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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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Cornell University Clears President of Wrongdoing After Incident With Anti-Israel Protesters
Cornell University students walk on campus, November 2023. Photo: USA TODAY NETWORK via Reuters Connect
Cornell University absolved its president, Michael Kotlikoff, of wrongdoing following an incident in which anti-Israel protesters accused him of lightly impacting a student and an alumnus with his car as they participated in a mob which had surrounded the vehicle to prevent his leaving a parking space.
As seen in viral footage shared on social media and reported in local outlets, Kotlikoff was walking to his car on April 30 when an anti-Zionist group converged on him, demanding a chance to interrogate him about free speech and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Kotlikoff resolved to go home, however, telling the group that he would not answer any more questions and asked them to stop recording.
After the protesters refused to comply, Kotlikoff denied the protesters their move to form a blockade around his parking spot, reversing out of it even as the student and alumnus held their positions to hold him still.
All the while, the mob banged on the vehicle, creating what the school described as a sense of imminent danger.
“The actions taken by these individuals on April 30th, which included following President Kotlikoff from an evening event into a parking lot and impeding his ability to leave, are inconsistent with university policies governing expressive activity and our standards for respectful conduct, safety, and the prohibition of intimidation,” the university’s Ad Hoc Special Committee of the Board of Trustees said in a statement on Friday announcing its decision after reviewing the incident. “President Kotlikoff has declined to pursue a complaint against the students involved.”
Noting it considered evidence gathered by the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD), including video footage and a sworn statement from Kotlikoff, the committee said the person at the scene who reported that Kotlikoff’s vehicle had made contact refused treatment from the EMS team and would not provide a sworn statement to CUPD. None of the individuals at the scene gave sworn statements about the incident.
The committee added that “appropriate action” was taken against at least one of Kotlikoff’s “non-student” harassers and called on students to appreciate the importance of “robust debate” and “peaceful protest,” values it extolled Kotlikoff for upholding “over the course of his decades long tenure at Cornell.”
Cornell University is no stranger to radical anti-Zionist activity. In 2023, a history professor there cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel — a cornucopia of evils which included torture and gang rape. That same semester, an ex-student, Patrick Dai, threatened to perpetrate mass murder and sex crimes against Jewish students.
Anti-Zionists activists at Cornell have also heavily featured blood in their political messaging. Last year, they doused a statue in red paint and left behind a graffitied message which said “occupation=death.”
Kotlikoff, whom trustees appointed to the university’s top position in 2024 at the peak of student protests over the Israel-Hamas war, is a veteran of several clashes with the school’s anti-Israel faction.
Having enacted a zero-tolerance disciplinary policy, Kotlikoff has pursued criminal investigations against protesters who break the law, as happened in September 2024 when a mass of them disrupted a career fair because it was attended by defense contractors Boeing and L3Harris. The incident resulted in at least three arrests, and, later, severe sanctions, including classifying five students as “persona non grata,” which, Cornell says, bans from campus “a person who has exhibited behavior which has been deemed detrimental to the university community.”
Anti-Zionist student groups have tried and failed several times to initiate mass demonstrations or make other big moves during these final weeks of the academic year.
At Occidental College in Los Angeles, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) “peacefully” took down an encampment it established in April to protest the institution’s financial ties to Israel after school officials rushed to the scene to take names and issue disciplinary referrals, deterring others joining in.
At Smith College in Massachusetts, SJP activists last month were granted a meeting with high-level officials at a later date in exchange for the group’s ending an unauthorized encampment established on campus to protest the board of trustees’ decision to reject a proposal inspired by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Jewish Man Brutally Attacked in London After Speaking Hebrew
Jewish man beaten in London on May 17, 2026, after speaking Hebrew. Images circulating on social media show the victim’s face heavily bloodied and bruised, with multiple visible cuts and swelling in the aftermath of the assault. Photo: Screenshot
British police are searching for a group of attackers after a young Jewish man was brutally assaulted in the north London area of Golders Green following an incident in which he was overheard speaking Hebrew, the latest outrage in a surge of antisemitic violence and harassment shaking the city’s Jewish community.
On Sunday night, a 22-year-old Jewish man was violently attacked by a group of four to five unidentified individuals outside his home in Golders Green, one of the most visible centers of Jewish life in London, around 2 am, after they allegedly overheard him speaking Hebrew during a phone call.
According to multiple media reports, masked men walking nearby heard the man speaking Hebrew on his phone and began chasing him while shouting antisemitic insults.
Once they caught up with him, the group allegedly demanded to know if he was Jewish, before dragging him across the road, ripping his clothes, and stealing one of his shoes.
The attackers brutally beat him, according to reports, repeatedly kicking him until he was left close to losing consciousness, with images later circulating on social media showing his face covered in cuts and bruises.
Local law enforcement arrived at the scene shortly afterward, but the suspects had already fled. The victim was later taken to hospital for treatment of his injuries and has since been receiving medical care.
As authorities continue their investigation, the assault is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, with no arrests made so far.
The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a British charity, strongly condemned the incident, warning of a sharp escalation in threats facing Jewish communities and calling for urgent action to confront the rising tide of violence.
“It is plain for all to see that Jewish lives are under threat in their own communities. We cannot wait any longer for real intervention against this horrific wave of violence against Britain’s Jews,” the statement read. “We are in dire need of urgent action.”
In the United Kingdom, the Jewish community has faced a mounting wave of antisemitic violence, intimidation, and street-level harassment over the past two years following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with the escalation deepening concerns over public safety.
