As the Taliban entered Kabul, one former translator for the U.S. military felt she was living through a horror movie. “Nobody wants to leave their home because they don’t know if they’ll make it back alive,” she told me via WhatsApp on Wednesday. “The past 20 years feel like a dream. Overnight everything has changed.”…
April 19, 2021, is the 78th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and a good time to take aim at the myth that Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter.” Warsaw stands alongside Auschwitz as a symbol of the Holocaust: As Auscwhitz is an eternal condemnation of the perpetrators and all they stood for, so…
When I first heard that Warsaw’s Polin Museum had an exhibit about Muranow, the former Jewish quarter of the Polish capital, my first instinct was to buy a ticket to Warsaw – until I remembered that we’re in the midst of an epidemic. Although I live in Israel, Muranow has become very familiar to me…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Simcha Rotem, the last known surviving Jewish fighter from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, has died. Rotem, known as Kazik, died on Saturday in Jerusalem at the age of 94. “This is the loss of a special figure, because ‘Kazik’ was a real warrior in the full sense of the word,”…
The honorary doctorate being awarded this week by Krakow’s Jagiellonian University to San Francisco-based philanthropist Tad Taube is noteworthy for two reasons. One speaks to Poland’s recent history, the other to the present political moment. No one has done more during the last 30 years to repair the anguished relationship between Poland and the Jewish…
On a warm and cloudless spring day, Warsaw residents and Jews from abroad today remembered the ghetto uprising that began on this day in 1943. One in three or four people you passed on the streets in the center of the city seemed to be wearing the yellow paper daffodils being handed out by young…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The first Holocaust memorial services took place while the genocide of Europe’s Jews was still occurring. Whenever a city or town was liberated, a few Jews would return, clean up the mass graves where their relatives had been shot, erect a simple marker and chant “El Malei…
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Former Warsaw Ghetto fighter Simcha Rotem won his case against the PWN publishing house which published his letters to his former romantic partner, Irena Gelblum. The letters were published in Remigiusz Grzela’s book “Irena’s Choice.” PWN was ordered to apologize to Rotem and donate $5,900 to charity. The verdict was issued…
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