Mordecai Anielewicz biography

Profile

Born in 1919, Mordecai Anielewicz joined a Zionist youth group as a boy, and by 1940 he had become actively pro-Soviet and vocal in encouraging Polish Jews to defend themselves against oppression. After the German invasion of Poland, he organized the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto to fight off the Germans in 1943. Anielewicz's forces held Warsaw from January to May, before falling to the German army.