ExHis - The Traveling Maquettes

The Ideal of the “Straight-Backed” Jew

Today, July 14, the 29th of Tammuz, on the Hebrew anniversary of the death of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, we remember one of the most influential—and most debated—figures in modern Jewish history.

Many know his name, yet his legacy is often reduced to a few political slogans and the concept of the “Iron Wall.” In reality, his story is far richer: it is the story of a man who offered a radically new response to centuries of Jewish vulnerability.

Jabotinsky did not emerge from the world of rabbis and yeshivas. He was born in Odessa in 1880 into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family. As a young man, he became a journalist, reporting from Rome and Bern, studying languages, and immersing himself in literature and European politics. For many years, he considered himself more of a cosmopolitan Russian intellectual than a Jewish nationalist.

The Kishinev pogrom of 1903 changed his life.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Jabotinsky traveled to Kishinev to witness the devastation firsthand. There he met Chaim Nachman Bialik, and later translated Bialik’s poem In the City of Slaughter into Russian. The poem portrayed with devastating force both the horrors of the pogrom and the helplessness of the Jewish community.

It was not merely an elegy—it was an indictment. It condemned not only the murderers, but also a world in which Jews had come to accept their own defenselessness as a natural condition.

Jabotinsky did not conclude that Jews should simply plead more loudly for government protection. Instead, he joined efforts to organize Jewish self-defense in Odessa. He raised funds, procured weapons, and prepared the community so that, should another pogrom occur, they would not face their attackers empty-handed. In the Jewish world of Tsarist Russia, this was a revolutionary idea.

Many Jewish leaders feared that self-defense would only provoke the authorities and lead to even greater violence. Jabotinsky argued the opposite: a people unwilling to defend itself entrusts its survival to the goodwill of others. And faith in goodwill is a fragile strategy when Cossacks are already roaming the streets with pitchforks.

It was during this period that his vision of the “straight-backed Jew” took shape: a generation marked by dignity and action—a generation unashamed of its identity, unwilling to apologize for its existence, and determined to become the author of its own history rather than the object of other people’s decisions.

During the First World War, Jabotinsky sought to put these ideas into practice. When the Ottoman Empire entered the war, he realized that Jews should participate in the liberation of the Land of Israel as part of their own military force.

The mainstream Zionist leadership considered the proposal reckless. Together with Joseph Trumpeldor, however, Jabotinsky organized the first volunteers. Their efforts led first to the Zion Mule Corps, which served at Gallipoli, and later—after a prolonged political struggle—to the establishment of the Jewish Legion within the British Army.

Jabotinsky did not limit himself to advocating military service from the safety of lecture halls. He enlisted as an ordinary private, later earned an officer’s commission, and took part in operations in the Jordan Valley.

To him, the Jewish soldier represented a historic turning point: after centuries, Jews once again fought under their own symbols as an organized military force.

After the war, he settled in Jerusalem. In the spring of 1920, he warned the British authorities that Arab attacks against the city’s Jewish population were imminent. When no meaningful action followed, he organized a defensive force of roughly six hundred former soldiers and volunteers.

After the ensuing riots, the British arrested several members of the self-defense organization. Jabotinsky voluntarily surrendered himself to the police, declaring that if the defenders were guilty, then so was he, since he had organized them. He was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor and imprisoned in Acre.

One lesser-known aspect of this episode is that Jabotinsky showed little interest in portraying himself as a victim. While in prison, he lectured fellow inmates about Theodor Herzl, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky, and translated Dante’s Divine Comedy into Hebrew.

International outrage eventually forced the British authorities to reduce his sentence, and a few months later he was released.

In later years, Jabotinsky broke with the Zionist mainstream and founded the Betar youth movement. He believed Zionism should state its ultimate objective clearly: not merely a cultural center or uncertain autonomy, but a sovereign Jewish state.

In 1923, he published his famous essay The Iron Wall. He did not argue that peace with the Arabs was impossible. Although a distinct Palestinian national identity had not yet developed in its modern form, he believed it was unrealistic to expect the local Arab population to voluntarily accept the establishment of a sovereign Jewish-majority state.

In his view, peace could only become possible once eliminating the Jewish presence was no longer considered a realistic political objective. First, an unbreakable position of strength had to be established. Only then could genuine negotiations and mutual compromise take place. For Jabotinsky, the Iron Wall was not an alternative to peace—it was its prerequisite. Negotiations, he argued, have meaning only when they are not about the disappearance of the Jewish side.

Jabotinsky does not fit neatly into today’s political categories. He was an unwavering advocate of Jewish national self-determination while also defending individual liberty and minority rights.

