by Tyler Rosen
On Saturday, April 19th, 2025, the Jewish Peoples Schule held its annual class on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The date was chosen as the 83rd anniversary of the initiating of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, where heroic Polish Jewish socialists, communists, liberals, left Zionists, and other Jewish anti-fascist forces banded together to demonstrate to the world that the Nazi war machine was not invincible.
The main theme of this year’s class was the unity of seemingly disparate forces against a common enemy. Within the Warsaw Ghetto, Jewish groups of various ideologies, which under different circumstances would be more-or-less adversarial towards each other, were able to join in coalition in the struggle against fascism and Nazism and for democracy, peace, and justice. This is why the coalition organization, the Jewish Combat Organization (in Polish: Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB), was composed of the socialist Jewish Labor Bund, the Polish Communist Party, Jewish liberals, the labor Zionist groups such as Hashomer Hatsair and Dror was able to form.
Coinciding with the Passover holiday, the class started with an abridged Passover Seder. The Hagaddah served as a connection with the biblical heroism of the defiance against the Pharaoh’s oppression by the Egyptian Jewish slaves with the struggle against Nazi Germany by the Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. As a progressive Jewish fraternal organization, we seek to carry on the tradition of defiance against ALL forms of oppression of ALL oppressed groups by ALL oppressors. Today, this especially means supporting the struggle against the oppression of Palestinian civilians by the genocidal Netanyahu regime in Israel as well as the struggle of oppressed minorities in the United States that suffer under racist, xenophobic, sexist, and all other bigoted policies, rhetoric, and actions by the Trump regime and all other oligarchs.
Though the fate of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were almost certainly sealed, they were able to form a heterogeneous coalition to demonstrate there is power in unity against oppression. Today, it is most pertinent that we Jews today, and all democratic-loving people of the world in general, learn to set aside less urgent ideological struggles against each other and to build coalitions against the most immediate threat that we all share in common: the rise of the fascist threat and intensified violence against oppressed groups.
If you would like to be added to our contact list for future classes or would like to participate in the Jewish Peoples Schule or our parent organization, the United Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order, please visit us at: https://ujpfo.org/index.php/contact-us/. We greatly appreciate any and all support that we receive!