The Ghetto Fighters’ House (Lohamei Hageta’ot) has been in existence since 1949. It was founded just one year after the establishment of the State of Israel by members of Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, itself established the same year by Holocaust survivors, who included those who had fought in the desperately daring Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The world’s first Holocaust museum, The Ghetto Fighters’ House is a precious institution that honors the memories of the brave Polish Jews who did their utmost to, at least, hold off the Nazis for a while before the Germans completed the decimation of the ghetto and sent hundreds of thousands of the inmates to their death at the Majdanek and Treblinka concentration and death camps. It was the largest single act of resistance by Jews during the Holocaust and, as later noted by uprising leader Marek Edelman, aimed to “not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths.”
As important as it may be, however, for most of us The Ghetto Fighters’ House is pretty far off our beaten track, located around the midpoint between Haifa and Nahariya in the Western Galilee. Even as the offspring of a Holocaust survivor, I have not visited the northern museum for many a year. It never seems to feature in my weekly agenda.
If – as I –you’d like to see what the museum has to offer these days but can’t free up the time to make the trek over there, you can get a glimpse of some of the invaluable historic specimens stored in its archives by popping along to the Givatayim Municipal Gallery to see the exhibition Avar Nocheach – Ikvot Zikaron BeOlam Mishtaneh (Past Continuous – Fragments of Memory in a Changing World) on display until February 16. The exhibition is part of a month-plus long program of events in Givatayim, which has already taken in a lecture about the state of the kibbutz today by Ghetto Fighters’ House historian Prof. Hanna Yablonka. There will be a major event on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, called “With All Their Might – The Power of Solidarity to Preserve and Build A Society in Times of Crisis”; and a musical and storytelling program on February 3.
The second part of the exhibition title is intriguing. The first part is self-explanatory, inferring the desire to keep the flame of yesteryear’s deeds burning and reminding us that they took place. But the post-dash section prompts a question. What does “in a Changing World” imply? Is that connected to a sharp uptick in the number of Holocaust deniers around the world? In the absence of clear statistics on the topic, there is still a general sense that may very well be the case, particularly in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
Yigal Cohen, director general of The Ghetto Fighters’ House, who curated and is overseeing the offerings in Givatayim, does not have a clear-cut answer. “I am not sure about that,” he says. “I think the problem is not so much with Holocaust denial but rather with distortion of the Holocaust.”
Jewish history exploited for anti-Israel narrative
Cohen feels that the cataclysmic passage of Jewish history is being exploited for nefarious and other ends, including stoking up anti-Israel sentiments. “There are people who suddenly start asking ‘Why aren’t you talking about Gaza?’
They say the Holocaust is no longer relevant. There is a new holocaust in Gaza. They say that with intense criticism and total distortion. With all the difficulty and complexity of everything that took place in Gaza, you can’t put that in the same category. And it happens. People do that.”
When someone is in distress, it is not much help if they are told others have been through worse trials. That said, Cohen adds some pertinent and poignant context to the issue at hand. He says this is not just a problem around the world. “These distortions are happening here too,” he notes. “The experiences we have endured, and continue to go through, since October 7 are very hard. I would say unbearable.” This is not just conjecture or secondhand projection. “I say that as the father of a soldier who spent most of the war in Gaza, and I was evacuated from my home near the Lebanese border for one and a half years. It was tough, and I can’t argue with someone who experienced these things [and others] and claims they went through a holocaust. But I feel we have to relate to these things in the right proportions.”
It is also, says Cohen, a matter of perception and the accessibility of the reality of what really happened a couple of generations ago. “At the time of the Holocaust, there were no GoPro cameras and no Internet and other things. I assume that if there had been such devices, as survivors themselves said, including at Ghetto Fighters’ House, almost every day what they went through [in the Holocaust] felt to them like Oct. 7.”
Cohen notes that the institution he heads takes a different approach to the sensitive subject. “Our way of education is not to come from a judgmental and critical angle. We primarily look at things through questions. Through that, the audience – mainly young people – arrive at a different understanding.”
Presumably, Cohen sees the Givatayim initiative as a means of furthering that goal by, as it were, bringing the mountain to Muhammad. There was a modicum of proteksia involved. “This connection was made possible thanks to my personal relationship with the Givatayim mayor, Ran Kunik, and with the municipality director general, Avi Motola.” That and a strategic shift. “We decided to ‘lower the museum walls.’ We realized the museum is not just a physical, geographic entity with walls and boundaries. We understood that the museum could also be in other places, in different forms, such as in Givatayim.”
Even in a digital world where there doesn’t seem to be a spot on the entire planet you can’t sample via the Internet, thankfully, there is still significant added value to learning about something from close quarters. And while busloads of students do get to the Western Galilee on organized trips, having a taste of The Ghetto Fighters’ House closer to hand, at least for a while, helps to spread the message the museum wants to get out to the world. “Making the institution more accessible to more circles of people, more students, more young people and adults, I see that as a welcome development,” Cohen declares.