The central educational ideal of Betar was hadar—a Hebrew concept encompassing dignity, self-discipline, integrity, poise, and Jewish self-respect. The “new Jew” was not strong because he threatened others, but because he mastered himself, accepted responsibility, and stood upright even when those around him advised him to bend a little lower in the name of safety.

Throughout the 1930s, Jabotinsky became increasingly desperate in urging the mass emigration of European Jews. As early as 1936, he spoke of evacuating millions. His warnings were widely dismissed as alarmist, irresponsible, or politically exaggerated. Meanwhile, the British restricted Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel, forcing many refugees to attempt the journey aboard illegal ships.

Through the efforts of his movement, nearly 20,000 Jews reached Mandatory Palestine, many escaping directly from N**i persecution.

Jabotinsky died in August 1940 while visiting a Betar summer camp in New York State. He did not live to see the establishment of the State of Israel. His remains were reinterred in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl only in 1964, during the premiership of Levi Eshkol.

Even during his lifetime, Jabotinsky divided the Zionist movement, and debates over his political legacy continue to this day. One thing, however, is difficult to dispute: he recognized that the central problem facing the Jewish people was not only the hatred of antisemites, but also the political reality in which Jewish survival depended upon the goodwill of others.

He did not believe that strength was a virtue in itself. Rather, he believed that without strength, morality easily becomes nothing more than a noble wish—one that enemies can ignore without consequence.

The Jew he envisioned was neither submissive nor cruel. He would not apologize for wanting to live, yet neither would he deny the rights of others. He would take up arms when necessary and seek agreement whenever possible.

Above all, he would stand with a straight back, refusing ever again to accept vulnerability and fear as the national destiny of the Jewish people.

— March of the Living Foundation
https://www.facebook.com/share/1Rk1UY3Mgk/?mibextid=wwXIfr
/ by Tamás Vajda

The Man Who Volunteered for Auschwitz

Throughout history, many people chose to share the fate of their loved ones, even when it meant imprisonment or death. But, to the best of our knowledge, only one person deliberately allowed himself to be imprisoned in Auschwitz as part of an intelligence mission: Witold Pilecki.

Born on May 13, 1901, in the Russian Empire, Pilecki grew up in a deeply patriotic Polish family. His grandfather had been exiled to Siberia after participating in the January Uprising of 1863–1864 against Russian rule. In 1910, the family moved to Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania), where the young Pilecki became involved in Polish patriotic youth organizations.

When Poland regained its independence, Pilecki volunteered for the Polish Army and fought in the Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921), including the decisive Battle of Warsaw. After the war, he returned to civilian life, became a farmer, married, and raised two children—living a life similar to millions of other Poles.

Everything changed in September 1939 when N**i Germany invaded Poland. Mobilized once again as a cavalry officer, Pilecki fought during the campaign before making his way to Warsaw, where he helped establish one of the first underground resistance organizations, which later became part of the Polish Underground State.

Meanwhile, the Germans established the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland. The first transport of prisoners arrived on June 14, 1940, carrying 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów. Very little was known about what was happening inside the camp, and the Polish resistance desperately needed reliable intelligence.

Pilecki proposed an extraordinary mission: he volunteered to enter Auschwitz.

Using forged identity papers under the name Tomasz Serafiński, he deliberately allowed himself to be arrested during a German roundup in Warsaw on September 19, 1940. Days later, he entered Auschwitz as prisoner No. 4859.

For nearly two and a half years, Pilecki endured starvation, forced labor, disease, and constant brutality. At the same time, he secretly organized an underground resistance network inside the camp known as the Union of Military Organization (ZOW). The network helped prisoners survive, gathered intelligence, and smuggled reports to the Polish resistance.

These reports became some of the earliest eyewitness accounts describing Auschwitz. They documented the camp’s organization, the inhumane living conditions, executions, and, as the camp expanded, the systematic mass murder taking place there.

Pilecki believed that the Home Army (Armia Krajowa), possibly with Allied support, might launch an attack to liberate Auschwitz, with the internal resistance assisting from within. However, the Polish resistance leadership concluded that such an operation was militarily unrealistic given the strong German forces guarding the camp and the immense challenge of evacuating and protecting thousands of liberated prisoners.

Realizing that no rescue operation was coming, Pilecki organized his escape. During the night of April 26–27, 1943, he and two fellow prisoners escaped from a bakery outside the camp, overpowered the guards, cut the telephone lines, and successfully reached resistance-controlled territory.

After his escape, Pilecki wrote detailed reports describing Auschwitz’s structure, daily operations, the underground movement inside the camp, and the atrocities committed there. Today, these documents—known as the Pilecki Reports—are considered among the most important early sources on the Holocaust.

Pilecki continued fighting against N**i Germany and later took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. After the uprising’s defeat, he became a German prisoner of war and was liberated only after Germany’s surrender.

Unlike many others, he chose to return to communist-controlled Poland after the war. Working for the Polish government-in-exile, he documented the crimes committed by the Soviet NKVD, the persecution of Polish resistance members, and the establishment of the communist regime. Although ordered to leave Poland because of the growing danger, he refused and continued his intelligence work.

In May 1947, Pilecki was arrested by the communist authorities. He was brutally tortured, subjected to a show trial, convicted of espionage and treason, and executed with a shot to the back of the head on May 25, 1948, in Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison. His burial place remains unknown.

For decades, the communist regime suppressed his story. After the fall of communism, his conviction was overturned, and in 2006, Polish President L**h Kaczyński posthumously awarded him the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest state decoration.

Witold Pilecki’s life is one of the most remarkable stories of courage in modern history. He voluntarily entered one of history’s most notorious concentration camps—not to survive, but to ensure that the world would learn the truth.

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/education/e-learning/podcast/story-of-witold-pilecki-co-founder-of-resistance-in-auschwitz

https://eng.ipn.gov.pl/en/digital-resources/publications/7837%2CReport-W-KL-AUSCHWITZ-1940-1943-by-Captain-Witold-Pilecki-Institute-of-National-.html?

https://hmd.org.uk/resource/witold-pilecki/?

/picture colored with AI/

✠➡️❌ Salomon Klass (1907–1985): A Jewish Hero Who Refused Hi**er’s Iron Cross

The life of Salomon Klass is one of the most extraordinary and morally courageous stories to emerge from the Second World War.

Born into Finland’s 🇫🇮 Jewish community ✡️ in Helsinki, Klass was a committed Zionist from a young age. In the early 1930s, he made aliyah to Mandatory Palestine, joining thousands of Jewish pioneers who sought to rebuild a Jewish homeland in the ancestral Land of Israel 🇮🇱. There, he immersed himself in the Zionist movement and became associated with the Irgun, one of the Jewish underground organizations fighting for Jewish self-determination. His years in Palestine reflected not only a political commitment but a profound belief that the Jewish people deserved sovereignty, security, and a homeland of their own. Although he later returned to Finland to defend his country ⚔️ during its darkest hour, the ideals of Zionism remained central to his identity throughout his life.

During the Winter War (1939–1940) and later the Continuation War (1941–1944), Klass served as an officer in the Finnish Army 🪖. He fought with exceptional bravery against Soviet forces and was severely wounded in combat. His leadership and courage earned him the respect of his fellow soldiers and commanders.

But Klass’s wartime service also placed him at the center of one of the most unusual and controversial episodes of the Second World War.

Finland fought alongside N**i Germany against the Soviet Union, creating the paradoxical situation in which Jewish soldiers served in the Finnish Army while Germany was carrying out the Holocaust across Europe. Despite the alliance of convenience between Finland and Germany, Finnish Jews continued to serve openly in the armed forces. Jewish field synagogues operated near the front, and Jewish soldiers fought and died for Finland.

Among those soldiers was Salomon Klass.

In recognition of his bravery, German authorities proposed awarding Klass the Iron Cross, one of the Third Reich’s highest military decorations. For a Jewish officer whose people were being persecuted and murdered by the N**i regime, accepting such an award would have been morally impossible. But Klass refused ❌.

His rejection was not unique, but it was part of a remarkable act of collective moral resistance by Finnish Jewish servicemen. Several Finnish Jews nominated for the Iron Cross declined the decoration. Among the best-known cases was Major Leo Skurnik, a military doctor who had saved the lives of numerous German soldiers during combat and was likewise nominated for the award. He too refused. Captain Salomon Klass joined those who chose principle over prestige, demonstrating that military valor did not require moral compromise. 🕊️

The controversy surrounding these nominations remains a powerful reminder of the complex realities of wartime Finland. Jewish soldiers fought bravely for their homeland, yet they never forgot who they were. They defended Finland while rejecting the ideology and honors of the N**i regime. Their service challenges simplistic narratives and illustrates the difficult choices faced by individuals caught between competing loyalties and historical circumstances.

Salomon Klass’s life embodied both Jewish national aspirations and civic duty. He was a Zionist 🇮🇱 who answered the call of the Jewish homeland, a Finnish patriot who returned to defend his country, and a soldier whose courage was matched by his moral conviction.

