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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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The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election
There are two ways to look at the Oct. 7 attacks, and which way you do will determine, to a large degree, whether you want to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survive the next election.
The first view is that Oct. 7 proved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be solved. The second is that it proved the conflict cannot be allowed to remain unresolved.
These conclusions point in almost opposite directions, yet both begin with something Israelis learned, or thought they learned, from the same horrific day. One says there is no point trying to mollify the Palestinians, because hatred of Israel runs too deep. The other says that leaving millions of Palestinians indefinitely in their current condition will produce catastrophe again and again. The tragedy is that Oct. 7 supplied powerful evidence for both.
The first view is not without foundation. Even to Israelis (and people across the world) who have long sought a peaceful accommodation, it was shocking to see the sheer joy of the Hamas terrorists as they butchered families while filming their own barbarism, calling parents to brag, then dragging innocents into Gaza where crowds wildly cheered.
But the real shock was the support for this in the West Bank and Gaza – polls showed two-thirds to three-quarters of Palestinians approved – suggesting coexistence is impossible. Rarely have polls been more devastating. As a result, many Israelis lost sympathy for Palestinians and concluded that a cleansing inferno is required. The brutal war that followed certainly reflected that.
The second way to see Oct. 7 is that the Palestinian issue cannot be ignored – that the situation of the Palestinians was so unacceptable that something terrible was bound to happen. Many Israelis have trouble accepting this, because it does not really explain Hamas, which would fight Israel in any case, even if it were led by a far-left government willing to hand over to it every inch of the West Bank and Gaza and divide Jerusalem. But it might explain why so many Palestinians – even ones not in denial about the facts – were prepared to support it.
This view also offers at least one reason why the propaganda war waged by Hamas and its supporters has been so successful. There are others – including antisemitism and an outright denial of Israel’s right to exist . But the fundamentally unacceptable situation of the Palestinians is a big one, to be sure.
The combination of these factors yielded stunning results and contributed to an unfair vilification of the country that continues to frustrate Israeli voters.
By Oct. 9, before Israel had even identified all its dead or invaded Gaza, accusations of “genocide” were already circulating online, then among activists, NGOs, academics and eventually governments. By Oct. 13, protests denouncing “genocide” took place in London. On Oct 17, the Qatar-based Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies held a symposium called “The War on Gaza: Palestinian Defiance and Resistance against Orchestrated Genocide and Expulsion.”
Within weeks, South Africa accused Israel of “genocide” at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, invoking the “crime of crimes,” a term most associated with the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and Rwanda. “This libel is powered by a relentless campaign of indictment that engraves a lie into collective memory,” says Adam Fisher, one of Israel’s top venture capitalists, who has researched the propaganda campaign in detail.
When Israel’s military entered Gaza, it faced an enemy that had deliberately embedded weapons caches, command centers and rocket launchers in homes and crowded neighborhoods, including hospitals, schools, mosques and UN sites. Hamas fighters vanished into tunnels beneath civilian areas, turning every dead child, collapsed building and grieving parent into material for a global indictment of Israel on social media. The strategy was clear: maximize civilian suffering, isolate Israel internationally, weaken American Jewish support and ultimately erode U.S. backing.
The implication is that Oct. 7 was a response to Palestinian suffering. The suffering is real, but Hamas was never defending Palestinians. The Iran-backed jihadist group has long sought to destroy Israel rather than establish a Palestinian state, and its campaign of terrorism after the 1993 Oslo Accords helped destroy the peace process by driving Israelis to the right.
Still, none of this makes the pre-Oct. 7 reality acceptable. In the West Bank, three million Palestinians live alongside some 500,000 Jewish settlers without equal rights, largely under military occupation, while extremist settlers have increasingly engaged in violence with the government and military often looking the other way. In Gaza, more than two million Palestinians endured a devastating Israeli-Egyptian blockade because Hamas ruled the Strip. It failed to prevent Hamas from arming itself while making civilian life miserable.
On Al Jazeera recently I was placed opposite a young Gazan named Ahmed Abo Askar, introduced as a humanitarian activist and engineering student. He said he had gone three days without eating, and looked like it. He hoped an aid flotilla might get through and then smuggle out his ailing father.
I tried to put things in perspective, explaining about Hamas and the need to be rid of it. Ahmed answered emotionally: “Israel, not Hamas, they are the ones who killed my sister, killed their children and their entire family on 6 November 2023. Not all of Palestinian people are Hamas. The goods, why it’s not entering? ‘It’s because of Hamas.’ We are not Hamas. We are human in the end.”
Everything I said was true – but he won the argument anyway, because he was a decent person suffering. No history lesson trumps that.
The insane situation has traumatized Palestinians and Israelis in parallel ways. The Palestinians – who are rooted in a conservative society disinclined to compromise – have been made, in large numbers, desperate enough to support a nihilistic movement like Hamas, which is truly genocidal against Jews.
As for Israelis, it has made huge numbers of them stop wanting to think seriously about Palestinians except through the lens of security and punishment. Some openly fantasize about expulsion. Empathy is viewed as naïve. Oct. 7 made Israelis a little crazy too – exactly per the plan of Hamas.
So the Israeli opposition — people deeply hostile to Netanyahu and his extremist coalition — is mostly afraid to touch the Palestinian issue at all in the campaign ahead of the Oct. 27 election, preferring to focus on Netanyahu’s epic domestic failures. Politically, the calculation is correct.
