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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 80th anniversary remembered with daffodils, 3 presidents and an 11th commandment against ‘indifference’
WARSAW (JTA) — Exactly 80 years ago, a few hundred ragtag, half-starved Jews emerged from sewers in Warsaw to battle Nazis – and held them off for nearly a month rather than surrender themselves and their Jewish brethren to the Treblinka and Majdanek death camps.
On Wednesday, thousands of Poles and international visitors, including Polish President Andrzej Duda, Israeli President Issac Herzog and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in a stirring Holocaust commemoration festooned with daffodils, the emergent symbol of the largest Jewish rebellion against the Nazis during World War II.
“As German federal president, I stand before you today and bow to the courageous fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto,” Steinmeier told a few hundred politicians, Jewish leaders and others at the Ghetto Heroes Monument, marking the first time a German president has joined in the annual commemoration. “I stand before you today and ask for your forgiveness for the crimes committed here by Germans.”
This was also the first time leaders from all three countries came together for the official uprising ceremony to commemorate the fighters, none of whom are alive today. The last surviving fighter, Simcha Rathajzer-Rotem, also known as Kazik, died in December 2018. A handful of Warsaw Ghetto survivors who were not old enough to join the fighting remain, according to Holocaust scholars.
In another first, the three heads of state attended a commemorative service led by Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schdurich at Warsaw’s Nozyk Synagogue. By the end of the ceremony, which was conducted mostly in Hebrew and featured Polish-Jewish children singing the Polish and Israeli national anthems, many attendees had tears in their eyes.
“I just thought, the leaders are here, this is something we should do, it’s part of building relationships and collective memory that partnerships are built on,” Schudrich told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Earlier in the day, Polish President Duda called the fighters “the heroes of the Jews all over the world” and “the heroes of Poland and the Poles.”
Herzog, a day after Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, praised the fighters for sparking hope during one of humanity’s most tragic times. “In a world falling apart, in the shadow of death, under conditions of humiliation, famine, and forced labor, in the ghettos… they succeeded — mothers, fathers, children, grandfathers, and grandmothers — in upholding human morality, mutual responsibility, faith and basic humanity,” he said.
From left to right: German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Polish President Andrzej Duda and Israeli President Issac Herzog hold hands before the 80th anniversary commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in front of the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, April 19, 2023. (German Government Press Office/Getty Images)
Wednesday’s diplomatic tribute, which also included speeches by World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder and Marian Turski, a Lodz Ghetto survivor whose so-called 11th commandment — “Thou shalt not be indifferent” — became the slogan for programming by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews around the commemoration.
Eleven years ago, POLIN commissioned Jewish artist Helena Czernek to design a simple paper flower daffodil that has since been worn on the uprising’s anniversary to raise awareness of the day. The pin design was inspired by a commander of the uprising, Marek Edelman, who died in 2009. Each year he would receive a bouquet of daffodils to mark the anniversary date from an anonymous sender, and he would in turn place them on the city’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes — a large sculpture standing at the site of the uprising’s first battle.
The daffodil marker has since changed the landscape of Holocaust memory in Poland, according to POLIN museum spokeswoman Marta Dziewulska.
“Our research shows that since we began our educational programs around this event, including handing out the daffodils, the rise in general public knowledge about the uprising has been enormous,” said Dziewulska.
This year, thanks in part to financial support from Lauder, a billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder fortune and a major Republican donor, the daffodil campaign reached far more people than ever, both in Poland and beyond. Throughout the center of Warsaw, the paper daffodil was ubiquitous among pedestrians and cafe dwellers across generations. All crew members on LOT Polish airline flights wore them.
For the first time, the daffodils were also distributed to 150,000 people in 100 Jewish communities around the world. More than 3,000 volunteers gave out 450,000 paper daffodils in six cities across Poland, and over 7,000 schools, libraries and cultural institutions participated in the museum’s daffodil campaign, which includes films and educational materials about the uprising.
Helena Czernek designed the paper daffodil over a decade ago. (Dinah Spritzer)
Krystyna Budnicka, who was 11 at the time of the uprising, told journalists about her story on Monday. The fighters of the Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) were armed with home-made grenades and Molotov cocktails. In the end, roughly 13,000 Jews were were burnt alive or suffocated as the Nazis burnt down the ghetto to quell the rebellion, sending the remaining some 50,000 Jews to be murdered further east.
