Jewish Ledger

JLedger / April 12, 2008 / No Comment

As it was in 1943, the first seder this year is on April 19th.

April 19, 1943: The First Seder

1943 was the year that a tiny remnant of Jews rose up in their agony to hit back at those murderers and oppressors who ripped apart their families, destroyed their health, stole all they owned and finally took their lives. On the evening of April 19th the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were not filling the air with song and story around festival tables, but were bringing the noise of guns and fire to add to their dying screams. This, not that they could live, for they knew that was beyond reach, but so the world might hear their pain and anguish instead of just the silence that comes with death.

This tiny resistance rose up when rumors of the murder of Warsaw’s Jews in Treblinka became a certainty. The pieces of Jewry’s many factions, those that were still left in the Ghetto, came together under the command of 23-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz.

< http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/34138.htm> They struck when German troops, auxiliaries and police entered the Ghetto on Passover morning, a day the SS chose knowingly because it was sacred to Jews. They came to round up its surviving inhabitants for deportation to the ‘east’, that euphemism for death camps and seven hundred and fifty starving, barely armed Jews lay in wait to lash out at the heavily equipped well-trained German forces. The Ghetto remnant fought bravely and sustained their heroic effort for nearly a month as the Germans brought in more troops and equipment. And a month was far longer than anyone had thought, but on May 16th the resistance could do no more. Very few remained and they had nothing left to fight with. Of 56,000 Jews the Germans found in the Ghetto, 7,000 were immediately shot and the rest deported to the camps.

Passover commemorates the parting of the Red Sea as Moses lead the Jews out of Egypt. A first Seder on April 19th this year should also remind us of that first Seder night in the Ghetto in 1943 and of the Jews in the Warsaw, for whom there was no parting of waters, no freedom from bondage, but who, with their lives and actions, brought forth a spirit of freedom that traveled over the seas in steel hulled ships to the land of their ancestors.

Some of the very few, the remnant of the remnant, found their way through Warsaw’s sewers and surrounding forests and they, against all odds, were alive at war’s end and able to reach Palestine, Eretz Yisroel. They came together with the destitute Jews of Europe, the ones crawling out of their hiding places and those who were coming from behind the barbed wire of the camps. And they, joined by 850,000 Jews being driven out of their centuries old homes in Arab lands, became part of a great ingathering of Jews from all over the world. They all sought their home in the new-old Jewish State of Palestine-Israel and they infused it with the spirit of resistance from the Warsaw Ghetto.

While Jews around the world celebrate Passover, too few remember why, on this first night of Pesach, this April 19th, there is more to remember. As we read of God’s Mighty Hand guiding our ancestor’s sojourn from Egypt, we must remember too that powerful story of our fragile fragment, zichoron l’bracha, survivors of the Ghetto, who helped shape the soul and spirit of the State of Israel in its 60th year. 2008. 5768.

nrg—with appreciation to Ruth S King. This is a slightly different version of the editorial published in this week’s Connecticut Jewish Ledger.

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