O nce again I’m feeling that old ambivalence.
I feel it every year as Israel observes its Holocaust Remembrance Day on 27 Nissan. I actually should feel personally connected to it as my Uncle Yisrael Hy”d my father’s brother was commander of one of the bunkers that fell in the uprising — dying in that battle together with his wife and their daughter on Chol Hamoed Pesach of 1943.
For years I felt aggrieved that his name wasn’t mentioned in the chronicles of the ghetto revolt and for the pettiest of reasons: He was a Bundist not a Zionist. Indeed he was a son of Reb Leibel Grylak Hy”d a Gerrer chassid and a well-known Agudah askan in Warsaw; still Yisrael was a member of the anti-religious and anti-Zionist workers’ movement known as the Bund which unfortunately captured the hearts of many frum young people of the time.
Although survivors testified that Uncle Yisrael took a leading role in the uprising the books that came out in the early years of the State — inspired by the secular Zionist left — omitted his name just as they omit the names of the Revisionists who according to a more recent book by former Defense Minister Moshe Arens formed the backbone of the revolt. (See Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto published in 2011). And years after the events a book published in Argentina by Bundist survivors who settled there recounted the lives and deaths of members of their movement who took part in the uprising including my uncle Hy”d.
