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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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Tu B’Shvat, Conscious Eating, and the Jewish Call to Return
Orange trees in Israel’s northern Galilee region. Photo: פואד מועדי / Wikimedia Commons
Tu B’Shvat, the Jewish New Year for the Trees, is often celebrated simply: fruit on the table, blessings over figs and dates, and a nod to nature in the middle of winter. For those who do things a bit more lavishly, a ceremony or seder is conducted.
But at its core, the holiday of Tu B’Shvat is far more than a seasonal celebration. It is a day that offers a profound Jewish teaching about food, responsibility, and the possibility of return.
To understand that teaching, we have to go back to the very first act of eating in the Torah.
In the Garden of Eden, God gives Adam and Eve permission to eat freely from nearly everything around them. Only one boundary is set: there is one tree that is off limits. When Adam and Eve cross that boundary, the result is a rupture of faith between humans and God, which results in a series of other ruptures between humans and the earth — and humans and themselves.
One of the great Chassidic masters, Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen (1823-1900), suggested that the problem was not simply what they ate, but how they ate: without awareness, without restraint, and without consciousness. They consumed, rather than received.
Five hundred years ago, the kabbalists of Tzfat transformed Tu B’Shvat from a technical agricultural date into a spiritual opportunity. They taught that the world is filled with sparks of holiness, and that our everyday actions, especially eating, can either elevate those sparks or bury them further. This lesson has recently been discussed by the Jerusalem-based educator Sarah Yehuit Schneider.
Eating, in Jewish thought, is never neutral.
When we eat with intention and gratitude, we participate in tikkun olam, repairing the world. When we eat mindlessly, we reenact the mistake of Eve and Adam from the Garden of Eden.
The holiday of Tu B’Shvat invites us to try again.
There is another detail worth noting. The Torah’s first description of the human diet is explicitly plant-based: “I have given you every seed-bearing plant and every fruit-bearing tree; it shall be yours for food.” That diet, which was given in Eden, does not end with humanity’s exile from paradise. For generations to come, until after the great flood in the time of Noah, that diet continued in a world already marked by moral compromise.
On Tu B’Shvat, when Jews sit down to a table of fruit, we are quietly returning to that original vision of eating plant-based food that sustains life without taking it, nourishment that reflects restraint rather than domination.
That idea feels especially urgent today.
Our food choices now affect far more than our own bodies. They shape the treatment of animals, the health of the planet, and the sustainability of our food systems. Eating “without knowing” is something that carries grave consequences, which are all too visible in our society.
To observe conscious eating today means asking hard questions: Who is harmed by this choice? What systems does it support? What kind of world does it help create?
In my work as a rabbi and educator with Jewish Vegan Life, I encounter many Jews grappling with these questions, most of whom possess a desire to align their daily choices with enduring Jewish values of compassion, responsibility, and reverence for life.
Tu B’Shvat reminds us that Judaism does not demand perfection, but it does demand awareness. It teaches that repair is possible, not only through grand gestures, but through daily choices repeated with intention.
Redemption begins when a person makes a choice to eat their meal consciously. This is what the seder on Passover is for and what it reminds us of, and the same holds true for the seder on Tu B’Shvat.
The custom to eat fruits on Tu B’Shvat, the choice to have a seder or ceremony, reminds us of the consciousness that we must approach all of our meals with. On Tu B’Shvat, we are being asked to reconsider how we eat, how we live, and how we might take one small step closer to the world as it was meant to be. It is, after all, according to the Mishna in tractate Rosh Hashanah, one of the four New Years of the Jewish calendar.
Rabbi Akiva Gersh, originally from New York, has been working in the field of Jewish and Israel education for more than 20 years. He lives with his wife, Tamar, and their four kids in Pardes Hanna. He is the Senior Rabbinic Educator at Jewish Vegan Life. https://jewishveganlife.