Budnicka told the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza that “as the ghetto was burning, the underground was like a bread oven.”
But Budnicka and some of her 10 immediate family members, none of whom survived the Holocaust, had one advantage. Her brothers and father were observant Jews who happened to be carpenters. They had constructed a bunker to lead to the sewers so that eventually, at least she and her brother, who later died of typhus, were able to make it out.
Budnicka was later taken in by a Catholic orphanage while the war was still raging and hid her Jewish identity, changing her last name to Kuczer. Until the 1990s, she told almost no one of her travels. But today she is the ambassador of POLIN Museum.
Her recollection of life at the time is limited, except that she had hope for survival. The fighters slept during the day in bunkers the Nazis couldn’t easily find, and came out of the sewers to fight at night. She remembers hunger, being the only girl among many boys and dreaming about what bread tasted like, a distant memory.
Many decades later, after the end of the Communist dictatorship, a “Children of the Holocaust” association was formed in Poland. For the first time, Budnicka and many others started telling their stories out loud, and at schools.
“Now I feel that I have to do it,” she told Gazeta Wyborcza. “When I mention my loved ones at meetings, it’s like I’m erecting a monument to my family. They live then. I see them. It’s in order: my mother Cyrla, father Josef Lejzor, brothers Izaak, Boruch, Szaja, Chaim, Rafał.”
Budnicka is not the only Warsaw Ghetto survivor to ask the world to remember what she endured. Helena Birnbaum, 93, who also survived by hiding in a bunker, participated in this year’s March of the Living — an annual Holocaust remembrance event that brings thousands of participants from around the world to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She told reporters at the march on Tuesday why she flew all the way to Poland from Israel to talk about her ordeal.
“The importance of knowing about the Holocaust is to know the person in all situations, on the brink of death,” she said. “The importance of knowing that the Holocaust was life within death and not everyone died at once. The individual stories matter.”
An iconic photo from the Warsaw Ghetto shows Jews being led by Nazis in 1943. (U.S. Holocaust Museum/Wikimedia Commons)
The act of international unity in display at the official uprising ceremony comes at a time when Poland’s right-wing government continues to espouse a nationalist narrative that international scholars say downplays Polish antisemitism and violence towards Jews before, during and after World War II. Multiple Polish laws connected to Holocaust rhetoric and restitution payments caused diplomatic tensions between Poland and Israel for years, and the two only resumed more full relations last month. The rapprochement came after Israel’s foreign minister announced the resumption of Israeli student trips to Holocaust sites in Poland, which now could include sites that explain Nazi violence against non-Jewish Poles.
Six years ago, some Polish Jews who rejected their government’s patriotic narrative launched their own uprising commemoration, which has grown from a group of hundreds to nearly a thousand. During the alternative commemoration on Wednesday, which featured Yiddish songs sung by school children and recitations of poetry by Polish-Jewish authors, participants laid paper and real daffodils at Warsaw Ghetto monuments such as Umschlagplatz, where the Nazis deportee 350,000 Jews by train to Treblinka.
Patrycja Dolowy, director of Warsaw’s Jewish community center, was an early supporter of what she called a grassroots alternative to the pomp and circumstance of the government’s ceremony, only a few hundred feet away.
“Jews were sentenced to death in the center of their own city and the majority of people outside the ghetto were doing nothing about this,” said Dolowy, who believes government focus on heroism should not erase inquiry into less heroic actions by Poles.
“If Jews were not treated before the war as strangers, it would have been much easier for everyone, Jews and non-Jews, to rise together and resist,” she theorized.
The counter-commemoration reflects the contrasting attitudes in Poland towards honoring Jewish and Holocaust memory. In 2017, the government passed a law that assured public schools taught history from a heroic, patriotic perspective, and in 2018 made it illegal to insult the Polish nation’s Holocaust record, condemning scholars who dared delve into historical Polish aggression against Jews.
Attendees shown at an alternative Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration, which has grown in recent years. (Dinah Spritzer)
Jerzy Warman, 76, a Polish-born Jew participating in the non-governmental commemoration whose parents survived the Warsaw Ghetto, said the Polish government wants to turn the uprising commemoration into an event where “they can do a roll call of Poles who they say helped the Jews.”
