May 16, 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Nazi forces detonated the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, thus ending the 27-day Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In attempt to prevent the mass deportation to death camps of those remaining in the ghetto, a group of Jews decided to fight back, forming militia groups and arming themselves with smuggled pistols, rifles and Molotov cocktails. On the eve of the final deportation, during Passover, a group of 750 Jews ambushed 2,000 heavily armed and well-trained German troops, forcing the Nazis to momentarily retreat. The Nazis returned and eventually overpowered the poorly supplied rebels. Militia leader Mordechai Anielewicz, who was killed in the revolt and who later had Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in Israel named in his memory, wrote in one of his last letters, “I merited to see Jewish resistance in all its grandeur and glory.”

Source: Picture by Marc Israel Sellem of the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes by Nathan Rapoport at Yad Vashem; The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition, May 2015; www.jpost.com/christian-news