JERUSALEM, Jan. 28 (Xinhua) -- The prime ministers of Israel and Poland decided Sunday to start bilateral talks to reach an agreed wording of a Polish bill that bans mentions of Polish complicity in crimes committed during the Holocaust.
The talks may halt an escalating diplomatic crisis between the two countries after the lower house of the Polish parliament voted in favor the controversial bill on Friday, sparking an uproar in Israel.
On Sunday evening, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office released a statement saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki talked over the phone about the issue.
"The two agreed to begin an immediate dialogue between teams from both countries to try to reach understandings on the legislation," the statement read.
The new legislation proposes to jail a person who blames Poland or the Poles for Nazi crimes against humanity, which were committed in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. The bill also prohibits phrases such as "Polish death camps."
Israeli leaders, as well as Holocaust survivors, condemned the bill, charging that it attempts to rewrite history and conceal Polish complicity with the Nazis during the war.
On Sunday, during Israel's weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu urged Poland to change the bill before its final approval, while the Deputy Polish Ambassador to Israel Piotr Kozlowski was reprimanded at the foreign ministry.
About 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War II, many of them in the death camp of Auschwitz and other death camps in Poland.
