Mordechai Anielewicz (Hebrew: מרדכי אנילביץ'; 1919 – 8 May 1943) was the Polish leader of the Jewish Combat Organization (Polish: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the largest Jewish resistance movement during the Second World War. Anielewicz inspired further rebellions in both ghettos and extermination camps with his leadership. His character was engraved as a symbol of courage and sacrifice, and was a major figure of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
Mordechai Anielewicz (Hebrew: מרדכי אנילביץ'; 1919 – 8 May 1943) was the Polish leader of the Jewish Combat Organization (Polish: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; the largest Jewish resistance movement during the Second World War. Anielewicz inspired further rebellions in both ghettos and extermination camps with his leadership. His character was engraved as a symbol of courage and sacrifice, and was a major figure of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
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Biography
Mordechai (Polish: Mordechaj) Anielewicz was born to a Polish-Jewish family of Abraham (Avraham) and Cyryl (Cirel) née Zaltman, in the town of Wyszków near Warsaw where they met during the reconstitution of sovereign Poland. Shortly after Mordechai's birth, his family moved to Warsaw. Mordechai had a brother and two sisters: Pinchas, Hava and Frida. He finished Tarbut elementary with Hebrew instructions in 1933, at the age of 14. Mordechai was a member of the Betar youth movement from 1933 until 1935. He completed the private Jewish Laor Gimnazjum (also La Or, approved by the Ministry of Education). He later switched over to the left-leaning Hashomer Hatzair. At the age of 18 he went to a pre-military Polish training camp.
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R.I.P Mordechai
Fleeing Occupied Poland
On 7 September 1939, a week after the German invasion of Poland, Anielewicz traveled with a group from Warsaw to the east of the country in the hopes that the Polish Army would slow down the German advance. When the Soviet Red Army invaded and then occupied Eastern Poland in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Anielewicz heard that Jewish refugees, other youth movement members and political groups had flocked to Wilno, which was then under Soviet control.
Anielewicz travelled to Wilno and attempted to convince his colleagues to send people back to other Polish occupied territories to continue the fight against the Germans. He then attempted to cross the Romanian border to open a route for young Jews to get to the Mandate of Palestine, but was caught and thrown into the Soviet jail. He was released a short time later and returned to Warsaw in January 1940 with his girlfriend, Mira Fuchrer. While there Anielewicz saw his father for the last time, who was pressed into forced labor.
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Mordechai Anielewicza adăugat o fotografie
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R.I.P Mordechai
Initial resistance After returning to Warsaw, Anielewicz organized groups, meetings, seminars, secretly attended resistance groups in other cities, and founded the underground newspaper Neged ha-zerem (Hebrew: נגד הזרם, literally "Counter-current"). At the beginning of April 1940, the construction of the Warsaw Ghetto began. It stretched over an area of 3.4 km2, and gradually a 3 m high wall with barbed wire was built around it. In mid-October, it was officially established, and by mid-November, the Germans had driven the Jews from the rest of Warsaw and its surroundings. An estimated 400,000 Jews, representing about 30% of the city's population, were pushed into an area which took up approximately 2.4% of the city's area. On top of extreme overcrowding, inadequate food supply and disease caused tens of thousands of deaths before deportation even began. In October 1941, the German occupation administration in Poland issued a decree that every Jew, captured outside the ghetto without a valid permit, would be executed. After the first reports of the mass murder of the Jews spread at the end of 1941, Anielewicz began immediately to organize defensive Jewish groups in the Warsaw Ghetto. His first attempt to join the Polish resistance, subject to the Polish…
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Mordechai Anielewicza adăugat o fotografie
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R.I.P Mordechai
Warsaw Ghetto uprising In October 1942, the Jewish resistance managed to establish contact with the Polish Home Army, which was able to smuggle a small number of weapons and explosives into the ghetto. Since the end of September 1942, the Jews started building fortified bunkers and shelters in the Warsaw Ghetto, and there were 600 by January 1943. Each fighter had a gun and several hand grenades (many of them home-made) or Molotov cocktails. There was however a lack of ammunition and heavier weapons – only a few rifles, ground mines, and one machine gun were available. On 18 January 1943, the Germans resumed deportation. Anielewicz, together with other members of ŻOB and ŻZW, decided to act. They were armed with five revolvers, five grenades, Molotov cocktails, crowbars and clubs. Twelve of them joined a group of evacuated Jews and attacked the German soldiers on the contracted signal. The fighters joined the line of hundreds of prisoners concentrated on Mila Street. As they reached the corner of Zamenhof and Niska, they attacked, each member of the unit targeting a German soldier. In the subsequent confusion, part of the deported Jews managed to escape. Most of the resistance in the attack…
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Commemoration
During the later part of the war, a unit of the People's Guard formed by Warsaw Ghetto survivors bore the name of Anielewicz
In July 1944, Anielewicz was posthumously awarded the Cross of Valour by the Polish government in exile.
In 1945 he was also awarded the Cross of Grunwald, 3rd Class by the Polish People's Army.
In December 1943, kibbutz Yad Mordechai in Israel was renamed after him and had a monument erected in his memory.
In 1945 was established the Casa de Cultura Mordejai Anilevich in Montevideo, Uruguay.
The site of a former German concentration camp, was renamed Mordechaj Anielewicz Street.
Many cities in Israel have streets named after him, including Beersheba, Tel Aviv, Petah Tikva, Safed, Lod, Ashdod, Haifa, Holon, Yehud and more.
In 1983, the Israeli government issued a two-stamp set honoring Anielewicz and Josef Glazman as heroes of the ghettos.
In 2023, he was commemorated in the Holocaust memorial at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. On the same year, he was posthumously awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the President of Poland Andrzej Duda.
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Bibliography
Edelman, Marek, and Krall, Hanna. Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation With Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Henry Holt and Company, New York, 1986
Zuckerman, Yitzhak, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (A Centennial Book), ISBN 0-520-07841-1
