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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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Gunfight Outside Israeli Consulate in Istanbul Leaves One Attacker Dead
A drone view shows police officers and medics standing at the scene, after a gunfire was heard near the building housing the Israeli consulate, according to a witness, in Istanbul, Turkey, April 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mehmet Emin Caliskan
One attacker was killed and two others were wounded in an extended gun battle with police outside the tower building housing the Israeli consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday.
Footage showed the backpack-wearing attackers firing with automatic rifles and handguns, and police officers returning fire and seeking cover, as they maneuvered among parked white police buses near a checkpoint. One body lay on the street.
Shots rang out for at least 10 minutes among the glass towers in Turkey’s main financial district, Reuters witnesses said. One person was seen covered in blood.
No Israeli staff were at the consulate, which occupies a floor in one of the towers, at the time of the attack, Turkish and Israeli authorities said.
Israeli diplomats had left Turkey shortly after the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza began in late 2023, a conflict that prompted large pro-Palestinian protests outside the consulate and across the country, and a deep chill in Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties.
US ENVOY SAYS CONSULATE WAS TARGET
The three attackers had links to an organization that “exploits religion,” Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci said, without giving any name. Two of them were brothers, and they had traveled in a rented car from the city of Izmit, he added.
While Turkish authorities did not say what motivated the attackers, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey, said on X that it was an attack on the Israeli consulate and he condemned it.
President Tayyip Erdogan said the “heinous terrorist attack” would not dent Turkey’s trust and security. Israel’s foreign ministry said it appreciated Turkish security forces’ “swift action in thwarting this attack.”
Two police officers were also lightly wounded, Istanbul Governor Davut Gul told reporters at the scene of the midday incident, which occurred next to a major motorway as thousands of nearby workers were breaking for lunch.
DIPLOMATIC CHILL AMID GAZA WAR
Turkey, a fierce critic of Israel’s military operations in Gaza as well as in Lebanon and Iran, had recalled its ambassador from Israel in November 2023, and diplomatic relations have been effectively frozen since then.
At the same time that year, Israeli diplomats left Turkey due to security concerns, including the protests. Since then, heavily armed police and armored vehicles have been stationed in a broad area surrounding the consulate.
Militant violence has mostly subsided in Turkey in recent years after a violent spate from 2015 to 2016 when Islamic, Kurdish, and leftist militants carried out attacks amid the spillover from the Syrian civil war.
The latest incident was late last year when three Turkish police officers and six Islamic State terrorists were killed in a gunfight in the town of Yalova in northwest Turkey, amid raids on militant cells believed to be planning Christmas and New Year attacks.
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Ivy League Schools Are Cutting Jewish Admissions, While Faculty Attack Israel and Jews
Graduating students rise in support of 13 students not able to graduate because of their participation in anti-Israel protests during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
In an escalation of its fight with Harvard, the Trump administration announced a lawsuit accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students, and threatening to cut off Federal grant money. The lawsuit alleges the university was deliberately indifferent to campus antisemitism, failed to discipline “campus agitators,” refused to enforce its own rules regarding demonstrations, and says the institution was in violation of Title VI.
The US Department of Education also announced two new investigations into Harvard focusing on racial discrimination and antisemitism. The lawsuit came as many universities have quietly adopted a strategy of waiting out the Trump administration.
The other notable development in March regarding campus antisemitism was the release of the report by the House Education and Workforce Committee. Among the more shocking revelations detail how Qatar Foundation officials dictated terms to Northwestern University regarding the institution’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
Particularly disturbing details described Qatari efforts to prevent the university from censuring faculty member Khaled Al-Hroub, who had denied that Hamas members had committed rape. The report also emphasizes that faculty affiliated with Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine “played a significant role in legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism on college campuses.
Elsewhere, legal systems continue to protect pro-Hamas protestors who vandalize university property. In one recent example, a New York State judge ruled that Columbia University cannot discipline students who occupied and vandalized buildings in May 2024 on the grounds that there was no evidence the students “acted to endanger Hamilton Hall or University property within Hamilton.” The judge, an adjunct Columbia Law School faculty member, deemed expulsions and other sanctions “arbitrary and capricious.”
In another case, pro-Hamas protestors who occupied and vandalized a building at the University of Washington in 2024 were charged with misdemeanor trespassing by county prosecutors, who claimed there was insufficient evidence for felony charges. These protestors caused more than $1 million damage to the building. Most have returned to campus.
In Michigan, a Federal court ruled that a lawsuit by Palestinian students who accused the University of Michigan of targeting their “activism” could advance. The suit alleges that disciplinary procedures and its suspension of the leading pro-Hamas student group constituted viewpoint discrimination.
