General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland

The General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland (Yiddish: אַלגעמײַנער ײדישער אַרבעטער בּונד אין פוילן, romanized: Algemayner Yidisher Arbeter-bund in Poyln, Polish: Ogólno-Żydowski Związek Robotniczy "Bund" w Polsce) was a Jewish socialist party in Poland which promoted the political, cultural and social autonomy of Jewish workers, sought to combat antisemitism and was generally opposed to Zionism.

The Bund had party structures established amongst the Jewish communities in the Polish areas of the Russian empire.

[2] In December 1917 the split was formalized, as the Polish Bundists held a clandestine meeting in Lublin and reconstituted themselves as a separate political party.

A majority resolution calling for the entry of the party into the Communist International was passed at the convention, but never implemented.

[11][12][13] In the autumn of 1933, the party issued a call to the Polish public to boycott goods from Germany, in protest of the Hitler regime.

[14] In December 1938 and January 1939, at the last Polish municipal elections before the start of the Second World War, the Bund received the largest segment of the Jewish vote.

[16] For the first time, the Bund and the PPS had agreed to call their electors to vote for each other where only one of them presented a list.

This alliance made it possible for a Left electoral victory in most great cities: Warsaw, Łódź, Lwów, Piotrkow, Kraków, Białystok, Grodno, Wilno.

[10] After its municipal electoral successes in December 1938 and January 1939, the Bund hoped for a breakthrough at the parliamentary elections due in September 1939, but these were de facto cancelled by the German-Soviet invasion.

"[18] When the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky toured Poland urging the "evacuation" of European Jewry, the Bundists accused him of abetting anti-Semitism.

[19] After the 1939 German-Soviet invasion, the Bund continued to operate as an underground anti-Nazi organization in German-occupied Poland.

Two most eminent Bund leaders, Wiktor Alter and Henryk Erlich were executed in December 1941 in Moscow on Stalin's orders under accusations of being agents of Nazi Germany.

In 1942, the Bundist Marek Edelman became a cofounder of the Jewish Fighting Organization that led the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and was also part of the Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa (Home Army), which fought against the Germans in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.

Whilst Zionists organized mass emigration to Palestine after the war, the Bund pinned its hopes to a democratic development in Poland.

Together with Jewish communists, the Bund was active in promoting Polish Jews to settle in areas in Silesia that were previously German territories.

Monument to the Bund in the Jewish Cemetery of Warsaw
Fifty year anniversary celebration of the Bund, 15 November 1947