“Eighty Years On, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Descendants Are Fighting for Israeli Democracy”, Haaretz

Published April 17, 2023

Judy Maltz, Tel Aviv, April 17, 2023

Rebellion runs in the veins of many at the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz in northern Israel, which helps explain why they are resisting the Netanyahu government’s judicial coup with all their might

Divisions run so deep in Israeli society these days that families are even being split apart. Yael Zuckerman takes comfort in the fact that hers is probably an exception.

“Our extended family holds an annual reunion, and when we met a few weeks ago I really didn’t know what to expect,” she recounts. “So, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that each and every one of us has been actively involved in the protest movement. We ended up sitting around the table sharing photographs of ourselves at different demonstrations,” she says, referring to this year’s pro-democracy rallies against the Netanyahu government’s efforts to eviscerate the judiciary.

With a tad of irony, she adds: “We’re a family of rebels, after all.”

A retired clinical psychologist, Zuckerman is the daughter of two legendary leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Yitzhak (“Antek”) Zuckerman and Zivia Lubetkin.

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the most famous act of Jewish resistance against the Nazis during the Holocaust.

Yael Zuckerman at her home on Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot, northern Israel. “My parents were people who took responsibility for their actions, who never thought about their own personal interests, and who felt guilty until their dying days about not having been able to save more Jews.”Credit: Rami Shllush

On April 19, 1943, a few hundred young Jewish fighters ambushed German forces as they entered the Warsaw Ghetto to round up whichever Jews remained there and transport them to the Treblinka death camp. All the fighters had at their disposal was a tiny cache of guns, grenades and Molotov cocktails, but these desperate individuals, believing they had nothing left to lose, managed to hold out against the Nazis for nearly a month.

“Antek” Zuckerman served as second-in-command to Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the main Jewish resistance group. He was based at the time on the “Aryan” side of Warsaw, where he helped procure weapons for his comrades in the Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojow) behind the ghetto walls. Lubetkin, his girlfriend at the time, was the only woman to serve in the high command of the left-wing ZOB.

Street sweepers cleaning the pedestal of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes, commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943, in the Polish capital earlier this month.Credit: WOJTEK RADWANSKI – AFP

Yael holds the distinction of being the first child born on Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot (the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz), which was founded in 1949 by a group of 180 Holocaust survivors. Many of them, like her parents, had been active in the Jewish resistance to the Nazis.

The mass protests in Israel are well into their fourth month now, the weekly Saturday night demonstrations drawing hundreds of thousands nationwide. A chant repeatedly heard at these rallies takes the form of an ultimatum to the government: “Democracy or uprising!”

For Yael Zuckerman and other second- and third-generation members of this kibbutz, this battle cry resonates in a very personal way.

Zuckerman, who still lives on the kibbutz (as does her older brother Shimon), says she doesn’t miss a demonstration.

“I’ve protested in Haifa, in Jerusalem, in Tel Aviv – wherever I can,” she said in a recent interview at her plant-filled home surrounded by a lush garden. “I do it out of fear. I have never felt before the dread I feel today. It’s something tangible and terrifying. Unlike my parents, I wasn’t blessed with leadership skills or particular charisma, so I’m not the type of person who can rally the masses. But I do what I can, and often that means standing in the street holding a flag.”

This soft-spoken woman considers it presumptuous to speak in the name of her deceased parents. However, if they were alive today, she believes they would be “out there resisting with all their might, and probably, knowing them, assuming leadership roles in this fight.”

‘Moral obligation’

Located between the northern coastal cities of Acre and Nahariya, Lohamei Hageta’ot is home to some 800 residents. It is also home to the Ghetto Fighters’ House, established in 1949 as the world’s first Holocaust museum.

In early February, nearly 200 of its residents signed a public declaration against the judicial coup – a half-page ad, one of the first of its kind, published in the widely circulated Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. Like many Israelis, they had become convinced that this could spell the end of democracy in their homeland.

Israelis waving flags during a protest against the judicial coup in Jerusalem earlier this year.Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP

Citing their unique legacy, the kibbutzniks made clear in their declaration that the fighting spirit of their parents and grandparents still ran strongly in their veins.

“We are committed to ‘rebellion’ against all form of evil, social injustice and oppression of other peoples,” they warned. “We will resist any attempts to harm our legal system and the values of equality, rule of law and an independent judiciary.”

Among the signatories was Yehonatan Stein, a history teacher whose late grandmother, Dorka Sternberg, was among the founding members of Lohamei Hageta’ot. “As descendants, I feel we have a special moral obligation to speak out against what this government is doing,” says the 42-year-old father of two.