His refusal ❌ of the Iron Cross ✠ remains one of the clearest symbols of that conviction: a declaration that no military honor could outweigh loyalty to one’s people, conscience, and principles.

📜 Today, Salomon Klass stands as a powerful example of heroism—not only on the battlefield, but in the courage to say “no” when accepting recognition would have meant compromising one’s deepest values.



(His photo was recolored by AI)

Einstein was not only one of the greatest figures of modern physics, but also a Jewish scientist whose career was shaped and permeated by antisemitism long before Hi**er came to power.

In 1905, he published the theory of special relativity.
That same year, Philipp Lenard received the Nobel Prize in Physics. Lenard later claimed that Einstein’s theory became popular not because of its scientific merit, but because of some kind of “Jewish conspiracy.”
The scientific debate thus gradually ceased to be about arguments and became instead about origin, hatred, and political obsession. A familiar mechanism: when someone cannot understand the equation, they soon discover the Jewish conspiracy behind it.

In the early 1920s, Einstein became the target of increasingly vicious attacks in the German press and academic circles.
Relativity theory was branded as “Jewish physics.”
In September 1920, he debated Lenard in Bad Nauheim at the meeting of the Society of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, while antisemitic demonstrations and heckling accompanied his public appearances.

During the same period, groups demanding “pure science” also emerged, though what they truly wanted was not scientific purity, but the exclusion of Jews.
Anti-Einstein rallies were held in Berlin, antisemitic pamphlets were distributed, and the campaign against relativity degenerated into a politically motivated antisemitic crusade.

By 1922, the atmosphere had become so threatening that Einstein no longer considered public appearances safe. He did not yet leave Germany permanently, but he clearly saw the direction in which German public life was heading. In one of his letters, he wrote that he was well, living quietly, and trying to remain independent from the state. Freedom was no longer merely a professional issue — it had become a strategy for survival.

Einstein later became an important supporter of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For him, Jewish scientific and intellectual independence did not mean isolationism, but rather a response to a world that periodically explained to Jews, in polite language, where they did not belong.

In a 1947 letter to Jawaharlal Nehru, Einstein wrote that he had embraced the cause of Zionism long before Hi**er’s rise because he saw in it the possibility of correcting a grave historical injustice. For centuries, the Jewish people had lived as a persecuted nation deprived of rights, and Zionism sought to end that vulnerability.

Einstein was not a man of simplistic political slogans. He did not think in terms of tribal triumph, nor was he a nationalist. But he understood clearly that a people with no secure refuge anywhere is ultimately dependent on the goodwill of others.
History, however, has not proven to be a particularly reliable partner in that regard.

In 1935, writing from America, Einstein warned that hostility toward Jewish professors and students at universities was growing dangerously stronger, even if it appeared in polite or hypocritical forms.
Perhaps this is the most unsettling sentence in the entire story. Antisemitism does not always wear boots and armbands. Often it comes with departmental committees, moral language, carefully chosen words, and seemingly modern justifications.
That is why Einstein’s story still resonates today. Because hatred of Jews often does not disappear — it merely changes its clothing.

Philipp Lenard and his associates ultimately ended up on the poisoned margins of history. Einstein’s name, however, outlived them and became one of the symbols of the modern spirit. This does not undo hatred, nor erase every historical bitterness, but it does remind us of something:
obsession may be louder, but truth endures longer.

📷 In February 1923, Einstein and his wife Elsa spent two weeks in Jerusalem during the British Mandate, traveling from Japan to Europe.
During the visit, he delivered a speech on the future site of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose founding he actively supported.
The photograph was taken beside the distinctive stone building of the École Biblique in Jerusalem.

(Original post by March of the Living Hungary)
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BJi7YJKcD/?mibextid=wwXIfr
The photo is a coloured version of the original

