April 18, 2023
On Yom Hashoah, we remember our forebears of from Dror who resisted against the Jewish genocide in Europe.
Chavka Raban Folman : 1924-2014. Pictured here studying at the underground school run by the Dror Movement in the Warsaw Ghetto, Chavka was a chanicha of the movement and active as a courier. She illegally travelled between ghettos, moving documents, weapons, and people. She was caught during one of these missions to the Krakow Ghetto and sent to Auschwitz. She survived, emigrated to Israel and lectured and educated about her time in the movement and the underground until her death.
Yitzhak Zuckerman: 1915-1981. Known by his underground name, Antek, he was one of the leaders of the Dror movement before the start of WWII and one of the key figures in the Jewish Fighting Organization that led the uprising. Guided by the values of the movement he loved and led, he was second in command during the uprising, active in organizing the survivors in post-war Europe and founding the Ghetto Fighter’s Kibbutz and Museum.
Tzivia Lubetkin: 1914-1978. A madricha of the Dror movement and highest ranking woman in the Jewish Fighting Organization during the uprising, Tzivia led her chanichimot through the most challenging of situations as the Nazis laid siege to the ghetto. She survived, fought in the Polish Uprising of 1944, and travelled to Eretz Yisrael, where she gave testimony at Kibbutz Yagur.
“What gave us this moral strength? We were able to endure the life in the ghetto because we knew that we were a collective, a movement. Each of us knew that he wasn’t alone. Every other Jew faced his fate alone, one man before the overpowering, invincible enemy. From the very first moment until the bitter end, we stood together, as a collective, as a movement. The feeling that there was a movement, a community of people who cared about each other, who shared ideas and values in common, made it possible for each of us to do what we did.”
The last photo is of our Workshoppers on their recent trip to Poland. They are seen standing around a monument to the sewer grate, decorated with the Hebrew letter “ב”, where Tzivia helped dozens of Jews escape from the Warsaw Ghetto.
