Every year on April 19, a crowd of New Yorkers gathers at Riverside Park on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to commemorate the anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the 1943 act of Jewish resistance in German-occupied Poland.
Specifically, attendees meet by an iron fence that guards a plaque that was originally installed on site in 1947 under the purview of then New York Mayor William O’Dwyer as a temporary placeholder for what would become the very first Holocaust monument in the United States.
Called “Der Shteyn,” which is Yiddish for “the stone,” the slab of granite is inscripted as follows: “This is the site for the American memorial to the heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Battle, April-May 1943, and to the six million Jews of Europe martyred in the cause of human liberty.”
Nearly 77 years since it was first put up, “Der Shteyn” feels more important today than ever before, especially because plans to erect a bigger monument honoring the victims of the Holocaust have never actually come to fruition.
Back in 1947, speaking to thousands of people in the area, O’Dwyer mentioned that a would-be memorial was to be designed by sculptor Jo Davidson. As reported by the Forward, “Davidson’s sculpture of a muscular Jewish fighter defiantly towering above a rabbi with his arms outstretched over the fallen never came to be.”
Several other subsequent design proposals never turned to reality either and conversations regarding the subject eventually stalled.
And, so, “Der Shteyn” remains in place, the site of an annual remembrance ceremony that this past year felt a little different given the plight of Jews in Israel on October 7 and the current state of affairs all around the world. As Jews grow accustomed to defending their right to exist without being tortured by antisemitic sentiments and crimes, the plaque reminds of the evil that humans are capable of doing and what could happen if Jews stop defending themselves.