In 1942, a drunk German officer sat at dinner and bragged about the Jewish woman he had selected from the brothel the N**is had forced open in town. He said her name out loud. The Tunisian Arab sitting across from him stayed calm, smiled, poured more wine, and finished the meal. Then he drove the officer home, sped through the dark streets, and knocked on a door close to midnight. That night, he hid 25 people for four months. He never spoke about it again.
His name was Khaled Abdul-Wahab. He was 31 years old, a wealthy Muslim Tunisian who had studied art and architecture in New York and spoke fluent German. N**i officers trusted him. They invited him to their dinners.
Tunisia was the only Arab country directly occupied by N**i Germany during the war. Jewish families were pushed from their homes. More than 5,000 Jewish men were sent to forced labor camps. Yellow stars marked every chest.
That December night in the coastal town of Mahdia, Khaled listened as the officer boasted. The woman he named belonged to a family Khaled had known all his life.
He left immediately. He drove through the night. He knocked on their door at midnight.
Pack nothing. Come now.
He gathered 25 people — mothers, fathers, cousins, and children — and drove them nearly 20 miles to his family farm, hiding them inside the olive press, stables, and storage buildings.
This was not one brave act. It was four straight months of courage.
He fed them while supplies grew scarce. He kept babies quiet. He trusted his servants to stay silent. When German soldiers arrived to count Jewish families, the hidden people pinned yellow stars onto their clothes and stood motionless. When the soldiers left, the stars came off again.
One night, a drunken soldier wandered onto the farm and discovered them. An eleven-year-old girl hiding under a bed watched him laugh and threaten to kill everyone there. Then Khaled appeared. She remembered him her entire life as a guardian angel. He calmly walked the soldier outside, took away his weapon, and sent him off the property.
Nobody on that farm died.
In May 1943, British forces liberated Tunisia. All 25 people returned home alive.
Khaled went back to a quiet life. He married, raised daughters, painted, and worked in government service.
He never told anyone what he had done. Not his wife. Not his children. No one.
He died on September 4, 1997, at the age of 86. His story was buried with him.
Ten years later, his daughter Faiza was sitting in a café in Paris reading a Sunday newspaper when she came across an interview with an American historian describing a Tunisian Arab who had hidden 25 Jews in 1942.
The historian mentioned her father by name.
She was 45 years old and had never heard the story before.
She contacted the historian. One of the children saved on the farm had left behind 83 pages of testimony before her death. Every detail matched.
“I rediscovered my father,” Faiza later said.
Khaled was nominated for Israel’s highest honor given to non-Jews who saved Jewish lives. He would have been the first Arab to receive it.
The committee declined, saying he had not risked his own life enough.
Faiza answered with a line history should never forget:
“My father opened his home to Jews. They did not open theirs to us.”
Today, the 25 people Khaled saved have hundreds of descendants living across Israel, France, America, and Tunisia. The little girl hidden beneath the bed grew up, moved to Paris, and built a family of her own. None of them would exist if Khaled had stayed silent that night.
He had everything to lose. He acted anyway. Then he spent the rest of his life saying nothing about it.
The world nearly forgot him twice. Now you know his name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Abdul-Wahab

Editor's Note: the Committee declined AFTER it was communicated that such an award would endanger his surviving family among fellow Arabs. To be so honored as Among the Righteous of the Nations in Israel. To save the family's face the Committee made it's declination! There were also two Egyptian Arabs in the same situation.

The image is a color enhanced photo of his real black and white photo. The original photo is in the article.

🕯️ The Blueprint of Terror: Remembering Dachau

Today marks a somber reflection on Dachau Concentration Camp, one of the most chilling symbols of the Holocaust.

Established in March 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hi**er rose to power, Dachau became the first N**i concentration camp—serving as a “school of violence,” the prototype for the regime’s vast system of oppression.

⸻

⚫ The Reality of the Camp

For twelve years, Dachau was a place of systematic dehumanization. While not classified as an extermination camp like Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the distinction was grim.

Thousands suffered and died from:

⚒️ Forced Labor: Prisoners were worked to exhaustion in armaments factories.
🧪 Medical Experiments: High-altitude and freezing experiments on unwilling subjects.
🦠 Disease & Hunger: Overcrowding led to deadly epidemics, including typhus near the war’s end.

By its final days, over 200,000 people had been imprisoned, and at least 41,500 died from murder, neglect, or inhumane conditions.

⸻

🪖 April 29, 1945: The Liberation

As Allied forces approached, the horror intensified. Troops of the U.S. Army discovered the “Death Train”—railcars filled with bodies of prisoners who perished in transit.

When the camp was liberated, over 30,000 survivors were found inside.
The shock reshaped global understanding of N**i crimes.

Dwight D. Eisenhower later reflected:
👉 “The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and be******ty were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick.”

⸻

🕊️ Why We Remember

Remembering Dachau means confronting the depths of human cruelty—while honoring the resilience of those who survived.

Today, the memorial site stands as:
⚠️ A warning against unchecked hatred
🏛️ A reminder of democracy’s fragility
🧭 A call to responsibility for future generations

We remember the history to ensure it is never repeated.

We coordially invite you to participate on the ExHis Closing conference.
Please register here https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdVwsdeH9v9NnFXqU5_6eaNeaykMmQE8fFzZhuFKUBbgDxnLg/viewform