The 30th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising will be observed in cities and towns across the country April 29. The day has been designated Warsaw Ghetto Remembrance Day in resolutions unanimously passed by both houses of Congress last week. Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller has proclaimed April 29 Warsaw Ghetto Day in New York State and Mayor John V. Lindsay has done the same for New York City.
Times Square will be re-named Warsaw Ghetto Square for the occasion. Several thousand persons representing more than 50 national and metropolitan Jewish organizations will attend an outdoor rally there next Sunday to pay tribute to the memory of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
According to Abram Salomon, chairman of the National Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Anniversary Committee, religious bodies representing the three branches of American Jewry will be represented at the event held under the auspices of the Zionist Organization of America. The sponsoring organizations include the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, Hadassah, Jewish War Veterans of the U.S., B’nai B’rith, the Jewish Nazi Victims Organization of America and others. Salomon noted that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April, 1943, was the first organized battle against the Germans in all of Nazi-occupied Europe.
In Bergen County, N.J., a special holocaust observance to mark the Ghetto uprising will be held as part of the county’s observance of Israel’s 25th anniversary. A community-wide memorial service will be held at Temple Israel Meeting House in Boston on Saturday evening, April 28, commemorating the Ghetto revolt. It will feature songs from “I Never Saw A Butterfly,” a collection of children’s poems from the Terezin concentration camps recently set to music.
OBLIGATION TO RETELL STORY
A Warsaw Ghetto memorial service will be conducted at the Bayswater Jewish Center in Far Rockaway, N.Y., on April 29. The anniversary was marked here last Thursday at a demonstration at Central Commercial High School in Manhattan honoring the Ghetto resistance fighters. Participants included representatives of the Workmen’s Circle, the Jewish Labor Committee and the Jewish Labor Bund.
Preparations were being made to honor the Ghetto fighters in Philadelphia. Dr. Abraham I. Katsh, president of Dropsie University there, said the observance should be more than a once-a-year memorial, “It must become an integral part of Jewish observances and daily prayers the year round,” he said.
Philip E. Hoffman, president of the American Jewish Committee, similarly urged world Jewry to undertake a massive effort to make the facts of Jewish resistance to the Nazis familiar, especially to Jewish young people. “Every Jew of our day should consider himself as at one with those who were directly involved in the fate of European Jewry and we have an obligation to retell the story to our young,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
