Ghetto Fighters’ House with a visit to the WGM

The Director of the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Lohamei HaGeta’ot visited the Warsaw Ghetto Museum to talk about mutual cooperation. The visit of Yigal Cohen was organized by the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv.

The WGM delegation visited the Ghetto Fighters’ House in January of this year. The visit was organized by the Polish Institute in Tel Aviv. In addition to the institution in Lohamei HaGeta’ot, representatives of the WGM also met with employees of Moreshet – the Mordechai Anielevich Memorial and the Massuah Museum. In Warsaw, the directors Cohen and Stankowski raised issues connected with mutual cooperation.

The Ghetto Fighters’ House (full name: Itzhak Katzenelson Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum, Documentation and Study Center) is an Israeli historical museum, located in the kibbutz of Lohamei HaGeta’ot in Western Galilee. It was established in 1949 and it is the first Holocaust museum in the world. It was founded by members of the resistance movement from Poland and Lithuania who survived the Holocaust – insurgents from the Warsaw and Vilnius ghettos and former prisoners of concentration camps, among others Icchak Cukierman and Zivia Lubetkin from the Jewish Combat Organization [ŻOB]. The institution commemorates their bravery, triumph of the spirit, and ability to rebuild their lives after the terrible war trauma in the new state which they had always dreamed of – Israel.

One of the permanent exhibitions, „Jewish Warsaw”, presents the history of Polish Jews and Jewish Warsaw. The museum is located in the heart of a kibbutz community – the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz – and it conducts research and educational activity. An exceptional division of the Ghetto Fighters’ House is the Yad Layeled Children’s Memorial Museum. One of its exhibitions is called „Korczak of the Children”. Another permanent exhibition is entitled „Facing the Glass Booth” and its most important exhibit is the glass cabin in which Adolf Eichmann testified in 1961 during his trial in Jerusalem, and which had been constructed for his safety.

Anna Kilian