Slovak Jews are outraged over efforts to abolish the crime of Holocaust denial, which the government says conflicts with the right to free speech.
"It is an offence to all those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust," Mr Jozef Weiss of the Central Association of Jewish Religious Communities in Bratislava told TA3 television.
"Society must be able to defend itself against such a demonstration of extremism."
TASR news agency quoted a statement from Israel's Chamber of Commerce criticising "this absurd contribution of Slovakia to the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz."
The proposal must be approved by parliament to become valid, but several deputies, including some from the ruling coalition, said they wanted to keep the denial of the Holocaust as a crime.
It is estimated that some 136,000 Slovak Jews died during the war. Afterwards, about 3,000 returned, and it is estimated the Jewish population in Slovakia today is less than 10,000.
The paragraph outlawing the denial of the Holocaust was put into the penal code in 2001.
* The politically influential son of the Libyan leader, Col Muammar Gadafy, criticised Arabs who deny the Nazi extermination of Jews.
"It is incorrect to deny the Holocaust because I think the Holocaust is a fact," Mr Seif al-Islam Gadafy, head of the Gaddafi International Foundation of Charity Associations told reporters at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.
"It was not done by Zionism or the Americans or the New York Times. It was discovered by the Red Army. The Russians were the first who liberated that camp [ Auschwitz)]," he said.
"Of course, we are not responsible. It was done by Germans, not Arabs," he said.
"Really it was a tragedy of modern history. If some Arabs are denying this, I think it is incorrect."
He urged Libyan Jews who had settled in Israel to return to their home country and invest in business, but he sidestepped questions about whether Libya would establish relations with the Jewish state or trade with it.
He said Libya was not at war with Israel and saw no reason to fight the Jewish state since it had no territorial dispute. - (Reuters)