Jewish resistance during the Holocaust

Jewish resistance
Members of the Jewish partisan organization, the Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye, active in the Vilna Ghetto during World War II
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising launched as the final act of defiance against the Holocaust in occupied Poland
Jewish resistance under the Nazi rule
Organizations	AK AOB Bund GL PKB ŻOB ŻZA
Uprisings	Ghetto uprisings Białystok Sobibór Treblinka Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Jewish resistance under the Nazi rule took various forms of organized underground activities conducted against German occupation regimes in Europe by Jews during World War II. The term is particularly connected with the Holocaust and includes a multitude of different social responses by those oppressed, as well as both passive and armed resistance conducted by Jews themselves.

Due to military strength of Nazi Germany and its allies, as well as the administrative system of ghettoization and the hostility of various sections of the civilian population, few Jews were able to effectively resist the Final Solution militarily. Nevertheless, there are many cases of attempts at resistance in one form or another including over a hundred armed Jewish uprisings.Historiographically, the study of Jewish resistance to German rule is considered an important aspect of the study of the Holocaust.

The historian Julian Jackson argued that there were three discrete forms of Jewish resistance in the course of his study of the German occupation of France:

"One can distinguish three categories of Jewish resistance: first, individual French Jews in the general Resistance; secondly, specifically Jewish organizations in the general Resistance; thirdly, Resistance organizations (not necessarily comprising Jews alone) with specifically Jewish objectives."

In his book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy, Martin Gilbert defines Jewish resistance more widely:

"In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair.