Hundreds Gather For Passover Seder Commemorating Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
Image by Getty Images
By Adrianna Chaviva Freedman April 18, 2019
Captured Jews are led by German Waffen SS soldiers to the assembly point for deportation during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Image by Wikimedia Commons
Editor’s note: The original version of this story appeared with the headline “Warsaw Ghetto To Have A Passover Seder For The First Time Since Its Uprising”. This was far from the first — in fact, since World War II, there have been multiple Seders in the area that was once the Warsaw ghetto and the prewar Jewish neighborhood of Muranów.
In what was once the Warsaw Ghetto, hundreds of Jews are gathering for a seder on April 19th, the Jerusalem Post reported. Shalom Ber Stambler, Chabad’s Chief Rabbi of Poland will be officiating the Seder, which will include participants from Israel, Europe and the United States.
The date is significant in Jewish history, as it is the 76th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, when Jewish inmates, led by Mordechai Anielewicz, led a doomed revolt against German troops.
The seder is expected to be separated into three groups, based on the language the Seder-goers speak. Yossi Stambler, Rabbi Stambler’s thirteen-year-old son, will be conducting the seder entirely in Hebrew, while his father leads one entirely in Polish.
According to Rabbi Stambler, this event is “very significant for us to be celebrating Jewish holidays.” With the seder in particular, he says that it “symbolizes Jewish freedom and the day that we united as a nation, in a place that not long ago, others sought to destroy us.”
Among the attendees will be Albert Stankovsky, the director of the upcoming Warsaw Ghetto Museum.
“Before the war, approximately one-third of the Warsaw was Jewish,” he told the Jerusalem Post. “Commemorating pre-war Jewish Warsaw and celebrating the growth of the current Jewish community is of utmost importance to us.” He also explained that “the Passover celebration organized by Rabbi Shalom Ber Stambler and Chabad Lubavitch is a vital part of this process,” as the goal for the museum is to “preserve, for future generations, the memory of the Jews of Warsaw, who were imprisoned behind ghetto walls during the German occupation and subsequently murdered in the German camps.”
Adrianna Chaviva Freedman is the Social Media Intern for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @ac_freedman
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