The Hashomer Hatzair children, to all the members of the Warsaw Group, Be Strong Ghetto!

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This time no Shomer bonfire will be lit, this time we will not go out to celebrate our dear festival in the outdoors. We will not have a Scouts camp, we will not put up a tent and not demonstrate our strength in front of a crowd. In a narrow ghetto, in the darkness of the “Jewish neighbourhood”, during days of dying and loss, assimilation and failure of our people, the festival of youth and rebellion takes place – Lag Ba’Omer. Closed up inside the wall, disconnected from the wide open field, differentiated from the world by a barbed wire fence, walls of bricks, savage guards – sentenced to destruction, hunger and death....it is a period of fatal times, and when we come to review our work on Lag Ba’Omer 5701 and determine lines for the future, we must say: Each generation and its bonfire – each generation and its mission. And the mission of our generation is: to keep the holy embers that were saved burning, when the time comes, for the fire of the rebellion, which will burn and uproot all the roots of evil of man and society. Our mission is – to light a fire, however not a fire that destroys and ruins bringing with it annihilation, but rather it shall bear the light of the darkness of the ghettos, redemption for those awaiting it, progress to the enterprise of human freedom.

 

On Lag Ba’Omer 5701 we will carry out an accounting of our achievements and failures and we will know: the final accounting will be determined not by the brute, armed and brutal force of our enemies, but rather solely and only by our inner courage and our outrage against the ideas of the rebellion, that we have cultivated and blessed since then. And therefore, we will not have a parade on Lag Ba’Omer 5701, but rather a pure internal accounting of the Shomer movement. The aspiration to the inner strength of the movement is that which has lit the way for us, for the past year and by the light of which we will also test our current status.