'Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising' moves to Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County

A “lost” Holocaust memorial sculpture by a world-renowned artist, which spent years gathering dust in a Farmingdale warehouse, has been resurrected and is now on display at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County.

The roughly 8-foot bronze tableau, titled “Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising,” was unveiled in a rainy ceremony Sunday afternoon in the center’s garden, inside the county-owned Welwyn Preserve in Glen Cove.

 Created by the Polish Holocaust survivor Natan Rapoport,  who died in New York City in 1987, it depicts four figures protecting a child and fighting back with a menorah, a pistol and Molotov cocktails in their hands. Rapoport sculpted similar monuments that can be found on the street in Warsaw where the uprising began and in Israel’s National Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

The center's executive director, Bali Lerner, told a crowd of about 100 people the monument "stands as a true testament to strength and to resistance — the kind that truly transforms ordinary people into heroes when they rise to defend dignity and humanity."

Among the guests at the unveiling was Alan Kriegstein, of Huntington, who said Rapoport was a close friend of his father’s and a regular guest in his Long Island home growing up in the 1970s.

He described the sculptor as a “warm, humble and kind soul” with surprisingly soft hands: “I would later realize that those hands perfectly reflected him — gentle in touch, yet capable of immense creative force.”

Rapoport escaped from Poland to the Soviet Union during World War II, so he was not in Warsaw as the Nazi occupiers herded nearly half a million Jews into an 840-acre ghetto, where most died of disease, starvation or were transferred to death camps. On April 19, 1943, Jews launched a rebellion, fighting back for about a month before ultimately being crushed.

It was “the greatest act of resistance by Jews during the Holocaust as the Nazis prepared to completely liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto,” said Zachary Graulich, an educator at the museum.

After the war, Rapoport immigrated to Israel and then to New York City in the late 1950s.

In 1976, the Workers Circle, a Jewish social justice organization, commissioned “Monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising," which adorned its New York City headquarters until 2011, when the sculpture was confined to storage during a move.

Recently, Kriegstein — who volunteers in center's garden — learned the sculpture was in storage about a mile from where he works in Farmingdale, and arranged for its transfer to the museum on a 50-year loan.

While Lerner and others spoke of the memorial as a reminder to stand against rising antisemitism, Workers Circle CEO Ann Toback said it is a reminder to stand up for democracy and anyone who is vulnerable, including immigrants illegally detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"Remembrance has never been something you observe," she said. "It's always been a mandate for action."