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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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South Korean President’s Holocaust Remarks Spark Outcry From Israel, Controversy at Home
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung speaks during his new year press conference at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. Photo: Ahn Young-joon/Pool via REUTERS
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has sparked a diplomatic row with Israel and criticism at home after comparing Israeli military actions against Palestinians to the Holocaust in a post on social media platform X.
The controversy began on Friday after Lee said “wartime killings” by the Israel Defense Forces were “no different from the Jewish massacre” by the Nazis in World War Two, and reposted footage with a caption that said it showed Israeli troops had tortured and thrown a Palestinian from the roof of a building.
Israel‘s Foreign Ministry said in a post on X on Saturday that Lee “for some strange reason, chose to dig up a story from 2024.” It said the incident occurred during an IDF operation against what it called “terrorists” and had been thoroughly investigated.
The ministry accused Lee, who had said that he needed to verify the footage, of the “trivialization of the massacre of Jews on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel,” saying his remarks were “unacceptable and warrant strong condemnation.”
Israel marks Yom HaShoah on Monday remembering the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.
The Israeli military said in 2024 it was investigating the incident in the videos and described the actions as serious and not in keeping with its values.
Friday’s comments are a rare instance of Lee discussing international politics on social media and come as his government navigates a surge in energy prices following US and Israeli strikes against Iran. Tehran has closed the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic and South Korea is one of the world’s largest importers of oil and gas.
Lee did not mention the Iran war in his posts but said that South Koreans were today feeling “immense pain and national hardship.”
The president later on Saturday said it was “disappointing” that Israel criticized his comments and that it was natural to feel sorry if someone was suffering.
South Korea’s foreign ministry later said it was regrettable Israel “misunderstood” Lee’s remarks, which were about universal human rights.
Lee’s comments also proved controversial at home.
South Korea’s conservative party hit out at Lee for failing to speak more prudently and said he was showing double standards for his silence on human rights abuses in North Korea, while Lee’s Democratic Party praised him for speaking out on the universal value of human dignity.
The mainstream Joongang Ilbo newspaper said on Monday Lee would be well advised to recognize the weight of a president’s remarks and the risk of misunderstanding from unfiltered comments on social media, especially in sensitive global disputes.
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US Begins Blockade of Iran’s Ports, Tehran Threatens Retaliation
A billboard with a graphic design about the Strait of Hormuz on a building in Tehran, Iran, April 13, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
The US military began a blockade of ships leaving Iran’s ports on Monday, President Donald Trump said, and Tehran threatened to retaliate against its Gulf neighbors’ ports after weekend talks in Islamabad on ending the war broke down.
A US official said there was continued engagement with Iran, and forward motion on trying to get to an agreement. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also said efforts were still under way to resolve the conflict.
But oil prices climbed back over $100 per barrel, with no sign of a swift reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to ease the biggest ever disruption in supplies and broader concerns over the durability of a two-week ceasefire agreement reached last week.
Trump said Iran had been in touch on Monday and wanted to make a deal but that he would not sanction any agreement allowing Tehran to have a nuclear weapon.
“Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We can’t let a country blackmail or extort the world.”
Since the United States and Israel began the war on Feb. 28, Iran effectively shut the Strait of Hormuz to all vessels except its own, saying passage would be permitted only under Iranian control and subject to a fee.
Trump has said Washington would block Iranian vessels and any ships that paid such tolls and that any Iranian “fast-attack” ships that went near the blockade would be eliminated.
Brigadier General Reza Talaei-Nik, a spokesperson for Iran’s Ministry of Defense, warned that foreign military efforts to police the strait would escalate the crisis and instability in global energy security.
NATO allies including Britain and France said they would not be drawn into the conflict by taking part in the blockade, stressing instead the need to reopen the waterway, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil normally passes.
CEASEFIRE UNDER STRAIN
The ceasefire that halted six weeks of US and Israeli airstrikes looked in jeopardy, with only a week left to run. Washington said Tehran rejected its demands at weekend talks in Islamabad, the highest-level discussions between the two nations since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The US military’s Central Command said the blockade would be “enforced impartially against vessels of all nations” entering or leaving Iranian ports in the Gulf and Gulf of Oman.
“The blockade will not impede neutral transit passage through the Strait of Hormuz to or from non-Iranian destinations,” Central Command said in a note to seafarers seen by Reuters on Monday.
Two Iranian-linked tankers, the Aurora and New Future, left the strait laden with oil products on Monday before the deadline, according to LSEG data.
An Iranian military spokesperson called any US restrictions on international shipping “piracy,” warning that if Iranian ports were threatened, no port in the Gulf or Gulf of Oman would be secure. Any military vessels approaching the strait would violate the ceasefire, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said.
Trump said Iran’s navy had been “completely obliterated” during the war, adding that only a small number of “fast-attack ships” remained.
“Warning: If any of these ships come anywhere close to our BLOCKADE, they will be immediately ELIMINATED, using the same system of kill that we use against the drug dealers on boats at Sea. It is quick and brutal,” Trump, much of whose communications are on social media, wrote on his Truth Social site.
