France’s main Jewish organization commemorated the 79th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising on Tuesday.
The CRIF (the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) and the Shoah Memorial organized the ceremony, which was streamed on the CRIF’s Facebook page.
The commemoration of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising paid tribute to the Jewish resistance and also to all the Holocaust victims who did not have the means to take up arms, including the one and a half million children who perished, the CRIF said in a statement.
Éric de Rothschild, president of the Shoah Memorial and Francis Kalifat, president of the CRIF, gave opening remarks at the ceremony followed by a reading in Yiddish of “Song from the Byalistok Ghetto” by the journalist and Yiddish teacher Lise Gutman.
There were speeches by Yael German, Israel’s ambassador to France, and Larissa Cain, a writer who is a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Representatives from French Jewish youth movements participated in the ceremony, “performing a call for resistance that evoked the heroic struggle of Mordechai Anielewicz.” the leader of the group that organized the uprising.
The commemoration ended with a Kadish by France’s Chief Rabbi Olivier Kaufmann and a performance of the Hymn of the Vilnius Ghetto and the Jewish Ressistance by Talila and Teddy Lasry.