Oldest Holocaust Museum Recasts Lessons as ‘a Warning Sign’
On April 19, 1949, the sixth anniversary of the start of the Warsaw uprising
and nearly a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, they broke ground for the communal farm and named it Lohamei Hagetaot, Hebrew for "the ghetto fighters." The same day, on the kibbutz grounds, they laid the foundation stone of the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the world’s first Holocaust museum.
The invitation to Mr. Gauck, Ms. Livne said, was "not about forgiveness or atonement,
but about being together in an alliance of liberalism and democracy against all those who endanger it." On Wednesday, the anniversary of the uprising and the founding of the kibbutz, senior Israeli Army officers and a group of Jewish and Arab educators attended seminars and toured the museum’s exhibits, some of which are based on documents and objects that the founders brought with them from Europe.
Not long after the war ended, Ms. Sternberg met one of the few legendary fighters who had managed to emerge alive from
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the most significant, albeit doomed, act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
Of the 150 Holocaust survivors who founded the kibbutz, Ms. Sternberg — who shared her testimony
with museum visitors for years — is one of the last ones alive to bear witness.
Anat Livne, the director of the museum, said the message it was trying to convey was one of courage to go against the grain, inspired by founders like Yitzhak Zuckerman, a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising whose nom de guerre was Antek,
and Zivia Lubetkin, an underground commander who became his wife.
Its Center for Humanistic Education, founded in 1995 by Raya Kalisman after she spent a year at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, runs a six-month program for Jewish, Arab
and Druze high school students, mostly from northern Israel.
