From the Jerusalem Post:
“Passover Seder to be held in Warsaw Ghetto for first time
in 76 years “
A Passover Seder will be held in
the Warsaw Ghetto this week for the first time in 76 years. On April 19, 1943,
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising broke out, which was on the eve of the Jewish
festival of Passover. German troops stormed the ghetto, intent on completing
the deportation process within three days, yet were ambushed by Jewish rebels.
This year, close to eight decades later, families of ghetto survivors will
celebrate the Jewish festival of redemption together. For the first time since
the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated during World War II and all its residents were
killed or deported to death camps, one hundred Diaspora Jewish families will
celebrate a Passover Seder in the ghetto, along with the Rabbi of the local
Lubavitch Jewish community and his family.
Rabbi Shalom Ber Stambler, Chief Rabbi of Chabad-Poland is hosting a
special Passover Seder in what was formerly the Warsaw ghetto with
approximately one hundred Jewish families from Israel, Europe and the USA
expected to take part. Yosef Nachum and Nakmi’a Ben-Shem are planning to fly in
from Israel to participate in the Seder. Daughter Sharon Ben-Shem recalled that
Warsaw Ghetto child prodigy Josima Feldschuh, "the celebrated young
pianist of the Warsaw Ghetto, was my aunt." "She perished on April 21, 1943 shortly
before her fourteenth birthday, while in hiding. Her very last meal took place
the prior evening - the seder night of 1943," Sharon said. "This
year, we will be joining the Seder in Poland together with her family, her
brother - my father - and sister - my
aunt - and I." "We will be in Warsaw, in the seder night, in her
city, precisely on the day that she passed away," she added. Sharon said
that Warsaw was also home to her grandmother’s immediate and extended family.
"It is deeply meaningful to us to be celebrating this festival of Passover
together as free Jews in a place where so many, including our own family,
perished tragically.” The Seder will be divided into three groups and led in
three different languages - Polish, Hebrew and English. Toward the end of the
evening, they will merge and conclude the Seder as one. Numbering among local
guests are the members of the Szpilman family, whose uncle Władysław Szpilman
was a world-famous pianist who survived the Holocaust. A film about Szpilman's
survival in hiding and on the run during the Holocaust, The Pianist, won
several Oscars in 2003. Albert Stankovski, director of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum
which is currently being constructed by the Polish government, will also
attend. “Before the War, approximately
one-third of Warsaw was Jewish,” recounted Stankovski. “Commemorating pre-War
Jewish Warsaw and celebrating the growth of the current Jewish community is of
utmost importance to us." "The
Passover celebration organized by Rabbi Shalom Ber Stambler and Chabad
Lubavitch is a vital part of this process," he explained. "At the
Warsaw Ghetto Museum...we aim to preserve, for future generations, the memory
of the Jews of Warsaw who were imprisoned behind the ghetto walls during the
German occupation and subsequently murdered in the German camps.” The Warsaw Ghetto Museum will be housed in the
historic building of the former Children’s Hospital established by Jewish
families Bersohn and Bauman as a clinic for children of all faiths. The Stambler family were sent by the
Lubavitcher Rebbe to Warsaw with the mission of revitalizing Jewish life in
Poland in 1991. Since then, the Stamblers have invested enormous energies to
cultivate Jewish life, culture and resources in a city where Judaism was
largely wiped out during the war. The
communal Passover seder is one of their latest effort to rejuvenate the
community and spread awareness of Jewish identity and Jewish life in Poland. Yossi
Stambler, Rabbi Stambler’s 13-year-old son will lead the Seder in Hebrew, while
his father leads a parallel seder in Polish. Despite his youth, the boy has
earned a reputation as a talented orator. The English-language Seder will be
led by several young Lubavitch rabbis from the U.S. who are traveling to Poland
specially to participate in the event. One of them, Rabbi Levi Goldschmidt, is
a great-great grandson of Rabbi Tzvi Hersch Gur-Aryeh, a well-known Jewish
dignitary who lived in Warsaw before the war. Gur-Aryeh was murdered in the ghetto massacre
on Pesach. According to Holocaust historian Dr. Hillel Zaidman, on the eve of
Passover 1943, Rabbi Gur-Aryeh and his family, along with other Lubavitch
chassidim, covertly baked matzah at grave risk to their lives in order to be
able to properly fulfill the commandments pertaining to the Jewish festival. The rabbi and his family perished together in
the uprising. The only survivor of the family was Chaya, a daughter who was
married to Rabbi Nachum Goldschmidt and lived in Tel Aviv. Goldschmidt’s
grandson, who lives in New York, will be returning to his ancestor’s native
land where he will co-host the Seder in English. Rabbi Shalom Stambler said
that this is "very significant for us to be celebrating Jewish holidays,
and particularly the Seder night, which symbolizes Jewish freedom and the day
that we united as a nation, in a place that not long ago others sought to
destroy us. Throughout the ages, the
Jewish people have been oppressed by many nations, yet we have always emerged
triumphant!”
^ This Seder is important because
it shows once again that the Nazis did not win in their plan to wipe out Jewish
life and influence in Europe. Tomorrow (April 19, 1943) is the anniversary of
the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It lasted until May 16th. It is the
largest Jewish revolt against the Germans during World War 2. The Jews in the Ghetto knew the
Uprising wouldn't succeed from the start, but they wanted to show the Germans
that they wouldn't go to their deaths without a fight and wanted to avenge the
265,000 men, women and children taken from the Ghetto (from July-September
1942) by the Germans to the death camps and gassed. At the end of the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising 13,000 Jewish men, women and children were killed inside the Ghetto
(6,000 of them were burnt alive or died from smoke inhalation - including the
Uprising's leader, Mordechai Anielewicz - who was 24 years old.) Around 50,000
Jews were taken from the Ghetto to the Treblinka Death Camp and gassed. ^
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