IDF delegation reportedly barred from entering Birkenau with Israeli flags

By Zev Stub

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1 August 2025, 12:59 pm

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Zev Stub is the Times of Israel's reporter on diaspora affairs and Israeli real estate.

Participants with Israel's flag walk along a rail track leading to the gate of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, during the annual March of The Living to honor the victims of the Holocaust on April 24, 2025. (Photo by Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP)

Illustrative: Participants with Israel's flag walk along a rail track leading to the gate of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, during the annual March of The Living to honor the victims of the Holocaust on April 24, 2025. (Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP)

For what is believed to be the first time, a group of IDF soldiers at a ceremony at the Birkenau concentration camp in Poland has been barred by police from bringing an Israeli flag into the camp, according to the Hebrew daily Ynet.

A delegation of 180 Israeli officers and security officials taking part in the “Witnesses in Uniform” Holocaust commemoration program was halted Thursday at the entrance to the concentration camp when a local police officer refused to let them enter with their flags, Ynet reports.

Israeli officers and local agents were unable to reach an agreement with the police, and the soldiers had to enter without their flags.

Soldiers say the incident was tense and humiliating, and charge that the decision was driven by antisemitic beliefs.

“No ceremony has ever been stopped mid-way — never in Treblinka, Warsaw, or Majdanek,” one participant tells Ynet. “This shows that we are still fighting against antisemitism in Europe, and there are still those who are trying to change the Zionist narrative and the sanctity of this place for us.”