Nationality Polish, Israeli Name Zivia Lubetkin | ||
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Born 9 November 1914 Byten, Poland Known for One of the leaders of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Combat Organization), participant in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising Similar People Yitzhak Zuckerman, Mordechai Anielewicz, Marek Edelman, Jurgen Stroop, Ferdinand von Sammern‑Frankenegg | ||
Zivia lubetkin zuckerman web mov
Zivia Lubetkin (Polish: Cywia Lubetkin [ˈt͡sɨvja luˈbɛtkʲin], Hebrew: צביה לובטקין, nom de guerre: Celina; 1914–1976) was one of the leaders of the Jewish underground in Nazi-occupied Warsaw and the only woman on the High Command of the resistance group Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ŻOB). She survived the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland and immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1946, at the age of 32.
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Pre-World War II
Zivia Lubetkin was born in Poland in Byteń near Słonim (now in Belarus). She joined the Labor Zionist Movement at an early age. In her late teens she joined the Zionist youth movement Dror, and in 1938 became a member of its Executive Council. After Nazi Germany and later the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 she made a perilous journey from the Soviet occupied part of the country to Warsaw to join the underground there.
World War II
In 1942, Lubetkin helped found the left-wing Zionist Anti-Fascist Bloc. She also, as one of the founders of the ŻOB, served on the Warsaw Jewish community's political council, the Jewish National Committee (Żydowska Komitet Narodowy; ŻKN), and also served on the Coordinating Committee, an umbrella organization comprising the ŻKN and the non-Zionist General Jewish Labour Bund (Bund), that sponsored the ŻOB. During her years of underground activities, the name "Cywia" became the code word for Poland in letters sent by various resistance groups both within and outside of the Warsaw Ghetto. She was one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and one of only 34 fighters to survive the war. After leading her group of surviving fighters through the sewers of Warsaw with the aid of Simcha "Kazik" Rotem in the final days of the ghetto uprising (on May 10, 1943), she continued her resistance activities in the rest of Warsaw outside the ghetto. She took part in the Polish Warsaw Uprising in 1944, fought in the units of the Armia Ludowa.
Postwar life
Following the Second World War, Lubetkin was active in the Holocaust survivors community in Europe, and helped organize the Bricha, an organization staffed by operatives who helped Eastern and Central European Jews cross borders en route to Mandate Palestine by illegal immigration channels. She herself immigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1946. She married Yitzhak Zuckerman, the ŻOB commander, and they, along with other surviving ghetto fighters and partisans founded Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta'ot and the Ghetto Fighters' House museum located on its grounds. In 1961, she testified at the trial of captured Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
Her two children, Shimon (b. 1947) and Yael (b. 1949), were born in Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetta’ot, where she lived for the remainder of her life and died in [1976?]. Her granddaughter, Roni Zuckerman, became the Israeli Air Force's first female fighter pilot in 2001.