Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Yiddish World

VIDEO: Israeli soldier on the front singing a Yiddish fighting song

Yonatan was inspired to sing the “The Partisan Hymn” as his tank was rolling down the dusty road to the front

The Forward has received a Whatsapp clip taken this week by a reserve soldier in Israel singing “The Partisan Hymn, a well-known Yiddish fighting song, while riding in a tank on a dusty road on Israel’s northern front.

Yonatan, a young man in his 30s, sent the Whatsapp clip to Daniel Galay, the director of the Yiddish cultural center, Beit Leivik, in Tel Aviv, who then forwarded it to the Forward. “Yonatan is a real Yiddishist, Galay said. “He performs Yiddish songs frequently for us, accompanying himself on the accordion.

“The Partisan Hymn, known in Yiddish as “Dos partizaner lid, expresses the defiant resistance and resilience of the Jewish people. It was composed in 1943 by Hirsh Glik, a young member of the underground resistance movement in Vilna. Glik said he was inspired to write the song upon hearing news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. According to many accounts, Glik was captured and executed by the Nazis in July 1944.

In the clip, we hear Yonatan singing the first of the four stanzas of the song, translated here below. (You can read the translation of the entire song here.)

Never say that you are walking the final road,
Though leaden skies obscure blue days;
The hour we have been longing for will still come,
Our steps will drum – we are here!

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version