WARSAW: Poland's president on Saturday approved a law that will severely curb claims on properties seized after World War II, defying strong opposition from Israel and the United States.
The law sets a 30-year time limit on challenges to property confiscations - many of them relating to Poland's once thriving Jewish community.
Since confiscations mostly occurred during the Communist era in the aftermath of the war, the law will effectively block many possible claims.
President Andrzej Duda told Poland's PAP news agency that hoped the law would end an "era of legal chaos" and "reprivatisation mafias".
The government says it will restore legal certainty to the property market and block false claims.
When parliament passed the law this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had asked Duda not to sign it.
Lapid said it "damages both the memory of the Holocaust and the rights of its victims".
"I will continue to oppose any attempt to rewrite history, and to promote concessions that come at the expense of the Holocaust, of the Jewish people or the rights of Holocaust victims," he said.
Blinken said he was "deeply concerned" and urged Poland to approve a comprehensive law to cover confiscated property claims - something other countries in Central and Eastern European have done.
But Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said Poland "won't pay for Germany's crimes".
Six million Poles, half of them Jewish, were killed during World War II in Poland.
After the war, Communist authorities nationalised vast numbers of properties that had been left empty because their owners had been killed or fled.
While the law covers both Jewish and non-Jewish claimants, campaigners say Jewish owners will be disproportionately affected because they were often late in lodging claims after the war.
"Poland is, of course, not responsible for what Nazi Germany did during the Holocaust. However... Poland still benefits from this wrongfully acquired property," the World Jewish Restitution Organization (WJRO) said in a statement.
"Property restitution is about more than money - for many of Holocaust survivors and their families, a home is the last remaining physical connection to the lives they once led," the advocacy group said.
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