Shadow of Warsaw Ghetto over Gaza-Israel border

By Alastair Macdonald

YAD MORDECHAI, Israel (Reuters) - The shadow of the Warsaw Ghetto hangs over Israel's border with the Gaza Strip.

On a hilltop that gave a good view last week of the smoke of battle rising over Gaza and helicopters hunting Palestinians who aim rockets at Israel, that shadow is cast literally by a statue of the man who led the 1943 Jewish uprising against the Nazis.

The bronze figure of Mordechaj Anielewicz, who died fighting rather than follow millions of Jews to the gas chambers, towers in the low winter sun over gardens and a swimming pool at the kibbutz named after him by fellow Jewish socialists from Poland, whose move to Palestine in the 1930s spared them the Holocaust.

But figurative shadows from that time also hang over the Yad Mordechai communal cattle and honey farm, a mile or so north of the Gaza border: "It's very heavy to live in the shadow of Mordechaj Anielewicz," said Raya Passi, the kibbutz spokeswoman.

"The statue and the story of the war hang over the kibbutz."

She recalled how horrors in Europe brought Jews to the area but also how the kibbutz, set up just after German troops razed the Warsaw Ghetto, went down five years later in the founding epics of the Jewish state as the site of a David-and-Goliath battle against overwhelming odds and helped define the border.

The shadows hang, too, over Palestinians crammed miserably into the Gaza Strip, most descended from refugees who lost homes in what became Israel on May 14, 1948. They hang over vanished Arab villages, crumbled into the farmland north of the walls and fences Israel erected to stop attacks by people from Gaza.

MEMORY IN CONFLICT