Warman noted that his father joined Edelman at the Warsaw Uprising, a major Polish resistance campaign that took place year after the Ghetto Uprising. “The Jews tried to join the Polish Home Army as a group but were rejected by them,” Warman recalled his father explaining.
Moshe Kis, 22, a Jewish political science student from Warsaw whose grandmother spent two years in the ghetto, echoed Warman’s view.
“So many people here still don’t understand their own history,” said Kis, who will immigrate to Israel next year. He added, fiddling with a daffodil over coffee, “when the sirens went off today in honor of the uprising, I heard people around me saying on the street, ‘what is this for, are we being invaded?’”
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Tucker Carlson draws scorn for claiming he was ‘detained’ at Israeli airport after Mike Huckabee interview
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson had just barely wrapped his interview with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee before the two were already disagreeing on a basic fact.
Carlson, the influential conservative commentator, flew to Tel Aviv on Wednesday to conduct the interview with Huckabee at Ben Gurion Airport, departing hours later without leaving the airport. But before leaving, he told the British tabloid Daily Mail, Israeli authorities confiscated his passport, dragged his executive producer into an interrogation room “and then demanded to know what we spoke to Ambassador Huckabee about.’
Not so, says the ambassador: What Carlson’s team experienced was simply a routine security measure.
“EVERYONE who comes in/out of Israel (every country for that matter) has passports checked & routinely asked security questions,” Huckabee wrote on X, refuting his former Fox News colleague before their conversation could go live.
Israel’s airport authority also denied the allegations, saying Carlson’s team “were politely asked a few routine questions, in accordance with standard procedures applied to many travelers.” A longer statement from the U.S. Embassy in Israel also said Carlson’s decision to stay in Israel only a few hours without leaving the airport was his alone.
Carlson’s complaints drew withering reactions from Jews and others who said they recognized the intense security practiced at Ben Gurion. The conservative commentator John Podhoretz, for example, recounted on X how he had been questioned for 20 minutes because he was couriering a dress for a relative. “I’ve known Tucker was an asshole for 30 years but this takes the f–king cake,” he wrote.
The back-and-forth was a preview of the hotly anticipated interview between the two divergent flanks of the Christian MAGA coalition, whose public disagreements on Israel have paralleled a larger fissure in the Republican party. Carlson, the influential GOP kingmaker, has increasingly embraced anti-Israel talking points on his show at the same time as he has platformed conspiracy theorists and antisemites including Nick Fuentes. A growing number of young right-wing influencers and candidates are lining up behind his views.
Huckabee, meanwhile, is a leading evangelical Christian Zionist who has argued in favor of Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. He publicly lobbied Carlson for a sit-down after Carlson used his podcast to criticize him for what Carlson described as a failure to intervene in Israeli demonization of Christians. Carlson agreed to a talk, and posted a picture of himself arriving Wednesday prior to the interview.
“Greetings from Israel,” Carlson posted to X, captioning a photo of him posing outside near an Israeli flag with his arm around business partner Neil Patel. (“Sell out,” Sneako, a livestreamer and Internet personality with a long streak of antisemitic and anti-Israel comments, wrote in reply.)
Greetings from Israel. pic.twitter.com/1uBWvqBNST
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 18, 2026
To some seasoned travelers, the location was obvious.
“That’s the walkway to the private jet terminal for VIP entry,” tweeted David Friedman, who was U.S. ambassador to Israel during President Donald Trump’s first term.
“After the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the City of David, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Garden of Gethsemene, Capernaum, the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Yad Vashem, the Knesset and about 2 million other places, this walkway is an important site (but only if you fly on private jets),” he continued. “Too bad Tucker stayed in the airport in the face of so many invitations to see so many wonderful places. A huge and obviously intentional missed opportunity.”
Trump, an ally of both Carlson and Huckabee, may have also played a hand in arranging the interview, according to a former Fox News reporter who told the Times of Israel that Trump wanted to prevent an intra-party spat over Israel that could benefit Democrats. The source, Melissa Francis, also described the interview as “emotional” and said Carlson’s team had tried and failed to also arrange an interview with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Little about the interview process had been straightforward. The week before Carlson touched down in Israel, according to local reports, Israeli authorities had indeed briefly discussed whether to bar Carlson from entering the country over his past comments — something they routinely do for non-Jewish critics of Israel, even for prominent figures. They ultimately decided to avoid a diplomatic incident, according to reports.
