By Janet McEvoy

AMSTERDAM, June 27 (Reuter) - Slovak Prime Minister Vladimir Meciar said on Friday that parts of a controversial history book which denies that Slovak Jews were persecuted during World War Two was inaccurate and historically incorrect.

But he said he would not bow to a European Union demand to have it withdrawn from bookshelves in Slovakia, although it would not be used as originally planned as a school textbook.

``Some parts of it are inaccurate or historically incorrect,'' Meciar told a news conference after a meeting between the EU and leaders of 12 countries aspiring to join the Western political and economic bloc.

``It is not the time for burning books ...,'' he said. ``This will not be used in Slovakia as a textbook,'' he added, saying that Slovak history ``needs to be processed in a way because there's no overall history of Slovakia existing so far.''

Tracing Slovak history from the First Century AD to modern times, the book denies that Slovakia's Jewish community, estimated at 70,000 just before World War Two, was persecuted under the clerical-fascist Slovak State, a Nazi German puppet regime set up in March 1939.

Fewer than 10,000 Slovak Jews survived the wartime Holocaust and the country's Jewish community now numbers around 4,000.

The European Union's External Relations Commissioner, Hans van den Broek, told reporters in Brussels on Wednesday he had urged the government in Bratislava to withdraw the book -- ``The History of Slovakia and the Slovaks'' by Milan Durica.

On Thursday Slovakia's Education Ministry defended the book. It said EU statements on the book -- which received EU funding under the PHARE programme -- amounted to interference in Slovakia's internal affairs and a ``serious attempt to discredit her internationally.''

The history book, which Meciar said was not approved by the Education Ministry as a text but as an aid to teachers, has come under heavy criticism from Jewish groups and historians.

Meciar told the news conference he would ask for further studies of the doubtful areas to be carried out by historians and churches.

Slovak leaders want to join the 15-nation EU in its next enlargement, and have been resentful of EU criticism of its human rights record, in areas like the protection of minorities.

Meciar defended Slovakia's human rights record on Friday and said that its minorities policy was better than that of some EU member states.