On April 19, 1949, the sixth anniversary of the start of the Warsaw uprising and nearly a year after the establishment of the state of Israel, they broke ground for the communal farm and named it Lohamei Hagetaot, Hebrew for “the ghetto fighters.” The same day, on the kibbutz grounds, they laid the foundation stone of the Ghetto Fighters’ House, the world’s first Holocaust museum.
The closing event of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day will take place in an amphitheater outside the museum on Monday.
Of the 150 Holocaust survivors who founded the kibbutz, Ms. Sternberg — who shared her testimony with museum visitors for years — is one of the last ones alive to bear witness. As her generation fades away, the Ghetto Fighters’ House is grappling, like other institutions, with the question of how to educate future generations about the Holocaust and combat ignorance and denial.
