Essay On Jewish Resistance

Imagine living through a time where you are persecuted for your religious beliefs, would you be able to practice spiritual resistance? For Jewish people this was a daily dilemma they faced in death camps, ghettos, or in hiding during the Holocaust. This may seem like a difficult decision, but for many brave Jews, all they had left was their faith. Some of the very dedicated and brave made it their mission to record the tragedies of everyday life during the Holocaust. Those same courageous people fought to keep the Jewish faith existing. Spiritual and cultural resistance is important to preserve the history and hope of the Jewish people and document what happened in the Holocaust.

“The War Against The Jews” by Lucy Dawidowicz explores a very dark time in history and interprets it from her view. Through the use of other novels, she concurs and agrees to form her opinion. This essay will explore who Dawidowicz is, why she wrote the book, what the book is about, what other authors have explored with the same topic, and how I feel about the topic she wrote about. All in all, much research will be presented throughout the essay. In the end you will see how strongly I feel about the topic I chose. I believe that although Hitler terrorized the Jews, they continued to be stronger than ever, and tried to keep up their society.

     Throughout history the Jewish people have been scapegoats; whenever something was not going right they were the ones to blame. From Biblical times through to the Shakespearean Era, all the way to the Middle East Crisis and the creation of Israel, the Jews have been persecuted and blamed for the problems of the world. The most horrifying account of Jewish persecution is the holocaust, which took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945 when Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all the people that he thought were inferior to the Germans, namely the Jews, because he wanted a pure Aryan State.

Every religious group has suffered a time when their religion was not considered to be popular or right. Out of all of these religious groups that have suffered, no one group has suffered so much as that of the Jewish religion. They have been exiled from almost every country that they have ever inhabited, beginning with Israel, and leading all the was up to Germany, France, Spain, England, and Russia. Not only have they been exiled but also they have suffered through torture, punishment, and murder. Thus, because of the history of the religion, the Jewish people have become a very resilient people. They have survived thousands of years carrying their religion with them from one country to

The Jews used many types of ways to resist against the Nazis. One of the any ways the Jewish people resisted against the Nazis was by spiritual. “The Germans forbade religious services in most ghetto, so many Jews prayed and held ceremonies in secret - cellars, attics and back rooms - as other stood guard”

Resistance in the mist of WWII and the Holocaust occurred all across Europe and the occupied territories of Nazi Germany. The three groups I’m going to discuss are Zegota, White Rose, and Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Each one of these came from three very different areas, but they each resisted Nazi ideology. Each group has their own reason for why they decided to take a stand, whether morally, politically, or religious reasons and while there are differences between the groups many of them have overlapping reasons for their desire to resist.

Jews are a standout amongst the most stereotyped religious social orders ever, with the media every now and again utilizing negative pictures at whatever point they write about Judaism and the Jewish race. History demonstrates that Jews were constrained from their country and turned into an itinerant individuals, spreading all through Europe. Regarded as untouchables in Europe, local people were suspicious of the Jews and made numerous myths and pessimistic generalizations about them which are propagated today. Numerous limitations on callings were put on the Jewish individuals in the medieval times. The Catholic Church and numerous Christians accepted that loaning cash for premium was a wrongdoing and was prohibited. This pushed Jews into cash giving and rent gathering sort occupations which the congregation saw as second rate. This prompted the generalization that Jews are ravenous, shabby, mean and even degenerate.

Spiritual resistance is defined as “attempts by individuals to maintain their humanity, personal integrity, and sense of civilization in the face of Nazi attempts to dehumanize and degrade them” by the United States Holocaust Museum (Spiritual). Spiritual resistance was highly regarded by many Jews, and most actually considered it to be the purest form of resistance because it was non-violent, and kept their spirits from being broken, even while facing horrible degradation. Examples of spiritual resistance include conducting religious services while in ghettos or concentration camps, keeping covert libraries of Jewish works, and establishing secret archives to report about daily life in the ghettos.

Since the beginning of the Judaism, the Jewish people have been subject to hardships and discrimination. They have not been allowed to have a stabile place of worship and have also faced persecution and atrocities that most of us can not even imagine. Three events that have had a big impact on the Jewish faith were the building and destruction of the First Great Temple, the Second Great Temple and the events of the Holocaust. In this paper, I will discuss these three events and also explain and give examples as to why I feel that the Jewish people have always been discriminated against and not allowed the freedom of worship.

Throughout the Holocaust, Jews organized resistance movements in ghettos, concentration, and extermination camps. Although they had virtually no weapons and faced one of the largest arsenals in the world, the Jewish people fought for their honor and freedom. Without any hope victory and in the face of death, resistance fighters found the courage to take on evil in its purest form. Their efforts must not go in vein; to them we must accord our respect. This is a brief testimony of their fight against the Nazi regime.

Non-violent resistance began to evolve as the Jews were transported to the concentration camps. Upon their initial arrival in the concentration camps, inmates attempted to aid each other in various ways, such as by giving those that were extremely malnourished extra food or attempting to lessen the workload on those that were weaker by taking their place; these acts, although not aimed directly against the SS, were simply keeping one another alive. These acts can be considered under Bauer’s definition of resistance in that the groups’ motives in sustaining themselves as a whole was in direct opposition to the central idea of the SS to break down and destroy the Jewish population. These acts also helped lead to the later active, armed resistance in that they helped to keep inmates alive and maintain their strength, as well as providing them with a will to resist.

Examining any issue pertaining to the Holocaust is accompanied with complexity and the possibility of controversy. This is especially true in dealing with the topic of Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. Historians are often divided on this complex issue, debating issues such as how “resistance” is defined and, in accordance with that definition, how much resistance occurred. According to Michael Marrus, “the very term Jewish resistance suggests a point of view.” Many factors, both internal such as differences in opinion on when or what resistance was appropriate, as well as external, such as the lack of arms with which to revolt, contributed to making resistance, particularly armed resistance, extremely difficult. When considering acts

“Certainly, the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might have eventually stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the

Preparing for the resistance brought up both feelings of terror, and excitement over the fact that the Nazis would not be able to get away with at least one of their plans so easily. Zivia Lubetkin, who was a resistance fighter in the ghetto, describes the feeling of the resistance organization on the 18th of April after getting the news of the final roundup that was to take place the next day. She says “[e]ven though we were prepared, and had even prayed for this hour, we turned pale. A tremor of joy mixed with a shudder of fear passed through all of us. But we suppressed our emotions and reached for our guns” (Gilbert 557). Resistance was a new idea to the Jews. Since the Nazis had taken over, the Jews had found themselves in a rather helpless situation. There was almost no way to escape the ghettos, and those who did manage to make it out knew they were costing the Jews they had left behind. This was the first real attempt at an actual organized armed resistance. Lubetkin tells how the Germans were determined, especially after being forced to retreat in January, but so were the Jews. Determination was certainly something

I learned a lot of facts about Judaism that I had previously been ignorant to. I had no idea that we (Christians & Jews) maintained the same bible (The Old Testament) but that we interpreted certain events differently, such as Adam and Eve. “In Judaism, each and every human being is free to choose good or evil because each person stands before God in the same relationship that Adam and Eve did” (Esposito 77). I was unaware that Judaism did not believe in “original sin.” I had no knowledge of the fact that Jews did not believe that Christ was resurrected from the dead. I found it interesting how Jews have split into separate groups – Reform Jews, who believe that Judaism is a cultural inheritance and that neither the laws nor beliefs are