WWII's Warsaw Ghetto Uprising - lessons on 80th-year commemoration

Iconic photo (colorized) of German soldiers shipping Jewish families from the
Warsaw Ghetto off to be murdered at the Treblinka Concentration Camp,  1943

80-years ago this month, young Jewish slave-labor inmates of the Nazi-imposed ghetto in Warsaw, aware of their limited survival chances (and despite their limited access to weapons) rebelled for 29 days (beginning April 19-May 16, 1943) against the Nazi army deporting residents to the Treblinka death camp.

Though ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the Germans from entering the ghetto, the Jewish people's strategic and brave fighting showed that even amidst oppression, they could unite and fight back. The Uprising left a lasting legacy. It was the largest Jewish uprising in the Second World War and it inspired Jewish youth – in ghettos from Lvov to Będzin to Białystok, and in camps including Treblinka and Sobibor – to resist. It was an act of utmost courage – not least because the men and women fighting knew from the beginning that they had no hope of victory. They had been forced by the sheer inhumanity of the situation created by the occupying Germans to choose death in combat rather than in the camps.

Jews staved-off Nazis during Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

In this video interview at the Holocaust Musuem L.A., Rabbi Moshe Cohn, who heads Yad Vashem's International School for Holocaust Studies discusses the significance of the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

 
 

Polish-born Jewish man, Ben Lesser, age 94, explains how in 1940, Polish Christians, (empowered by Germany's National Socialist Army) confiscated ordinary Jewish citizens' businesses, dispossessed them from their homes, stole their homes, and concentrated them in racial ghettos. Mr. Lesser explains how the Jewish ghettos (an overcrowded apartment district where lucky folks worked as slaves inside or outside the walls to avoid deportation to concentration and death camps) differed from today's socio-economic ghetto neighborhoods. Most Jewish people were deported as slaves to concentration camps - where they were labored (ususally to death), if they survived (unlike many women and children) being gassed to death upon arrival or shot and incinerated.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising was the very first civilian uprising in occupied Europe, and the largest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. There were attempts at armed resistance in at least 100 other ghettos, and among Jewish partisans, who engaged in sabotage and guerilla warfare.

Anti-Semitism and preventing another Holocaust

On Holocaust Memorial Week, Jewish leaders from the right and left voice perspectives on the role of Israel in generating anti-Semitism and in averting another Holocaust. Jewish Task Force leader, Chaim ben Pesach, cautions westerners not to repeat tacit complicity in failing to thwart Jew-haters' goals to conquer Israel through an Islamist state of Palestine. At the Holocaust Memorial Park in Brooklyn, New York. 




 The Jewish Daily "Forward" editor, J.J. Goldberg, shares his views on the role of Jewish and Israeli culpability in the Arab-Israeli conflict in evoking anti-Semitism / anti-Zionism. Recorded at Sinai Temple, Los Angeles.






J.J. Goldberg will present the keynote address at the L.A. Holocaust Museum's annual ceremony on Yom ha Shoah, April 27th, 2014.

'Holocaust Fuels Modern Resentment of Jews & Israel' - Israeli Professor

Tel Aviv University Professor Dina Porat lays-out how the the Holocaust fuels anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism among leftist ideologues. Columnist Melanie Phillips' must-read interpretation:

"... the charge that Israeli Jews and Jews who support Israel have themselves turned into Nazis.
This deranged belief derives from a cocktail of ideology and prejudice. The victim culture championed by the left has created a large number of ‘victim’ groups all claiming primacy over each other. French thinkers such as Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard-Henri Levy have described this as a ‘competition of martyrdom’ in which groups such as American blacks, gays lesbians and other gender activists, American Indians and indigenous peoples everywhere, Muslims and so on, all compete to be considered the most victimised group on the planet. But the Holocaust, which although victimising others was specifically a Jewish genocide, made the Jews into the ultimate victims of a unique persecution. That uniqueness was considered a threat by others who resented the claim because it seemed to them to diminish their own claim to have suffered. {...}

And so if Jews defend Israel the left claim they are seeking to appropriate the role of ultimate victim and manipulate public debate to achieve that image at the expense of the universal brotherhood of victims across the globe. They are said to be waving the shroud of the Holocaust to sanitise the crimes of Israel.

And if Jews call attention to antisemitism they merely create it all over again, because this reinforces the belief that the Jews use this claim as a manipulative weapon for their own advantage. So Jews are never to be allowed to tell the truth about their own persecution; the more they tell this truth, the more they are to be cast out as pariahs for manipulating public debate. {...}

So apparently has it proved; according to Professor Porat, a study has now shown that Holocaust education does nothing to stop antisemitism and may even make it worse. If identifying Jewish victimhood with the Holocaust causes a murderous resentment, then obviously the more that the Holocaust is thrust down people’s throats, the more that resentment will increase.

While antisemitism once caused the Holocaust, the Holocaust now causes antisemitism. The fact that by their very existence the Jews are the incarnation of the incriminating memory of the crime committed against them - prompts a resurgence of the very prejudice that lay at the heart of that crime.

In short, as has often been observed, the problem is simply that the Jews have never been forgiven for the Holocaust.