to rankling disputes with both Russia and Israel.

Poland will host its own event at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum on Jan. 27, as it does every year.

More than one million people, most of them Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Speeches at the Jerusalem event are likely to focus on the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust as well as a more recent rise in anti-Semitism rhetoric and attacks worldwide https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-antisemitism/anti-semitic-attacks-rise-worldwide-in-2018-led-by-us-west-europe-study-idUSKCN1S73M1.

A global survey https://global100.adl.org/about/2019 by the U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League in November found that global anti-Semitic attitudes had increased, and significantly so in Eastern and Central Europe. It found that large percentages of people in many European countries think Jews talk too much about the Holocaust.

POLISH ANGER

Polish President Andrzej Duda turned down an invitation to the conference, expressing dissatisfaction that representatives of Russia, France, Britain, the United States and Germany would speak, while Poland was told it would not be allowed to.

Israeli organisers said the four World War Two allies, and Germany, would address the gathering.

Polish leaders have also been angered by comments made by Putin last month suggesting Poland shared responsibility for the war. Poland, which was invaded first by Nazi Germany and then by Soviet forces in September, 1939, sees itself as a major victim of the war, in which it lost a fifth of its population.

Thursday's gathering in Jerusalem could burnish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's domestic image as an international statesman. The veteran right-wing leader faces his third election in less than a year on March 2, amid legal woes and political deadlock.

At a meeting with Netanyahu on Thursday ahead of the Holocaust Forum, Putin said he had given assurances to the mother of Naama Issachar, a U.S.-Israeli woman jailed in Russia on drug charges, that "everything will be okay" for her daughter. Israel has called on Russia to release Issachar who was sentenced by a Russian court to seven and a half years in jail for smuggling nine grams (0.3 oz) of cannabis.

She was arrested during a stopover at Moscow airport in April, and her case has been widely followed in Israel.