Extension:Ex-4.1-6
Jewish Youth movements became a primary framework for organizing the social life of Jewish preteens, teenagers, and young adults in interwar Poland. Many were attached to a Zionist, Jewish socialist, or religious Jewish political party. Under wartime German rule they played a major role in assisting members and their families to cope with the increasingly harsh conditions of occupation. In some communities they came eventually to constitute an alternative leadership to the official Judenräte, forming the backbone of underground civil resistance activities, including food smuggling, clandestine schools and newspapers, cultural performances, and social interactions, all aimed at increasing the durability of Jews in the face of German efforts to wear them down. Following the onset of mass killing they also played a central role in organizing armed resistance.
Little is known about the activities of youth movements in Distrikt Krakau before the beginning of deportations to the killing centers in spring 1942. The largest and most active movements appear to have been Akiva (bourgeois Zionist movement with a positive attitude toward Jewish religious tradition), and Hashomer Hatsair, a Marxist, militantly secularist Zionist movement, dedicated to preparing its members for life on collective agricultural farms in Palestine. They and several smaller movements, including the non-Marxist socialist Zionist Dror, the religious Zionist Hashomer Hadati, and the anti-Zionist socialist Tsukunft, were most active in Kraków but endeavored to maintain contacts with communities in the periphery. In Distrikt Galizien Jewish youth movements had been suppressed under Soviet rule, along with all independent political activity. In many places they were able to reorganize once the Soviets departed, but because mass killing began close on the heels of the German conquest, their attention was directed from the start more toward armed than toward civil resistance.