In the days since agreeing to an interview with Huckabee, Carlson has posted new interviews with Ryan Zink, a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter and Texas congressional candidate; billionaire hedge-fund manager Ray Dalio; conspiracy theorist Ian Carroll; and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul.
Carlson has not yet published his interview with Huckabee. But late Wednesday, he shared an interview about Israel, continuing the vendetta that started their exchange. “How does Israel treat Christians? We spoke to one whose family has lived there since Jesus. His story is shocking,” Carlson wrote to promote the video.
For Carlson’s Jewish critics, the whole day offered yet more evidence that whatever he ultimately says about Israel should be discounted.
“Tucker Carlson is a chickens–t. The guy who’s been spouting lies about Israel for the past two years, landed today at Ben Gurion airport, took a quick picture in the logistics zone, tweeted it to pretend he’s actually IN Israel (so he can later claim that he’s a serious reporter who toured Israel), didn’t even step foot in country, then made up a story that he’s being supposedly harassed by our security (didn’t happen), whined about it, got back into the private jet and flew off,” tweeted Naftali Bennett, the Israeli politician. “Next time he talks about Israel as if he’s some expert, just remember this guy is a phony!”
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Les Wexner testifies that he was ‘conned’ by Jeffrey Epstein and did not know of his crimes
(JTA) — Leslie Wexner, the Ohio retail billionaire whose association with Jeffrey Epstein has shadowed his philanthropic legacy, spent six hours Wednesday answering questions in a closed-door congressional deposition that Democrats later derided as implausible and evasive.
Wexner, 88, appeared before staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at his home in New Albany, Ohio, where he sought to rebut years of scrutiny tied to Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who once managed Wexner’s personal finances.
In a prepared opening statement submitted to the committee, Wexner cast himself as a victim of deception.
“I was naive, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein,” Wexner said. “He was a con man. And while I was conned, I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.” He added: “I completely and irrevocably cut ties with Epstein nearly twenty years ago when I learned that he was an abuser, a crook, and a liar.”
Wexner’s testimony comes amid renewed attention to his relationship with Epstein following the release of previously redacted federal investigative records. Wexner, long celebrated across the Jewish communal world for his business achievements and billion-dollar philanthropy, has never been charged with a crime connected to Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation and has consistently denied knowledge of Epstein’s misconduct.
In his statement, Wexner presented that denial in unequivocal terms. “Let me be crystal clear: I never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity,” he said. “I was never a participant nor co-conspirator in any of Epstein’s illegal activities.” He continued, “At no time did I ever witness the side of Epstein’s life for which he is now infamous.”
Wexner also addressed the emotional toll of the scandal and expressed sympathy for survivors. “Before going any further, though, I want to acknowledge the survivors of Epstein’s terrible crimes and the devastation that each of them has endured,” he said. “The pain he inflicted upon them is unfathomable to me. My heart goes out to each of them.”
Throughout the document, Wexner portrayed Epstein as a master manipulator who carefully curated an image of elite credibility. “Epstein lived a double life. He was clever, diabolical, and a master manipulator,” Wexner said, describing how Epstein “revealed to me only glimpses into the life in which he was a sophisticated financial guru.”
Wexner reiterated longstanding claims about the unraveling of their relationship, saying that after Epstein’s legal troubles surfaced, his wife Abigail Wexner reviewed financial records and concluded Epstein had misappropriated “vast sums” from the family. “Once I learned of his abusive conduct and theft from my family, I never spoke with Epstein again. Never,” he said.
But Democrats who participated in the deposition emerged sharply skeptical.
“He’s claiming there was no friendship with Jeffrey Epstein,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee’s top Democrat, told reporters during a press conference outside Wexner’s residence, calling the claim “bogus.”
Garcia went further, arguing that Epstein’s wealth and influence were inseparable from Wexner’s patronage. “There would be no Epstein island, there’d be no Epstein plane, there would be no money to traffic women and girls … without the support of Les Wexner,” he said.
Rep. Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts struck an even harsher tone. “There’s no question in my mind, given the evidence so far, that Les Wexner knew about this and failed to stop it,” Lynch said.