He was apparently referring to the US strikes carried out against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. The strikes, which began in September, killed more than 160 people.
LEBANON FACES ATTACKS
Trump has also lashed out at US-born Pope Leo, who has spoken out against the war, denouncing him as “terrible” in a rare direct attack by a US president on a pontiff.
With rising energy prices causing political blowback, Trump paused the US-Israeli bombing campaign last week after threatening to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” unless it reopened the strait.
Israel has continued to bombard Lebanon and on Monday Israeli troops launched an attack it said was intended to seize a key south Lebanon town from Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah. Israel and the US have said the campaign against Hezbollah was not part of the ceasefire, while Iran has insisted it is.
Iran has brought new demands, including recognition of its control of the waterway, lifting of sanctions, and the withdrawal of forces from US military bases across the Middle East.
Trump has declared victory, despite so far not fully achieving the objectives he set out at the start of the war: to eliminate Iran’s ability to strike its neighbors, end its nuclear program, and make it easier for Iranians to topple their government.
Benchmark oil prices, which had eased last week after the ceasefire was announced, traded around 6% higher on Monday, off the day’s peaks but still above $100 a barrel.
Traders say the main benchmarks – used to set prices for trillions of dollars’ worth of commodities worldwide – actually understate the severity of a disruption with no precedent in modern times.
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For Another Year, BU’s Conference on Jewish Left Only Platforms Anti-Zionism
Peter Beinart, a prominent anti-Israel writer, being interviewed in January 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Academic conferences should foster inquiry, test ideas, and widen intellectual horizons. The third annual “Jewish Conference on the Left” held at Boston University (BU) last month was certainly presented in those terms. However, as time went on, it became clear that something else was afoot: Anti-Zionism framed as academic exploration, and a social structure encouraging the marginalization of Jewish students who fail to conform to their narrow and bigoted politics.
The gathering took place on BU’s main campus, reinforcing the perception that the conference’s ideology sits comfortably within the university’s academic culture.
The conference, which I attended, was dominated by anti-Zionist speakers, such as Peter Beinart, Fadi Quran, Dove Kent, and Arielle Angel. Beinart advocates for the dissolution of a Jewish-majority state, insisting Jews revert to once again existing as a vulnerable minority everywhere. Quran associates with the BDS movement. Kent’s org “Diaspora Alliance” rejects the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism definition. Angel is an ardent anti-Zionist. These are not neutral voices. They are activists representing an ideology that is effectively hostile to the idea of Jewish civil rights in our ancestral homeland. Several statements during the conference illustrated this bait and switch from policy debate to brazen indoctrination.
Numerous statements were made attacking Zionism and any Jews who believe in Israel’s right to exist. Neither the crowd, nor any other panelists, bothered to push back. Their only response was applause. It felt more like a political rally than a serious discussion on scholarship.
Unsurprisingly, there were no pro-Zionist leftist perspectives, not even modest discussions about classic topics like two-state coexistence. There were no voices articulating how Jewish self-determination might co-exist with Palestinian statehood. There was only delegitimization, double standards, and dehumanization of Zionists and Israel masked by reasonable-sounding language and boilerplate euphemisms.
The organization fair held at BU only hosted radical left groups including Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow. Tables included various infographics urging the IHRA definition be banned from schools, BDS graphics, comparisons between ICE and Nazi Germany, banning the ADL from schools, among others.
Clearly there was no room for dissenting views on the podium, and I observed the same mentality among its audience. At one point, I was berated by a stranger: “Shame on you for not clapping, you can’t even show respect for Fadi Quran.”
While I did not overtly present myself as a Zionist, I also did not mask my beliefs. Throughout my many conversations, I was repeatedly quizzed about my personal and professional background, as if my fellow attendees were actively looking for a reason to dismiss my position. Suspicion was immediate and hovered over every conversation whenever I questioned the status quo.
This is how ideological capture operates. It does not require formal censorship, all it needs is a couple of slogans and some bullies.
When a conference is promoted under the language of scholarly exploration to students and presents itself as an all-encompassing gathering of “Jewish left values,” the university’s association becomes part of the message.
For students who identify as both Progressive and Zionist, events like these reinforce the idea that there is no place for them. Many already navigate campus environments in which Zionism is treated as morally suspect. Student government resolutions single out Israel. Activist rhetoric regularly distorts Zionism into a kind of racism or colonialism. Institutional repetition normalizes and enables these intellectual boundary-breakers.
If Boston University intends to uphold its mission toward promoting intellectual diversity, it should clarify the distinction between providing space and conferring academic legitimacy. If organizers are truly acting in good faith, they should at least try to ensure that their conferences reflect the actual diversity within that tradition, or otherwise rebrand.
After three consecutive years of hosting this conference, the issue is no longer whether individual speakers have the right to present their views. They do. The question is whether a major university should repeatedly platform a singular ideological current while presenting it as representative of a broader intellectual tradition.
Melody Kaye is a Boston-based Campus Advisor for CAMERA.