“After all, we know better than most that democracy isn’t only about the rule of the majority, and we know better than most what can happen when there are no checks and balance and too much power is concentrated in the hands of the regime.

“The Holocaust, by the way, is not the only example,” he adds.

Yehonatan Stein. “As descendants, I feel we have a special moral obligation to speak out against what this government is doing,”Credit: Rami Shllush

A driving force behind the declaration was Moshe (“Moishele”) Shner, a retired professor of history and education at Oranim Academic College whose parents were among the founders of Lohamei Hageta’ot. His mother, Sarah Shner, was a partisan fighter in Belarus during the war and active afterward in smuggling Jews out of the Soviet Union into Poland and from there to Mandatory Palestine. An educator and prolific author, she wrote extensively about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

Moshe’s father, Zvi Shner, ran the Ghetto Fighters’ House for many years and edited numerous volumes of survivor testimonies.

“My parents were the high priests of memory here,” Shner, 68, reflects proudly over breakfast at his kibbutz home. He recalls that his mother had been recruited by Yitzhak Zuckerman after the war to help locate the secret Warsaw Ghetto archives (known as the “Oyneg Shabbes” or “Oneg Shabbat” project) buried under the ruins.

As a tribute to the founders of the kibbutz, Shner recently staged an “empty chairs” protest against the government at the Lohamei Hageta’ot cemetery. The chairs, he explains, were meant to symbolize the deceased founders who, after emerging from the darkest period in Jewish history, were determined to build a place where the values of democracy, freedom, egalitarianism and liberalism could thrive.

“They would have been in great despair were they alive today, seeing what is happening in this country,” says Shner. “But what we learned from them is to rise up against injustice wherever it exists and fight for our values. For us, joining the protest movement is a moral imperative.”

Not long after the first protests began in Tel Aviv last January, Shner headed out to the road outside his kibbutz with an Israeli flag in his hand. He was the only protester in the street on that night. Since then, though, the protests outside Lohamei Hageta’ot have grown weekly, drawing both residents of the kibbutz as well as of neighboring towns and communities. At the last count, says Shner, several hundred demonstrators were out there.

His rebellious nature, Shner says with a smile, was inherited from his late mother. “She was a partisan all her life, even after she left the forests,” he says. “She didn’t take orders from anyone and did what needed to be done – not necessarily what was permitted. She always taught me not to lower my eyes before authority and to act in a way that would make me proud to look at myself in the mirror each morning. That maybe explains why I’ve become so totally swept up in these protests.”

Moshe Shner. “What we learned from the kibbutz founders is to rise up against injustice wherever it exists and fight for our values.”Credit: Rami Shllush

‘This time it’s different’

Yael Zuckerman’s sense of despair over the direction Israel is headed is not new. It began long before its latest government – the most religious and right-wing in the country’s history – took power late last year.

“My stomach has been turning for years at what I see around me – the occupation, the discrimination against the Arab minority and the hateful discourse against people like me who are called ‘leftist traitors,’” she says. “But until now I never felt the need to revolt. I accepted what the government did, even things that to my mind were awful, because it was the government that been elected by the people. But this time it’s different.”

Zuckerman has been thinking about her parents a lot these days and their leadership style – so starkly different, she notes, from that of the country’s current leadership.

Yael Zuckerman’s father, Yitzhak, addressing the first assembly of Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot in 1949.Credit: Rudolf Younes/Ghetto Fighters’ House Archive

“My parents were people who took responsibility for their actions, who never thought about their own personal interests, and who felt guilty until their dying days about not having been able to save more Jews,” she says. “The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was the first act of its kind against the Nazis in all of Europe, but they often tortured themselves with the thought that had they acted earlier, perhaps more lives could’ve been saved.”

Her father, she recounts, was once asked what military lessons could be learned from the April 1943 uprising. “He famously replied that this was not a subject for military schools – rather, it was a subject for schools that study the human spirit.”

A few years ago, Zuckerman relays, she applied for and received a Polish passport. “I won’t get into the reasons for it, but I would often joke that if Israel ever became a dictatorship under [Benjamin] Netanyahu, then I’d have somewhere to go,” she says.

“And now here we are in a situation where a dictatorship is hanging over our heads like a sword. I know that my parents, were they alive today, would never have given up and left. And you know what? The protests made me understand that no way am I leaving this place either. The people out in the streets today protesting – their human spirit gives me hope.”

Visitors looking at an exhibit at the Ghetto Fighters’ House museum on Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot.Credit: Rami Shllush