H8: Jewish Resistance

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A 'Spiritual Underground'

Jewish resistance, when not active, concentrated on
the struggle for existence, on mutual hope, on
disobedience and contravention of Nazi orders that
inflicted want, hunger, and degradation, on the Jewish
populations of the ghettos. In addition it strove to
create and maintain a 'spiritual underground' whose main
aims were clandestine study, the holding of religious
services and fulfilment of mitzvot in secret, in spite of
their being forbidden.

An area of activity in which the youth movements, and particularly the Zionist ones, were engaged, was Zionist education. The movements held Zionist meetings in the ghetto, studies were carried on in secret, illegal libraries operated, and all manner of seminars were held. The young people involved in these 'illegal' activities acquired not only knowledge and understanding, but deepened their Jewish identity in the face of a regime that tried to depict the Jew as a satanic monster.

The cultural life that continued was often remarkable. In Vilna there was a ghetto theatre that begun with a gala opening. Performances were frequent and well-attended. The director, Jacob Gens, wanted the theatre to give the ghetto inhabitants a feeling of normalcy, and apparently it achieved these aims. Plans for a new 'season' of 'Tevye the Milkman' (the play on which 'Fiddler on the Roof' is based) were in place when the ghetto was destroyed in September 1943.

Conclusion - They Fought Back

The Jews were pressed into the ghettos in the full knowledge that these grossly overcrowded places filled with starving people will breed infectious and fatal diseases. The Jews were not given heating materials and in the bitter winters of Eastern Europe the cold became a plague which attacked the fragile body. And side by side with the physical blows aimed at hurting the body, the Nazis operated a complicated network of techniques to break the spirit, to instigate internal quarrels amongst the Jews, to bring about the disintegration of the social and communal fabric, and to destroy the bonds of family and human friendship. In the light of this record, the question is not why so few Jews fought back, but how so many found the strength to do so.

Every act - however small or ordinary - that ensured survival or helped it, physical, spiritual, or ethical, was an act of resistance. The Germans decreed death, and the Jews struggled to live. This was resistance.

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