Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jersey City Monument To Katyn Massacre Sparks Controversy

WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Plans to move a monument in Jersey City commemorating the victims of World War II’s Katyn Forest massacre sparked protests among people of Polish descent living in the United States, as well as Polish politicians and representatives of the Polish-Jewish community.

The monument commemorating the massacre created by Polish-American sculptor Andrzej Pitynski,  has stood in Jersey City’s Exchange Place on the bank of the Hudson River since 1991, but is set to be removed due to work a waterfront redevelopment project.

In 1940, the Soviet secret police murdered over 20,000 captured Polish citizens, including soldiers and police officers, in the Katyn Forest in western Russia. Several hundred of the victims were Jewish. The execution was carried out with a gunshot to the back of the head. Mass graves were discovered by the Germans in 1943, and the Soviet Union initially did not admit to committing the crime, blaming the Nazis instead.

The bronze and granite statue shows a tied-up Polish soldier who has been stabbed in the back with a rifle bayonet.

Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop has asserted that the city is not removing the monument completely, rather putting it in storage until the park planned for the area on which it sits is completed.

Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, President of Warsaw Jewish community Anna Chipczynska and President of the Union of Jewish Communities Leslaw Piszewski, said in a statement that they “don’t understand, and disagree with, the plans to remove the monument.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.