Warsaw Ghetto uprising’s 70th anniversary Seventy years ago last
month, the Nazis began their second deportation of the Jews from
the Warsaw Ghetto. In response, on Jan. 18, 1943, the first
organized and armed Jewish/Zionist resistance action in the
ghetto was launched. The fighters of the ZZW and ZOB drove the
Nazis from the ghetto. Months later, on April 19, 1943, on the
eve of Passover, the Nazi SS and police units entered the ghetto
and were attacked by organized Jewish partisans yet again. There
were two separate armed resistance organizations in the ghetto –
the ZZW and ZOB. The most famous Jewish leader of armed
resistance is Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the ZOB (Jewish
Fighting Organization) during the uprising. The ZOB was an
alliance of several Zionist and non-Zionist youth groups.
Anielewicz received paramilitary training in Betar as a young
teenager and left the group before the war. The ZOB had a
socialist orientation, and Betar as an organization did not
participate in it, in part because