Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

In the 16th century, more than twenty towns in Poland obtained the privilegia de non tolerandis Judaeis, including:
* Miedzyrzec in 1520
* Warsaw in 1525
* Sambor in 1542
* Grodek in 1550
* Vilna in 1551
* Bydgoszcz in 1556
* Stryj in 1567
* Biez, Krosno and Tarnogrod 1569
* Pilzno in 1577
* Drohobycz in 1578
* Mikolajow in 1596
* Checiny in 1597
In practice, this ban was inconsistently observed. In other locations, separate suburbs, "Jewish towns", were formed, including:
* Lublin
* Piotrkow
* Bydgoszcz
* Drohobycz
* Sambor
Jews fought for and won the revocation of those discriminatory regulations, including:
* Stryj
* Tarnogrod

In June, 1941, after the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, attacked Vilnius, and established the Vilna Ghetto, Abba Kovner escaped to a Dominican convent headed by Anna Borkowska in the suburbs.
He returned to the ghetto to build a Jewish resistance. and command the United Partisan Organization in the forests near Vilnius, engaging in sabotage and guerrilla attacks against the Nazis.

In July, 1941, SS Einsatzkommando 9 rounded up 6,000 Jewish men of Vilnius and transported them to Ponary, where they were shot.

On August 31, 1941, the Germans launched a major Aktion, supposedly in retaliation for an attack against the Germans, shooting 8,000 men and women were at Ponary, and rounding up and crowding tens of thousands of Jews from surrounding areas into a small area of Vilnius, and walled in.
The Germans masked the transportes and shootings at Ponary as resettlement.
Abba Kovner cited: "... when the troops herded the whole suffering, tortured, weeping mass of people into the narrow streets of the ghetto, into those seven narrow stinking streets, and locked the walls that had been built, behind them, everyone suddenly sighed with relief. They left behind them days of fear and horror; and ahead of them were deprivation, hunger and suffering - but now they felt more secure, less afraid. Almost no one believed that it would be possible to kill off all of them, all those thousands and tens of thousands, the Jews of Vilna, Kovno, Bialystok, and Warsaw - the millions, with their women and children."

In August, 1943,the Germans decided to liquidate the Vilnius Ghetto.
Most of the prisoner transports from the Vilnius Ghetto were sent to labor camps in Estonia, mainly the HKP and Kailis camps, where most of the prisoners were eventually killed by the SS.

In September 1943, Rozka Korczak escaped from the Vilnius Ghetto through the sewage canals for the forests of Rudninkai, carrying the movement’s archives and Abba Kovner’s poems.

On July 13, 1944, Vilnius was liberated, and Abba Kovner, Vitka Kempner and Rozka Korczak returned, together with several hundred survivors.