04/14/2026
״נזכור ולא נשכח״
“To remember and never forget”
Yom HaZikaron LaShoah V’LaGvura, or Holocaust and Heroism Day of Remembrance, observed on the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, is a day of remembrance honoring the all the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, as well as the Jews who took history into their own hands and resisted in the face of impossible odds.
Today, we remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. We remember not only lives lost, but a vibrant Jewish world destroyed: communities, cultures, movements, families, dreams, an entire world that can never fully be rebuilt. As the number of survivors grows smaller each year, the responsibility to carry their stories becomes increasingly ours.
For Habonim Dror North America, this memory is deeply personal. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was led by members of Dror and other Jewish youth movements, young people who organized resistance, educated underground, and chose Jewish dignity and defiance. Their legacy is our movement inheritance. In the face of rising antisemitism, we commit to carry forward the spirit of their rebellion in our education and within our communities. To remember them is not only to look back, but to continue what they began.
“You are able to - you must - fight evil, forgery, falsehood, and all that contradicts humanistic values... Be worthy of the fighters, of all of those who struggled and were slaughtered, by gas and other means. Educate yourself and others towards love and not hatred, towards peace, towards friendship, towards beauty, laughter and joy. It is hard. You can do it. I believe in you.”
-Chavka Folman Raban, member of Dror and the Jewish Fighting Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto