A New Exhibit on the Jews Who Fought Back against the Nazis

While the basic facts of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising are relatively well known, few are aware of the numerous other instances of Jewish resistance against the Third Reich. Thus the myth persists that millions of Jews went “like sheep to the slaughter”—a biblical phrase famously invoked by a leader of one of those resistance movements. A new exhibit at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London aims to set the record straight, writes Robert Philpot:

[A]s the exhibition makes clear, in every European country which fell under Nazi rule, Jews resisted the Germans, their allies, and their collaborators. Sometimes that resistance was a part of wider underground organizations, while sometimes Jews established their own groups.

Warsaw and Bialystok—where several hundred Jewish fighters launched a short-lived uprising in August 1943—were but two of the seven major and 45 smaller ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union where Jewish underground groups operated. And the two cities were by no means alone in seeing Jewish armed revolts. In dozens of ghettos, including Krakow, Vilna, Kovno, Będzin, and Częstochowa, Jews took up arms against their persecutors.

The Minsk ghetto—the scene of another revolt—also saw an audacious effort to smuggle out Jews and sabotage German factories. The exhibition highlights the story of Mikhail Gebelev, who liaised between resistance groups inside and outside the ghetto and organized mass escapes in 1942. But Gebelev refused to escape himself. Aged thirty-six, he was betrayed and murdered by the Nazis in August 1942. Thanks in part to his efforts, however, up to 10,000 of the 100,000 Jews imprisoned in the Minsk ghetto successfully escaped, many of whom then joined the Soviet partisans.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Holocaust, Resistance

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023