[osint] Armed Jews Week

[R.A. Hettinga]

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To: "Bruce Tefft" <btefft at community-research.com>
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From: "Bruce Tefft" <btefft at community-research.com>
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Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 21:19:58 -0500
Subject: [osint] Armed Jews Week
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6662217/

Armed Jews Week

Guest blogging for Glenn this week is Dave Kopel, Research Director at the
Independence Institute, and co-author of several articles with Glenn.


. December 10, 2004 | 11:51 AM ET

Tonight is the fourth night of Armed Jews Week, or as it is more popularly
known, Hanukkah.  Hanukkah is an eight-day celebration of the Jewish
revolution against Syria in the second century B.C.  The Syrian government
(a remnant of Alexander the Great's empire) attempted to wipe out the Jewish
religion by forcing the Jews to conform to Greek culture.  Some of them
refused, and a tiny militia, led by Judah the Maccabee ("the hammer") began
a guerilla war.

The Jewish militia grew in force, and repeatedly destroyed much larger
Syrian armies which were sent to smash the revolution.  Syria's King
Antiochus decided that the Jewish people were so much trouble that he would
just get rid of them entirely-slaughtering as many as necessary, and selling
all the rest into slavery.  But his wicked plans failed, and after years of
war, the Jews won their independence.

During the years of Syrian tyranny, Syrian officers enjoyed the droit du
seigneur-the authority to deflower virgin Jewish brides on their wedding
nights, before they could join their husbands.  So some stories which Jewish
families retell at Hanukkah, such as the Book of Judith,extol brave Jewish
women who went to the tent of enemy officers who were expecting sex-but who
instead met their deaths as the hands of lone Jewish women.

During centuries of oppression in Christian and Moslem lands, many Jews
adopted attitudes of passivity and helplessness.  Those attitudes began to
change in the late nineteenth century, with the growth of the Zionist
movement.

Zionists believed that Jews had become disconnected from the physical world.
That the Jews had no homeland was the most extreme manifestation of the
disconnection, but the disconnect could be seen on many levels.  Often pale
and weak, Jewish boys were easy targets for bullies.  Usually passive and
timid, Jewish communities were easy targets for mobs.  The root cause of
Jewish physical weakness and of disrespect by gentiles was the Jewish lack
of self-respect.

The Zionists set out to restore a Jewish homeland, and they recognized that
such a project would require a widespread change in Jewish consciousness.

So in counties such as Russia and Israel (which was ruled as colony by the
Ottoman Empire and then by the British), Zionists organized Jewish
self-defense groups.  Many of the young Jewish men and women who would lead
the resistance to Hitler were members of these Zionist self-defense youth
groups in the 1930s in Eastern Europe.

Although there is a widespread myth that Jews in the Holocaust were passive,
they were actually more active than any other conquered people.  In 1942-43,
Jews constituted half of all the partisans in Poland.  Overall, about thirty
thousand Jewish partisans fought in Eastern Europe.  There were armed
revolts in over forty different ghettos, mostly in Eastern Poland.

In other parts of Europe, Jews likewise joined the resistance at much higher
rates than the rest of the population.  Unlike in Eastern Europe, though,
Jews were generally able to participate as individuals in the national
resistance, rather than having to fight in separate units.

For example, in France, Jews amounted to than one percent of French
population, but comprised about 15-20 percent of the French Resistance.

In Greece too, Jews were disproportionately involved in the resistance.  In
Thessaly, a Jewish partisan unit in the mountains was led by the
septuagenarian Rabbi Moshe Pesah, who carried his own rifle.  The Athenian
Jew Jacques Costis led the team which demolished the Gorgopotamos Bridge,
thereby breaking the link between the mainland and Peloponnesian Peninsula,
and interfering with the delivery of supplies to Rommel's Afrika Korps.

One of the great centers of resistance was Vilna, Lithuania, which before
the Nazi conquest had been an outstanding center of Jewish learning,
compared by some to Jerusalem.

