Survivors light torches at Ghetto Fighters’ House

Six Holocaust survivors,families light torches in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

By SAM SOKOL
Warsaw Ghetto fighters 311 (photo credit: Isaac Harari/Knesset)
Warsaw Ghetto fighters 311
(photo credit: Isaac Harari/Knesset)
Six Holocaust survivors and their families lit torches in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising at Beit Lohamei Hagetaot [the Ghetto Fighters’ House] museum at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot in the Galilee.
The uprising was a monthlong battle by Jewish insurgents launched in opposition to the final liquidation of the ghetto in April 1943, during which time the sparsely armed Jews managed to hold off the Nazi forces for a period almost as long as it took the German Wehrmacht to conquer all of France.
Speaking on Sunday evening at Yad Vashem, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stated that the “mighty warriors” of the ghetto represented the “spirit of the Macabees” and that the same sprit motivated the Israeli army, “including many Holocaust survivors,” to defeat the “Arab armies that came to destroy the State of Israel” in the 1948 War of Independence.
The torch-lighters were Dr. Lucien Lazare, a former member of the French underground; Aviva Blum Waks, the daughter of Warsaw Ghetto fighter Avraham Blum; Semion Rozenfeld, a captured Red Army soldier who took part in an uprising in the Sobibor concentration camp; Yehuda “Poldek” Maymon, a member of the Polish resistance and a retired Israeli naval officer who was interned in Auschwitz; Julian Zanoda, an Algerian Jew who at age 10 took part in the underground revolt that facilitated the American invasion and prevented the destruction of Algerian Jewry; and Shimon Zuckerman, the son of Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and deputy to underground commander Mordechai Anielewicz.
Founded by Holocaust survivors in 1949, the Ghetto Fighters’ House bills itself as “the first Holocaust museum in the world” in order to provide visitors “a unique experience, going beyond the grief and horror in order to make evident Antek Zukerman’s declaration in the first National Gathering for Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day that took place on the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz: ‘We came here to build homes filled with life.’” The ceremony also included remarks by Finance Minister Yair Lapid.