Over the past couple months, however, the rate and intensity of incidents have spiked, with arson attacks, stabbings, and other forms of violence.
Recently, an increasingly popular antisemitic TikTok trend in London has led to arrests and convictions after young men filmed themselves using cash to mock and harass members of Orthodox Jewish communities.
Videos circulating on social media show young men walking through heavily Jewish areas of London carrying fishing rods with money attached to the line in an apparent attempt to “fish for Jews.”
In a separate incident last weekend in Stamford Hill, a man allegedly whipped several Haredi Jewish women with a belt before spitting at volunteer responders who arrived at the scene. Witnesses said he also shouted racist insults, antisemitic slurs, and threats at both the victims and the volunteers.
Hours later, in nearby Amhurst Park in north London, a Jewish child was allegedly assaulted outside a school after a woman screamed antisemitic insults and punched the minor.
Three weeks ago, an assailant stabbed two Jewish men in Golders Green — an attack that prompted the British government to raise the national terrorism threat level from “substantial” to “severe” for the first time in over four years.
In March, arsonists set fire to four ambulances belonging to the Jewish Hatzola organization in the area. Weeks later, a synagogue and the former premises of a Jewish charity in north London were also targeted.
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Iran’s Executions More Than Double in 2025, Making Up 80% of Global Total, New Data Shows
A February 2023 protest in Washington, DC calling for an end to executions and human rights violations in Iran. Photo: Reuters/ Bryan Olin Dozier.
The Islamic regime in Iran led the world in documented executions last year, with 2,159 people killed out of a total of 2,707 across 17 nations, according to a report released on Monday by Amnesty International.
Iran’s executions surged since 2024, when the regime carried out at least 972. All executions were conducted through hanging.
Following Iran, the next countries with the highest totals included Saudi Arabia, 356 or more; Yemen, 51; the United States, 47; Egypt, 23; Somalia, 17; Kuwait, 17; Singapore, 17; Afghanistan, six; and the United Arab Emirates, three.
Three countries executed one person: Japan, South Sudan, and Taiwan. In the US, nearly half of all executions took place in Florida. In total, Iran and Saudi Arabia accounted for 93 percent of documented global executions.
Notably, the 2025 total did not include “the thousands of executions that Amnesty International believes continued to be carried out in China, which remained the world’s lead executioner.”
China “continued to execute and sentence to death thousands of people but kept figures secret,” stated the report, which explained other countries did not disclose their death penalty numbers including North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Belarus.
“In the face of the state secrecy that continued to surround data on the death penalty, disclosures and commentary by the Chinese authorities once again pointed to an intentional use of the death penalty to send a message that the state would not tolerate threats to public security or stability; and would impose severe punishment to maintain order,” the report said.
According to Amnesty International, 2025 saw the highest number of executions globally since 1981, with Iran leading the surge.
“This alarming spike in the use of the death penalty is due to a small, isolated group of states willing to carry out executions at all costs, despite the continued global trend towards abolition,” said Agnès Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International. “From China, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia to Yemen, Kuwait, Singapore, and the USA, this shameless minority are weaponizing the death penalty.”
Callamard warned that the use of the death penalty sought to “instill fear, crush dissent, and show the strength state institutions have over disadvantaged people and marginalized communities”
The report showed a disturbing trend among the executions: that 46 percent of offenders (1,257) received the sentence for drug convictions, with 998 in Iran, 250 in Saudi Arabia, 15 in Singapore, and two in Kuwait. Amnesty documented 11 public hangings in Iran and six in Afghanistan — spectacles meant to terrorize communities as much as punish individuals.
Amnesty published its findings weeks after a joint-annual report released by the European groups Iran Human Rights (IHR) in Norway and Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) in France found Iran executed at least 1,639 people in 2025, a 68 percent leap from the 975 killed in 2024 and the highest seen since tracking began in 2008.
In March, the Human Rights Activists News Agency released a report on broader crackdowns in Iran last year, identifying that 78,907 people were arrested on ideological or political grounds from March 2025 to March 2026. In addition, the group found at least 6,724 protesters, including 236 children, were killed, with an additional 11,744 cases still under verification. Researchers also discovered 105 women were murdered with seven classified as “honor killings,” and that 68 were victims of sexual violence.
While men dominated the list of executions in the annual report, Iran executed 61 women and Saudi Arabia executed five.
Regarding methods of execution deployed, hanging was the preference of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Kuwait, Singapore, and South Sudan. Countries using firing squads included Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, the UAE, and Yemen. China, the US, and Vietnam rely on lethal injections while some US states use nitrogen gas asphyxiation.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s only state to continue beheading as a method of execution. The kingdom maintains the practice in accordance with Islamic law which mandates death for a wide range of offenses including adultery, sorcery, and apostasy.
The report noted that last year in Yemen, 18 people were convicted and sentenced to death “for sexual acts that do not constitute internationally recognized offenses – including sexual relations among consenting adults of the same-sex, and drug-related offenses.”
Saudi Arabia has also executed people convicted of offenses as children. Researchers described how on Aug. 21, 2025, the government executed Jalal Labbad (who was born on April 3, 1995) for his alleged “participation in protests in 2011 and 2012 against the treatment of Saudi Arabia’s Shia minority in Al-Qatif, as well as his attendance at funerals of individuals killed by security forces. On Aug. 1, 2022, the Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) convicted and sentenced him to death for alleged offences committed when he was 16 and 17 years old.”
Amnesty claimed success in its campaign to end capital punishment which started in 1977, noting that at the time 16 countries had banned the practice and today the number has reached 113.