Plans for resistance began in January 1942.  The Jews' only weapons were
smuggled in from nearby German arms factories where the Jews performed slave
labor.  Hopeful of liberation by the Russian army, many of the Vilna Jews
did not support the partisans.  Partisan resistance postponed by three weeks
the German plans to transport all the inhabitants of the Vilna ghetto to
death camps, but the deportation of 40,000 Jews was accomplished by the end
of September 1943.

A young poet named Abba Kovner led the resistance movement known as the
Avengers in the woods around Vilna.  His lieutenants, and bedmates, were
teenage girls, Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak.

The Avengers were the first partisans in Nazi Europe to blow up a German
train.

Towards the end of the war, the Avengers shepherded huge numbers of Jews to
Palestine, in violation of the British blockade.

Before the war, Ruzka had belonged to left-wing Zionist youth group called
"The Young Guard" (HaShomer HaTza'ir) which trained Jews in self-defense,
and taught the older boys how to shoot.  Abba was not religious, but he was
a fervent Zionist, loving to read the Bible stories of Jewish warriors, and
aiming to emulate the Jewish Bible heroes.

In the Vilna Ghetto, it was Abba Kovner who first saw that the tightening of
the Nazi oppression was not just a temporary imposition by a local German
official; it was a step towards the total destruction of the Jews.  The only
way out, he argued, was "Revolt and armed defense.  This is the only way
which promises any dignity for our people."

Other Jews countered that revolt was hopeless because the Germans were so
strong, and that collective reprisals by the Germans would just lead to more
Jewish deaths.  Ruzka Korczak retorted that the stories of Jewish heroism
could not remain only "a part of our ancient history. They must be part of
our real life as well."  The next generation of Jews must have something to
admire.  "How good will they be if their entire history is one of slaughter
and extermination?  We cannot allow that.  It must also have heroic
struggles, self-defense, war, even death with honor."

Vilna was typical, in that the young people were usually the ones who wanted
to fight, and the elders usually counseled against causing trouble.  Most of
the partisan leaders and fighters were young.

Niuta Teitelbaum was a beautiful 24-year-old Jewish Polish woman who looked
like she was sixteen.  Known as "Little Wanda with the Braids," she was an
expert smuggler of people and weapons, and instructed women's partisan
cells.  Her units blew up trains, artillery emplacements, and other German
targets.

Once, wearing traditional Polish clothing and a kerchief on her hair, she
talked her way past a series of Gestapo guards, whispering that she was
going to see the SS commander on "private business."  Alone with the
commander in his office, she drew a revolver, shot him dead, and calmly left
the building.

Because generation after generation after generation of Jewish families told
their children the heroic Hanukkah stories of Judah the Macabbee and Judith,
the spirit of freedom and resistance lived in modern heroes such as Abba
Kovner and Niuta Teitelbaum.

At the annual Passover Seder, Jewish families say:

In every generation, each person must look upon himself or herself as if he
or she personally had come out of Egypt.  As the Book of Exodus says, "You
shall tell your children on that day: it is because of what the Eternal One
did for me when I went forth from Egypt."  For it was not our fathers and
mothers alone whom the Holy One redeemed.  We too were redeemed along with
them.

The point has a broader application than just for Jews at Passover.
Hanukkah teaches that God's redemption of the Jewish people is a continuing
act of history-and so does Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust.
The resistance proved to the world that Jews were active fighters, and not
mere passive victims.  That resistance (most famously, in the Warsaw Ghetto)
was an indispensable step towards the rebirth of the modern state of Israel.

The Books of Maccabees and the Book of Judith are part of the Roman
Catholic, Episcopalian, and Orthodox Bibles; the stories of resistance to
the Nazis are part of the heritage of freedom-loving people everywhere.  So
as Jewish families light Menorah candles during the eight days of Hanukkah,
may people of good will, of all faiths, use the time as an occasion to teach
their children about the inspiring Jewish and Gentile men and women who,
even in the darkest times, have kept alive the sacred light of freedom.







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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'