Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Judke (Yehuda) Levitt hides supplies in the well. Jews in the Kovno ghetto started to build and prepare hide outs, bunkers,(melinas) for storage of food, medicine, guns, etc.

Photograph | Photograph Number: 81109
Judke (Yehuda) Levitt hides supplies in the well. Jews in the Kovno ghetto started to build and prepare hide outs, bunkers,(melinas) for storage of food, medicine, guns, etc.

Judke (Yehuda) Levitt hides supplies in the well. Jews in the Kovno ghetto started to build and prepare hide outs, bunkers,(melinas) for storage of food, medicine, guns, etc.

Photographer
George Kadish/Zvi Kadushin
Date
1942
Locale
Kaunas, Lithuania
Variant Locale
Kauen
Kovno
Kowno
Photo Designation
GHETTOS (MAJOR) -- KOVNO (Lithuania) -- Resistance -- Activity in Ghetto
Photo Credit
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of George Kadish/Zvi Kadushin

About This Photograph

Event History
Armed resistance in the Kovno ghetto was a difficult undertaking. The hostility of the local population, fear of reprisals, distance from partisan bases and the lack of weapons mitigated against greater resistance activity. Yet despite these obstacles, communist and Zionist youth formed underground cells. The left-wing Anti-Fascist Organization aimed its sights on joining forces with the Soviet partisans, while the Zionist underground movements initially concentrated on preserving Jewish culture within the ghetto. In the summer of 1943, Zionist and communist groups united to form the Jewish General Fighting Organization under the leadership of Chaim Yellin, a young Yiddish author. The resistance organization sent approximately 350 young men and women to the Rudninkai Forest to join the partisans. The underground had access to radios and maintained contact with other ghettos through couriers. Three in particular played a central role: Irena Adamovitch, a Polish Catholic, Gessia Glazer (Albina), a Soviet Jewish partisan, and Dr. Helena Kutorgiene, a Lithuanian. The Kovno ghetto leadership also assisted the underground. Members of the police, notably Moshe Levin, Yehuda Zupovitch and Ika Greenberg, provided weapons training and helped smuggle fighters out of the ghetto by cutting electricity and then forcing partisans onto waiting trucks on the pretext that they were needed for work. The Jewish council supplied the underground with money and protection, while the ghetto workshops outfitted departing fighters with warm clothing and mess kits.

See https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005174.
See Also "Kauen Main Camp" in Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Volume 1 Part A.

Keywords and Subjects

Rights and Restrictions

Photo Source
USHMM (Restricted)
Copyright: Exclusively with provenance
Provenance: George Kadish/Zvi Kadushin
 
Record last modified: 2003-03-18 00:00:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa11880