Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Role of Civil Resistance

On the occasion of the 78th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and forthcoming publication of "Jews against Nazi Germany During World War II", eminent Holocaust scholars will discuss the significance of civilian resistance in the ghetto before and during the April 1943 uprising, both civil disobedience and the participation of unarmed fighters in the uprising.
- 25 April (Sunday), 2021, 10:00 PST / 13:00 EST / 18:00 GMT / 19:00 CET / 20:00 IST
- The event was streamed live on POLIN Museum’s English profile
- Watch here >>
They will consider how Jews in the ghetto maintained forbidden religious practices, organized medical aid, documented Nazi atrocities, built bunkers, and disobeyed German orders more generally. How can resistance be defined in a situation where the Germans denied Jews the very right to exist?
Participants:
Dr. Miriam Offer, a senior lecturer in the Holocaust Studies Program, Western Galilee College and lecturer on the history of medicine during the Holocaust in the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University, leads national and international initiatives to advance academic research and public discourse on medicine during the Third Reich and its relevance today. She is an expert researcher on Jewish medical activity during the Holocaust. Her book, “White Coats Inside the Ghetto: Jewish Medicine in Poland During the Holocaust”, was published in Hebrew in April 2015 by Yad Vashem, and the English edition appeared in 2020.
Dr. Samuel Kassow, Charles Northam Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, is the author of many studies on Russian and Jewish history including “Who will write our history: rediscovering a hidden archive from the Warsaw Ghetto” (“Kto napisze naszą historię? Ukryte archiwum Emanuela Ringelbluma”, Warszawa 2017). He was part of the scholarly team that planned the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and is currently engaged in a project organized by Yad Vashem to write a history of the Holocaust in Poland. He has been a visiting professor at several universities including Harvard, Toronto and Dartmouth. Professor Kassow holds a Ph.D from Princeton.
Dr. Havi Dreifuss, is professor of Jewish history and head of the Institute for the History of Polish Jewry and Israel-Poland Relations at Tel Aviv University, as well as director of the Center for Research on the Holocaust in Poland at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem. Her research deals with various aspects of everyday life during the Holocaust, including the relationship between Jews and Poles, religious life in light of the Holocaust, and Jewish existence in the face of extermination. Her latest book, “The Warsaw Ghetto - The End (April 1942 - June 1943)” published in Hebrew in 2018 won the Shazar Prize for the Study of Jewish History, and will be published in English.
Moderator:
- Krzysztof Persak – POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and Polish Academy of Sciences
The debate is organized within the Global Education Outreach Program.
GEOP Program is supported by the Taube Philanthropies, The William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.