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Jewish Survival Depends on the Existence of a Jewish State
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
“The past is never dead, it is not even past,” a quotation from William Faulkner’s novel, Requiem for a Nun, is frighteningly apt today in relation to antisemitism.
Many of us are wondering if the antisemitism we are witnessing now is comparable to the antisemitism our parents or grandparents experienced during the 1930s, almost 100 years ago.
The parallels are obvious — the hatred and demonization of Jews/Israelis (especially on social media), boycotts of Jewish and Israeli businesses and products, and the aggressive public protests that include genocidal language and target Jewish neighborhoods and houses of worship.
There are also the increasingly common violent physical attacks on Jews, including murder, often carried out to coincide with Jewish festivals and religious observances.
There are also differences, of course.
Nothing like the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping German Jews of their rights, and designed to separate Jews from German society, have been enacted anywhere. But this point may not be as comforting as it sounds, because today, the most antisemitic countries in the world are not in Europe. They are in North Africa and the Middle East and, with the exception of a few thousand Jews remaining in Iran, these countries have virtually no Jews left to threaten. A majority of those Jews who once resided in that part of the world, and their descendants, are safe in Israel.
The existence of a Jewish State is the primary difference between the Jewish predicament today, and the situation that existed in the 1930s.
An episode such as that of the S.S. St. Louis, when 937 Jews fleeing Europe before the outbreak of World War II were denied sanctuary and sent back to almost certain death, would never happen today.
The Évian Conference is another example of Jewish powerlessness during the 1930s. Held from July 6 to July 15, 1938, representatives of 32 countries met in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to search for a solution to the Jewish refugee crisis precipitated by the intense antisemitism unleashed by the Nazis.
The conference achieved very little, and today the Évian conference is widely believed to have been a cynical ploy to deflect attention away from the refusal to raise US immigration quotas, or even fill existing quotas, to save Jews.
With the exception of the Dominican Republic (in the end, only a little more than 700 Jewish refugees found sanctuary there), no country agreed to accept Jewish refugees.
In a shocking example of indifference to Jewish concerns, representatives of a number of non-governmental organizations, including several Jewish ones, could observe but not participate in the proceedings. Golda Meir, an observer representing the Jewish Agency in Palestine at the Évian Conference is quoted as saying, “I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through it, can understand what I felt at Evian — a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror.”
In April 1943, American and British representatives met in Bermuda to discuss what to do with the Jewish refugees, both those liberated by the Allies as the war progressed, and those who might still be alive in Nazi-occupied Europe. The venue, Bermuda, a remote location in the midst of World War II, was chosen to minimize press coverage.
As in the case of Évian, no Jewish organization was allowed to participate. At the time the conference was held, there was no doubt about the full extent of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Yet, once again, nothing was achieved. As in the case of the Évian Conference, the Bermuda Conference was a public relations event, and not an actual effort to protect Jewish lives.
All of these events — and hundreds more throughout history — emphasize the importance of a sovereign Jewish state for Jewish safety and survival. But what really makes this point stand out is a history that is often overlooked; the role that Mandatory Palestine played in saving Jews from the Holocaust.
Aliyah numbers show that despite restrictions limiting Jewish immigration imposed by British officials, and widespread opposition to Jewish immigration by Palestinian Arabs, approximately 200,000 to 250,000 Jews, mainly from Germany and Eastern Europe, were able to find sanctuary in the Mandate during the 1930s. How many more would have been saved had there been an independent Jewish state?
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
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Did the Bondi Attack Actually Change Australia?
Grandparents of 10-year-old Matilda, who was killed during a mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday, grieve at the floral memorial to honor the victims of the mass shooting at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeremy Piper
The Bondi terrorist attack on December 14, 2025, changed Australia.
But in many ways, it also didn’t.
The shock of watching a murderous rampage unfold at one of our most iconic sites, in what Australians long believed was a safe, peaceful country, shook the nation to its core.
Fifteen innocent people being murdered at a peaceful Hanukkah event is something so foreign to the experience of Australians, that it shattered the country’s sense of security overnight. Most Australians believed this kind of hatred was something that occurred elsewhere, not here.
