Lohamei Hageta'ot

On the road from Akko to Nahariya, shortly before Regba, is the kibbutz of Lohamei Hageta'ot, founded in 1949 by survivors from Nazi concentration camps, with a richly stocked museum. In addition to a cultural center and a documentary collection named after the poet Beit Katznelson, murdered in Auschwitz in 1944, the building, which is of several storys, contains a collection of material and documents on the various concentration camps and on Jewish resistance to the Nazis in Poland and Lithuania. Every year on April 19th, the anniversary of the rising in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, there are special exhibitions and lectures here. On the ground floor are displays illustrating the history of Vilnius, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania", and the town's Jewish community from 1551 to 1940. In addition to small wooden figurines there is material on the early days of the socialist and Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century and objects illustrating the everyday life of Polish Jews. From the entrance hall stairs lead down to two underground rooms. On the staircase are plans and Nazi insignia recalling the extermination camps of eastern Europe. In one of the rooms is a large plan of Treblinka, in the other a portrait of Janusz Korczak (1879-1942), doctor and teacher, and some two thousand drawings and paintings by prisoners, including portraits of concentration camp inmates. On the first floor of the museum are documents on anti-semitism under the Nazis, the ghettoes and the deportation of Jews, a plan of Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam, pictures of the Terezín (Theresienstadt) camp and some thousand photographs of the Warsaw rising.