Other Democrats questioned the credibility of Wexner’s repeated assertions that he had neither seen nor suspected misconduct. Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona said his claims of not recalling key details about Epstein strained belief. Rep. Dave Min of California summarized the testimony as a case of “see no evil, hear no evil,” calling it “really just not credible.”
Committee Republicans did not attend the deposition, citing a medical procedure for Chairman James Comer. A committee spokeswoman said Wexner “answered every question asked of him” and pledged that video and transcripts would be released.
For Wexner, the proceeding marked another chapter in a saga that has complicated his public image and tarnished his name in the Jewish world, where countless rabbis and other professionals have received fellowships bearing his name. In his statement, he framed the deposition as an opportunity for to help the Epstein’s victims.
“I hope you are successful in uncovering the truth and bringing closure to all survivors,” Wexner said. “If I am able to assist you in that effort by answering your questions, I am grateful for the opportunity to do so.”
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Quietly sold by Jewish library, letter by famed 18th-century rabbi surfaces at auction, fetching $400,000
(JTA) — A decade ago, amid a financial crisis, the Jewish Theological Seminary turned to its assets, selling real estate as well as rare books from its world-renowned library. The book sales were private, and the institution has never detailed what was sold or for how much.
Now, a lost treasure from the library has once again emerged at auction: this time, a letter written and autographed by the 18th-century Jewish luminary Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, also known as the Ramchal.
When it was housed at the library, the letter belonged to a Ramchal collection numbering hundreds of pages. Removed from the collection and marketed to the auction house’s Orthodox clientele as a profound text by “a great and holy Kabbalist,” the letter sold on Sunday for nearly $400,000. The identities of the seller and buyer are not publicly known.
The price reflects the massive appeal of heritage items in a newly affluent Orthodox market, where rare texts and autograph material are increasingly treated as both status symbols and investment vehicles. It is a market the auction house, Genazym, has helped supercharge by selling not just books, but proximity to revered rabbinic figures.
Born in 1707, Luzzatto was an Italian Jewish thinker, mystic and writer whose influence far exceeded his brief life. His best-known work, “Mesillat Yesharim,” became a cornerstone of Jewish ethical literature and remains widely studied today. Though his mystical teachings stirred suspicion among some contemporaries, later generations regarded him as a major figure of Jewish thought.
In a famous 1928 essay titled “The Boy from Padua,” the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik offered one of the most enduring modern interpretations of Luzzatto’s legacy. Bialik described Luzzatto as a forerunner of three great streams of modern Jewish history: the Lithuanian rabbinic tradition, Hasidism and the Enlightenment.
The auctioned letter, spanning two handwritten pages and addressed to his mentor, captures Luzzatto engaged in a detailed discussion of mystical concepts. He uses the space to explain his reasoning and mentions additional writings then in progress.
For scholars like David Sclar, the quiet removal of Luzzatto’s writings from the JTS library and their transfer to private hands suggests a cultural decline.
“It’s a scandal within the world of scholarship and American Jewish institutions,” Sclar, a librarian at a Modern Orthodox high school in New Jersey, said in an interview. Sclar wrote his dissertation on Luzzatto using primary sources such as the auctioned letter.
He is also a former employee of the special collections division at JTS who left the institution years before the crisis that precipitated the sell-off. He sees the outcome of the auction as evidence of not only wrongdoing but incompetence.
“This is one of the items that they sold through the back door, which means they sold it for probably virtually nothing,” Sclar said. “And the tragedy in all of this, besides JTS sort of destroying cultural heritage, is that it’s also stupid, because if they had decided that they were desperate for money then just do an auction. Don’t do it through the back door.”
The librarian at JTS, David Kraemer, declined a request for an interview, directing questions to the institution’s spokesperson, who offered a brief emailed statement.
“Decisions were made at the time with careful consideration of what was in the best interest of the institution,” the spokesperson wrote.
In 2021, amid earlier revelations of the library’s sell-off, Kraemer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he had been ordered to sell items of his choosing to raise a specified amount of money, which he did not disclose.
In their defense of the sales, Kraemer and other JTS officials said at the time that the deaccessioned materials had been digitized and were deemed to have limited research value, allowing scholars to access their contents even after the originals left the collection. Seminary leaders described the decisions as financially prudent and of minimal impact on the library’s core mission.
Critics, however, argue that digitization does not replace the scholarly and cultural value of original manuscripts.
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