That is where the two interpretations of Oct. 7 attach themselves to the choice Israelis face in this election. Netanyahu has spent much of his career arguing, in practice if not always explicitly, that the Palestinian problem can be managed rather than solved: Contain Gaza, maintain Israeli control of the West Bank, expand settlements, periodically use overwhelming force and resist international pressure for Palestinian statehood.
If the lesson of Oct. 7 is that Palestinian hostility is essentially immutable and territorial compromise merely brings the enemy closer, then Netanyahu’s basic worldview survives despite his catastrophic failure on Oct. 7. The answer is deterrence and permanent Israeli security control — not another attempt at political reconciliation.
Gadi Eisenkot, the main challenger on the center-left, is more complicated. He is hardly offering Israelis a new Oslo: He has explicitly rejected a Palestinian state in the near- or medium-term and says the old two-state formula is unrealistic after Oct. 7. But he has also opposed more West Bank settlements and other measures that would make eventual territorial separation impossible.And he has long warned against Israel sliding into a binational state.
The implication is less a peace plan than a direction: Preserve the possibility of separating Israelis and Palestinians, change the conditions that perpetuate the conflict, and leave open a political horizon even if nobody can presently say exactly when it nears and how it ends. In that sense, the choice is not between Netanyahu and a dove. It is between continuing to manage an apparently permanent conflict and a government that might at least begin trying to move toward a possible peace.
But if Israelis conclude that Palestinians only understand force – which, by the way, Hamas clearly doesn’t – we’re guaranteeing a death spiral. Such a problem left to fester, without any attempt to change the dynamic, will blow up again and again. So after the election, if Netanyahu and his destructive right wing coalition are mercifully gone, this will need to be addressed in new and creative ways.
Both views of Oct. 7 rest on a foundation of facts. The invasion and massacre – and the widespread support for it among Palestinians – simultaneously dismantled both the Israeli left’s confidence in Palestinian intentions, and the Israeli right’s belief that the Palestinian problem could be indefinitely managed.
But it also proved that distrust is not a policy. Israel can build fences, destroy armies, assassinate commanders and punish those who attack it. What it cannot do is make millions of Palestinians disappear. If there is no political answer to that reality, eventually there will be another violent one.
The post The two ways to see Oct. 7 – and how they’ll influence the Israeli election appeared first on The Forward.
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Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium
(JTA) — Zach Bryan, one of the world’s most popular country artists, appeared onstage wearing a shirt that read “Free Palestine” on Saturday night at Gillette Stadium outside Boston.
The venue was at the center of the dispute between stadium owner Robert Kraft and rapper Macklemore, who was blocked from performing there after Kraft objected to statements and imagery from an earlier stop on the tour and a “broader history” that Kraft characterized as antisemitic.
Representatives for Bryan and Kraft did not respond to requests for comment.
Bryan, whose biggest hits include “Something in the Orange” and his Kacey Musgraves duet, “I Remember Everything,” broke a stadium attendance record with 73,538 people on hand, the stadium said in an X post.
Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, helped lead an effort by stadium owners to block Macklemore from performing at their venues as Ed Sheeran’s opening act. Sheeran tried to distance himself from the venue owners’ actions, but his backup band and other acts subsequently withdrew from the tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Country star Zach Bryan dons ‘Free Palestine’ shirt at Gillette Stadium appeared first on The Forward.
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Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion
(JTA) — Britain’s Green Party on Sunday adopted a policy equating Zionism with racism, a move that immediately drew condemnation from the Israeli government and sparked concerns among some Jewish party members and the broader Jewish community.
The motion has also caused divisions within the party itself, with leader Zack Polanski, who is Jewish, skipping the vote and the party’s five sitting members of parliament issuing a statement on the policy.
Passing with 1,022 votes to 813 votes at the left-wing party’s annual conference, the motion argues that Zionism as an ideology is racist as it promotes “ethnonationalism,” and “privileges one ethnic group on the basis of the subjugation of others.”
It also declares the Greens to be an “anti-Zionist party” and that Zionism, the movement to develop and protect a Jewish state in Israel, will be “treated as any other form of racism.”
The motion also supports the establishment of a “single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital.”
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a press statement, “Today, the Green Party in Britain ceased to act as a political party and became a body that gives legitimacy to terrorism. The Greens have adopted not only the green of Hamas, but also its ideology: the elimination of the State of Israel through armed struggle.”
“The shocking resolution adopted today legitimizes armed struggle, calls for a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ – meaning the destruction of the State of Israel – and labels as ‘racist’ the aspiration of the Jewish people for self-determination,” the ministry statement said, adding that it “goes far beyond the boundaries of legitimate political debate.”
The ministry called on other political parties in Britain, particularly the ruling Labour Party, to reject the resolution.
In a letter to Polanski ahead of the vote, the Board of Deputies of British Jewry, Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust said they had “acute concerns” about the motion and called on the party leaders to oppose it. They wrote that urgent action was needed to address growing antisemitism within the Green Party. Such a motion, they wrote, “fuels hatred of Jews.”
The five representatives of the Greens who sit in Parliament – MPs Ellie Chowns, Adrian Ramsay, Siân Berry, Carla Denyer and Hannah Spencer – issued a joint statement condemning the actions of the current Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but emphasizing, “We know there is no conflict between supporting the rights of Palestinians and the rights of Jewish people.”
A clause was proposed to protect Jewish Greens by clarifying that the motion should not be used to “pressure, proscribe or discipline” those affiliated with synagogues or other Jewish groups that describe themselves as Zionist. The clause was voted down.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Britain’s Green Party adopts ‘Zionism is racism’ motion appeared first on The Forward.
