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The stamp is issued in commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which took place 70 years ago.
In September 1939, as the German army approached Warsaw, the leaders of Polish Jewry fled the city. The Jews of Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Europe, were left leaderless under the German occupation. The transport of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp began in the summer of 1942. The Germans encountered no resistance. Jewish youth movements took on the leadership role in the ghetto and began to organize in preparation for an uprising.
Two 23 year-old young men, Pawel Frenkel, a member of Betar, and Mordechai Anielewicz, a member of Hashomer Hatzair, commanded two resistance organizations – the Jewish Military Organization (ZZW) and the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which led the uprising. With no chance of overcoming the superior German forces, they fought for the honor of the Jewish people. Attempts to unite the two organizations encountered difficulties, stemming from an ideological rivalry that pre-existed the war.
On April 19, 1943, the eve of Passover, German troops entered the ghetto equipped with automatic weapons, artillery and armored vehicles. They were faced by a few hundred young Jews equipped with only meager weapons. The primary fighting inside the ghetto lasted 10 days. The main battle, "T he Battle for the Flags" took place in Muranowski Square between ZZW fighters led by Frenkel, who raised the Zionist flag (now the Israeli flag) and the Polish flag on one of the rooftops, and German forces commanded by General Jurgen Stroop. It took the Germans four days to subdue the resistance and remove the flags.
Shortly before the uprising broke out, Frenkel addressed a meeting of his fighters, "Comrades! We will die before our time but we are not doomed. We will live as long as Jewish history continues to live." Frenkel fell in a gun battle with German troops.