More positively, the University of California Regents voted to settle a suit which alleges the institution failed to respond to antisemitic harassment and discrimination. The suit focused on pro-Hamas protests in 2024 where Jewish students were assaulted and harassed. The agreement stipulates antisemitism training for staff, faculty and students, an annual survey of Jewish life on campus, and the creation of a Title VI office.
Pro-Palestinian students complained the settlement is “a tool to silence the lived experiences of Palestinians and to criminalize student organizing against the ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinians in their homeland.” Immediately after and in contravention of the settlement, law school dean Edwin Chemerinsky announced to students that there would be no changes to the speakers policy.
The demographic composition of universities has been recognized as one of the bases for intensified hostility towards Jews and Israelis. The international component of student bodies, reaching in excess of 50% at some institutions, has imported students relentlessly hostile towards Israel and Jews. Complementing this, however, have been efforts to deliberately reduce Jewish populations.
New research has now shown how Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Columbia have systematically reduced the percentages of Jewish students in the past decades. Harvard reduced its Jewish population from approximately 25% in 2004 to the current low of 7%. Analysis of Columbia suggests the number was reduced from approximately 19% in 2004 to 9% today. Dramatic reductions in the number of white students admitted are also apparent.
Most Ivy League and elite institutions showed similar drops, with Cornell holding steady and Brown increasing the number of Jewish students. Muslim enrollment particularly at Columbia increased in the same period from approximately 4% to 7%. In response, Harvard denied reports that it had increased recruitment at Jewish day schools.
The rapid replacement of Jewish and white students at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia appears part of deliberate efforts to expand institutional “diversity,” globalize the student body and thus the subsequent donor base, and to “deAmericanize” the faculty and curriculum.
The replacement correlates with a massive upswing in anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic activity at these institutions. Downstream effects on American and global society may also be inferred as institutional cachets bolstered hateful stances from graduates.
Faculty Lead the Antisemitism Effort on Campus
Faculty continue to stand at the vanguard of anti-Israel and antisemitism on campus, a reality highlighted by details in the House Education and Workforce Committee report. In the wake of the Iran conflict Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups have also become outspoken in support of the Iranian regime and have decried the US.
The University of California Ethnic Studies Council and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism stated, “We reject imperialist and fear mongering narratives that position Iran as the intruder in the region, rather than US military bases and US interventionism.”
Union Theological Seminary announced the creation of a “Religion and Public Life” program led by two former Harvard Theological Seminary faculty who had left that institution after the program had been scrutinized for its goal to “dezionize Jewish consciousness.” The appointment of Harvard faculty member Rosie Bsheer as Columbia’s “Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature” also installs a reliably anti-Israel if mediocre figure in a high profile position. Reports regarding Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies also depict a Jewish founded academic unit that has been thoroughly colonized by “anti-Zionist” faculty.
Elsewhere the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health also held another “human rights” event in which participants accused Israel of “genocide.” The head of that center, Kari Nadeau, has now been named dean of public health at UCLA.
In an unusual case that suggests the methods used by Qatar supporters to police academia, Kings College London academic Andreas Krieg was forced to apologize and compensate two individuals in separate defamation cases. Krieg had falsely alleged one of the academics was a UAE agent operating in Sweden which generated official investigations. Krieg was formerly a contractor for the Qatari Ministry of Defense and has a long history of promoting explicitly Qatari viewpoints.
Students Embrace Iran
The most notable development in the student sphere in March were expressions of support for the Islamic Republic of Iran in response to the American-Israel campaign. This included mourning Ayatollah Khamenei by the Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society at Kings College London, which called his death “an unimaginable loss.”
At the University of Washington, a pro-Hamas student group endorsed a message from the PFLP affiliated Tariq el-Tahrir Youth and Student Network praising “the raining of blessed missiles over US military bases” and calls for “DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL, GLORY TO THE MARTYRS, LONG LIVE THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN, LONG LIVE THE AXIS OF RESISTANCE!”
The infamous pro-Hamas umbrella group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) also posted the message “Marg bar Amrika” or “death to America.” This forced the university to state the group was not “affiliated in any way with the University,” and that, “There is no evidence that anyone currently in control of their account is a current Columbia student, staff, or faculty member. They are illegally using the Columbia name.” Columbia was also forced to suspend the Young Democratic Socialists of America group for its continuing affiliation with CUAD.
Antisemitism in British education continues to intensify. The depth of hostility towards Jews on British campuses is depicted in a new report from the Union of Jewish Students, which details among other things that 20% of students would be reluctant or unwilling to have a Jewish housemate. Some 47% of students indicated they had been exposed to slogans or protests celebrating the Hamas massacres of October 7. The massacres were widely hailed by pro-Hamas student groups who celebrated the killing of Israeli civilians and soldiers. Jewish students are also routinely subjected to harassment and even violence on and off campuses
K-12 Teachers Support Iran and Oppose Israel
Teachers unions remain the focal point for anti-Israel and anti-American activism (and in the case of Philadelphia for training “revolutionary abolitionists”). They have now also taken the lead as supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response to the attack on Iran the Chicago Teachers Union co-sponsored a “hands off Iran and Lebanon” rally along with Palestinian, communist and other groups.
The union also adopted a resolution calling for a May Day civic action that would shut down schools. The protest calls for “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” to “defend our Democracy, demand ICE out of our cities, and tax the rich to support our schools and vital services.”
Anti-Israel activity by teachers unions and state officials in Canada continues to follow the path of Britain toward antisemitism and boycotts of Israel. In one development the British Columbia Teachers Federation passed a motion endorsing the BDS movement. In another, Montreal school officials announced they would be investigating reports of Israeli soldiers speaking in Jewish schools as violations of public funding laws.
In a third case a Holocaust survivor’s talk at a Canadian private school’s symposium was canceled. The school pointed to safety and the “current volatile geopolitical climate and … the high-profile nature of the dignitaries scheduled to attend,” and said it was “reviewing the format of its annual Holocaust commemoration ceremony.” The move came as “anti-Palestinian racism” continues to be elevated as the single most important and untouchable form of discrimination and pedagogical pivot in Canadian schools.
Dr. Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian specializing in the Middle East and contemporary international affairs. A completely different version of this article was originally published by SPME.
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Ambulances Burned in London: How Many More Warnings Do We Need?
Charred remains of ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, which were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
The world woke up last week to the news of yet another antisemitic attack in the UK, this time in the form of an arson attack, where three masked individuals set alight four Hatzola ambulances outside a synagogue in Golders Green, London.
The police were surprisingly quick to label this as an antisemitic attack. Tweets started flooding in from political leaders such as the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, declaring “This is a deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack,” and “Antisemitism has no place in our society.”
We need to ask ourselves a simple question: Is condemnation really enough to stop this?
On September 27, 2025 — a late Saturday night — I sat down at a pub in Manchester. Not even 60 seconds passed before my kippah caught a middle-aged woman’s attention. She leaned right over me, demanding answers: “Do you believe in genocide?” “Do you believe in free Palestine?”
Trying to de-escalate and enjoy my pint in peace, I respond, “Let’s keep politics away from the pub.”
She repeated herself in a more aggressive tone, and then picked up my pint, threw it in my face, and ran out straight into a taxi.
With just 12 hours until my flight, the police agreed to meet me the next morning to take a statement. I gave them a very clear message: If you don’t deal with the minor antisemitic attacks, there will be something way bigger, and it will be too late.
Five days later, just 0.5 miles from that pub, the Yom Kippur attack occurred — when an Islamist terrorist committed a heinous act of violence, leaving two Jews murdered in cold blood.
Following the shocking terror attack, I hoped the police would finally enforce a zero-tolerance policy on minor antisemitic attacks, especially the antisemitic assault that happened to me at the pub five days prior, as they had promised during the interview.
I stayed hopeful for four months, until the case was closed with no action taken. What does that tell us?
The Jewish community in the UK has reached a stage where they often don’t bother calling the police after antisemitic assaults or attacks, because receiving a crime reference number and a “we won’t tolerate antisemitism in our society” condemnation isn’t enough.
When British political leaders and police turn a blind eye to hundreds of antisemitic assaults in the UK, while thousands march and scream “globalize the intifada,” and Israelis are banned from attending a soccer game on British soil, does that reduce antisemitism — or risk encouraging it?
If the UK is serious about making Jews feel safe, they must end these marches calling to “globalize the intifada,” and crack down on every single minor antisemitic attack.
What starts small doesn’t stay small.
A group calling themselves the “Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand” has claimed responsibility for the arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances, and several other arson attacks targeting synagogues in Europe over the past month. This terrorist organization has ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), yet the UK still fails to formally proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization. We must ask ourselves: What signal does that send to those willing to attack Jews?
The warning signs are there. They’ve been there.
At what point are they actually going to be taken seriously?
Chaim Frankenhuis is a UK-born commentator based in Israel, focusing on the rise of antisemitism, distorted media narratives, and developments surrounding Jewish heritage.