Marking the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising’s 80th Anniversary

Moshe Arens (1925 – 2019), a former Israeli defence minister who was a senior Betar leader in the U.S. in his younger years, wrote a book on the ZZW’s heroic battle against the Nazis in the ghetto, Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto (Gefen Publishing, November 2011). The book and the many articles Arens wrote about the ZZW that were published in Yad Vashem Studies, Haaretz, and The Jerusalem Post helped to create a far more accurate account of the ZZW’s participation in the uprising. The book and the articles also did much to recall the heroism of Pawel Frenkel, ZZW’s frontline commander.

The ZZW is now known to have been the better-equipped fighting force in the ghetto, as it had procured machine guns. Arens writes that the ZZW had more fighters.

The groups finally decided to coordinate their efforts in the very last hours before the April 19 battle began. For 28 days, Jewish warriors fought the enemy and showed Jewish bravery perhaps not seen since the days of Bar Kochba’s uprising against Rome. Sporadic attacks on Nazis continued by Ghetto fighters who hid in bunkers beneath the Ghetto’s rubble until the Warsaw Uprising began in August 1944. The Ghetto fighters killed hundreds of Nazis.

One reason to continue to remind the public about the Uprising is that some want its importance minimized or worse. For example, in December 2013 Israel’s Haaretz newspaper published an article with the title “The Warsaw Ghetto Myth”.

It really should be impossible to speak about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising without talking about the founder of Betar, Ze’ev Jabotinsky — even though he was not there.

Jabotinsky (1880-1940) was a Zionist leader, orator, and writer who founded the Jewish Legion during World War I, as well as the Haganah self-defense units in Jerusalem in 1920. In 1923 he founded Betar. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion served as Jabotinsky’s personal aide just after the outbreak of World War Two and traveled with him internationally.