Nisan 14

In the Hebrew year 2448 (1312 BCE), the Jews in Egypt offered the Passover lamb, to be eaten later that night at the first Passover Seder. This was an act of great courage, as sheep were regarded as idols in Egyptian society, and the Jews were technically still subject to Egyptian slavery. This was God's way of emphasizing the idea that Egyptian society was in a state of collapse. In times of the Holy Temple, the Passover Lamb would be offered by every Jewish family; many thousands of lambs would be processed and prepared in the Temple during the afternoon hours preceding the Passover holiday.

On this date in 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising broke out. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Jewish ghettos established by Nazis during the Holocaust. It initially held 400,000 people (30% of the entire population of Warsaw), crammed into a tiny area. In its three years of existence, some 100,000 Jews died of disease and starvation, before the Nazis deported some 265,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp. When the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto, Jewish resistance fighters took action, digging hundreds of bunkers under the houses, connected through the sewage system. The final battle started on the eve of Passover 1943. Some 750 Jewish partisans shot and threw grenades at German patrols from alleyways, sewers and buildings. The Nazis responded with tanks and flamethrowers, rounding up or killing any Jew they could capture. After several days without quelling the uprising, the Nazis ordered the ghetto burned to the ground. The uprising ended after one month; approximately 300 Germans and 7,000 Jews were killed in the fighting. The remaining 30,000 Jews were sent to Treblinka for extermination. Several dozen fighters escaped through the sewers, and a number of these survivors went on to found Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, located near Acco in Israel.