The Little-Known Tale of the Jews Who Tunneled Out of a Ghetto to Fight against the Nazis

July 28 2022

On September 26, 1943—three days before Rosh Hashanah—a group of 232 Jews used a tunnel they had built themselves to sneak out of a Nazi ghetto to the comparative safety of the nearby forests. The escape from the Polish town of Nowogródek (known as Navaredok in Yiddish and currently in Belarus) was organized by the Bielski brothers, a team of Jewish partisan leaders whose exploits were made famous by the film Defiance. Yehuda Geberer tells this remarkable story, and places it in the context of other Jewish rescue efforts during the Holocaust. (Audio, 43 minutes.)

Read more at Jewish History Soundbites

More about: East European Jewry, Holocaust, Holocaust rescue, Resistance

Western Europe’s Failures Led to the Pogrom in Amsterdam

Nov. 11 2024

In 2013, Mosaic—then a brand-new publication—published an essay by the French intellectual Michel Gurfinkiel outlining the dark future that awaited European Jewry. It began with a quote from the leader of the Jewish community of Versailles: “My feeling is that our congregation will be gone within twenty or thirty years.” The reasons he, and Gurfinkiel, felt this way were on display in Amsterdam Thursday night. Michael Murphy writes:

For years, Holland and other European countries have invited vast numbers of people whose values and culture are often at odds with their own. This was a bold experiment made to appear less hazardous through rose-tinted spectacles. Europeans thought vainly that because we had largely set aside ethno-sectarian politics after the atrocities of the 20th century that others would do the same once they arrived. But they have not.

Perhaps the most unsettling part of this self-described “Jew hunt,” which left five people hospitalized, was the paltry response of the Dutch police. Reports suggest officers failed to act swiftly and, in some cases, to act at all. “I and two others ran to the nearest police station, but they didn’t open the door,” one of the victims claimed.

One hopes there is a reasonable explanation for this. Yet Amsterdam’s police force—with its increasingly diverse make-up—may have had other reasons for their reluctance to intervene. Last month, the Dutch Jewish Police Network warned that some officers “no longer want to protect Jewish targets or events,” vaguely citing “moral dilemmas.”

Read more at National Post

More about: Amsterdam, Anti-Semitism, European Islam, European Jewry