Such trauma can prompt genuine reflection — which in turn may lead to genuine change.
In the aftermath of the attack, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese struck a markedly different tone than he had previously, showing an empathy with Australia’s Jewish community that many of us felt was often sorely missing in the months following October 7, 2023.
On January 22, 2026, Albanese initiated a National Day of Mourning, observed across the country. Fifteen sites were illuminated to commemorate the 15 victims, Australians were encouraged to light candles in their windows, and — strikingly — the government even urged citizens to perform a mitzvah — yes, it used that word — in the victims’ memory, publishing a list of 15 suggested acts of kindness.
In a nationally televised address at the Sydney Opera House — the very site where, on October 9, 2023, crowds had gathered to celebrate the Hamas massacre in Israel — the Prime Minister offered a direct apology to the Jewish community, acknowledging that “we could not protect your loved ones from this evil.”
Five days later, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Albanese released a statement commemorating the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, describing “the immense multitudes of Jewish lives and futures stolen with a pitiless cruelty that remains scarcely fathomable in its evil.” To be fair, he issued a similar statement on the same day last year.
This moral clarity contrasted starkly with the BBC and US Vice President JD Vance, who both failed to even mention the word “Jew” in their statements marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Albanese’s apology for the Bondi massacre was a sharp departure from what had often been a strained and acrimonious relationship between his government and the Jewish community, driven by persistent and often disproportionate criticism of Israel during its war against Hamas and other terrorist groups, alongside a series of concrete policy decisions widely perceived as hostile toward a longstanding democratic ally.
In the weeks following Bondi, the government moved swiftly to legislate, recalling parliament early in order to pass a package of new federal hate and extremism laws, including the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill. These measures criminalize participation in designated hate groups, impose penalties of up to 15 years in prison for directing such organizations, expand visa-cancellation powers for individuals promoting hate, and tighten controls on extremist symbols and propaganda. A provision to criminalize extreme racial vilification was dropped in the face of the Opposition’s objections to it.
New South Wales, where the attack occurred, also introduced state-level laws granting police broader powers around protests linked to declared terrorist events.
A Royal Commission has also been commissioned to investigate antisemitism in Australia in the lead-up to the Bondi attack, following pressure from broad sections of the community after Albanese was initially opposed to holding one.
These steps were welcomed by the Jewish community, yet it remains far too early to declare them transformative. After all, hate-speech laws already existed across Australian jurisdictions, but were only rarely used.
History therefore suggests that legislation alone is rarely enough; the true test is whether authorities are willing to enforce the laws consistently, especially when doing so becomes politically uncomfortable.
And that discomfort may arrive very soon.
The upcoming visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in early February, at Prime Minister Albanese’s invitation, will serve as a critical test of whether the empathy shown after Bondi represents a lasting shift or a fleeting political moment.
Already, Labor Friends of Palestine have called for President Herzog to be blocked from coming and investigated for alleged incitement and complicity in war crimes. Multiculturalism Minister Dr. Anne Aly initially declined to confirm whether she would welcome the Israeli President on his state visit, before later offering a notably lukewarm endorsement. There are also mass protests planned against his visit by anti-Israel groups. How the government deals with this will be telling.
These are the same kind of groups that supported Hamas after Oct. 7, and appeared on Australia Day, the national celebration of identity and unity, with calls for “intifada.”
Australia is currently at a crossroads in its relationship with Israel and also the Jewish community here. How it navigates that relationship could well determine the future of Jewish life in Australia. Hopefully the solidarity now being shown will be maintained and enhanced. But if it proves to be temporary, and the hostility being drummed up by the local anti-Zionist movement resurges, then the long-term feelings of belonging and security that underpin Australia’s long thriving Jewish community will likely erode further.
That, tragically, could echo the same sad and tragic path of many past Jewish communities throughout history.
Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).