Does he believe that, in the wake of the current Givatayim-based offering, people from the center of the country might be tempted to make the trek up north? Cohen, naturally, goes along with that idea but points out that the turnstiles at The Ghetto Fighters’ House do, in fact, tick over at a pretty decent pace anyway. “Happily, other than during wartime, in the past few years, the museum fills up with students from Tel Aviv, from Jerusalem. It’s great to see that. That is a natural connection between the center of the country and the northern periphery. That is important, too.”
Indeed, much as quite a few Tel Avivians feel the country begins and ends within the metropolitan limits that spread no further than, say, from Bat Yam to Ramat Aviv or, at a stretch, possibly as far as Ra’anana, there is plenty to see and do elsewhere around this fair and troubled land of ours.
Eventually, I was enlightened about the “changing world” element I’d picked up on in the title. “The items on display in Givatayim, from The Ghetto Fighters’ House archives, were handpicked by various experts from the world of academia, from the world of museums, that they felt had the most meaning for them,” Cohen says.
This isn’t about drawing us back into that horrendous time for European and other Jewry. Quite the contrary. “The idea is to take an item from the past and to imbue it with a contemporary relevant expression, through current thinking,” Cohen explains. “What role does the specific item play in the world today?”
The curator offers the collateral for that line of thought. “One of the most moving items is The Book of Life from the Zeilsheim DP [displaced persons] camp in Frankfurt, Germany. It was a DP camp full of Holocaust survivors who had been through the most terrible experiences imaginable. But they created life there. They created theatrical shows and education.” That spawned the tome in question. “They didn’t call it The Book of Life for no reason, in contrast with what had happened before that.”
It is not only an account of what the survivors managed to achieve as they dragged themselves from hell back to life.
Cohen says the book fires him up and motivates him in his work and his life. “If you ask me what gave me the strength to keep on going during the time of the war, with my son in Gaza, and being evacuated from my home, one of my sources of strength was this book. You see what families and young people did after five to six such terrible years. And what life they managed to create!, cultural life, education, and social life. That, for me, is a powerful source of strength.”
It is, Cohen posits, also a valuable resource for coping with our current challenging circumstances. “That takes the past and gives it a presence in today’s world, a changing world in which we experience very tough things, and we take experiences of the past in order to bolster ourselves, or learn, or to gain inspiration.”
There is one particularly evocative and emotive exhibit in the Givatayim lineup. “There is a pair of shoes that was found on the site of Treblinka and was submitted as evidence at the Eichmann trial [by Warsaw Ghetto underground leader Adolf Berman]. The shoes tell a very hard tale, of a youngster to whom the shoes belonged, of his culture, his personal life, his hobbies.” Therein, says Cohen, lies the power of the tangible rather than the digital image. “One of the moving things about a real archival artifact is the ability [that it arouses in the viewer] to imagine everything that preceded it and everything that followed it.”
The ability to resonate with the past comes across in its most direct form in another priceless article unearthed from its archival repose. “There is microfilm which was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Polish government-in-exile in England, whereby courageous Jews mounted a different kind of resistance. This was not armed resistance; it was documentary resistance [of life in the ghetto]. They knew that some day someone will have to know what happened here and will have to learn from it.”
There is also a delightful item in the exhibition, a frame with a bunch of cards with jolly pictures. “These were motivating cards that [groundbreaking Polish-Jewish educator] Janusz Korczak gave to the children in his care in the children’s home he set up. These were given to Leon Gluzman,” explains Ghetto Fighters’ House archive director Anat Bratman-Elhalel. Korczak was murdered in Treblinka in 1942; Gluzman left for Canada in the 1930s.
That is another glimmer of light within the dark abyss of the Holocaust. “This [exhibition] is not just about the Holocaust. This is a story of the Jewish people, including from the expansive world of Jewish education, and from the philosophy of a great educator who educated [children] through these motivating cards. He didn’t call the children’s parents if they misbehaved. But he gave them a card when they were well behaved.”
Avar Nocheach has been up and running for a couple of weeks, and Cohen has had the opportunity to observe visitors’ reactions firsthand. “We have had wonderful responses. People have said they were moved by the exhibition and the stories behind the exhibits. There is also great video art in the show,” he says.
More than anything, Cohen is keen to disseminate light and positivity. “Israel continues, I’m sorry to say, to talk about how pitiful our Holocaust survivors are – that their fridges are empty. I don’t say there aren’t any such cases, and it is the state’s responsibility to care for them, and for other elderly people. However, we ignore their strengths and the power of what they built here. We, at The Ghetto Fighters’ House, have to convey that, to talk about the fact that a sort of miracle happened here. That didn’t happen overnight; people started almost from scratch, people who lost their entire family and managed to build here a world of medicine, of amazing culture, of literature, and of education!” he marvels.
That is the primary message Cohen would like us to take away from the exhibition and from The Ghetto Fighters’ House's ongoing work. “This is a miracle, something wonderful which we need to learn and pass on to the next generations.”
Admission to The Ghetto Fighters’ House events in Givatayim is free. For more information: https://www.gfh.org.il/eng