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| Director Yoav Potash greets Yaacov Goldstein |
A documentary about the murder of five Jews in a Polish town is being threatened with a ban in Poland - not because they were killed in the Holocaust, but because they weren’t.
The Jews at the heart of "Among Neighbors," from California-based filmmaker Yoav Potash, died six months after the end of Nazi occupation. They were among a handful of survivors from Gniewoszów, a town where about 1,500 Jews made up half the population before World War II. When they returned home in 1945, they were killed by their Polish neighbors.
Since premiering at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival in November 2024, "Among Neighbors" has been screened in six countries and qualified for Academy Award consideration. But its release on TVP, the Polish public broadcaster, has prompted uproar from right-wing politicians and a national investigation.
Potash stumbled into making "Among Neighbors" on a 2014 trip to Gniewoszów, where he planned to document a modest rededication ceremony for the Jewish cemetery. As he began talking with the oldest residents, one woman, who has since died, told him that Jews were killed there well after the war.
"That just really struck me as a very different kind of story, because it was not the Germans doing the killing, it was the Poles," said Potash. "It was not during the war, it was well after, when it should have been a time of peace."
When "Among Neighbors" appeared on televisions across Poland in November 2025, it was hit with backlash from the office of Polish President Karol Nawrocki, a right-wing historian who led nationalist efforts to rewrite Poland’s Holocaust history. His Law and Justice party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023, promoted historical narratives about Polish victimhood and resistance to the Nazis while delegitimizing research on Polish antisemitism or Poles who killed Jews.
