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This chapter traces Betar's complex relationship to Polish nationalism from the diverse and often conflicting vantage points of Betar's members, leaders, and Polish government officials. Betar's efforts to link Zionism with Polish nationalism became a regular feature of their activities in the early 1930s. At the very moment that Betar's leaders claimed to perform a distinct national identity, they modeled their ceremonies on Polish patriotic rituals, called for their members to “act Polish,” and attempted to include Polish government officials as both observers and participants in their celebrations. The chapter then explores the dynamics and paradoxes of acculturation for young Jews coming of age in interwar Poland, as well as the complex factors at play when government officials attempted to determine the extent to which young Jews and other minorities could be integrated into the new Polish state.

This chapter focuses on 1928–1931, the years in which Betar began its transformation into a mass movement in Poland. Across Europe, admirers of Fascist Italy were sifting through Benito Mussolini's political program in search of an antidote to their own political challenges. Fascist ideology in Italy was replete with contradictions and in a state of perpetual flux. Fascist leaders often used this ideological ambiguity to their advantage. The chapter then looks at the workshops of Betar's cultural architects, as they designed an array of myths and rituals linking the group to Judaism and ancient Jewish history, and explores how these projects provided fertile ground for Betar's leaders to determine the extent to which they would embrace the beliefs and behaviors they associated with fascism.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Betar youth movement in Poland in the 1930s. Like dozens of Zionist youth movements operating in the country at the time, Betar promised to prepare its members for a new life in the Yishuv—the Jewish community of prestate Palestine—by providing vocational training, Hebrew classes, and lessons in Jewish history. What set Betar apart was its commitment to the military training of Jewish youth, as well as its support of several prominent policies of the European Right. They deemed rifles, not ploughs or shovels, to be the most important tools to fulfill Zionism's goals. Like the vast majority of Zionist activists between the two world wars, Betar's leader, Vladimir Jabotinsky, sought to capture the hearts and minds of Jews living in Poland. His Union of Revisionist Zionists, founded in 1925, would go on to become one of the most popular Zionist organizations in the interwar period.

This chapter details Vladimir Jabotinsky's first encounter with Polish Jewish youth, during a last-ditch effort in 1927 to gain supporters for his political organization, the Union of Revisionist Zionists. He initially viewed the Polish Jews flocking to greet him at train stations with a mix of pity, disdain, and suspicion. Little did he know that they would transform his very understanding of Revisionism's mission and the tools required to bring him to power. The chapter then describes how members of several Jewish youth movements in Poland helped to convince the Revisionist leader to turn the celebration of militarism and the rejection of socialism into core components of his organization's program. Culminating with the founding of Poland's Betar youth movement at the end of 1927, it reveals how Polish Jewish youth were not merely the passive recipients of ideology imposed “from above” but played an active role in shaping the political beliefs and behaviors they adopted.

This epilogue focuses on the Betar youth movement during the Holocaust. The flight of Betar's leaders from Warsaw was far from exceptional. With rumors circulating that German troops were executing prominent Polish and Jewish political activists, many leaders of Jewish youth movements were on the run. Some Betar leaders who arrived in Mandate Palestine as wartime refugees continued to invoke legends of Polish national liberation to inspire their followers. As they had done in the past, they claimed that Polish and Jewish nationalists shared parallel fates: just as Catholic Poles struggled to overthrow the foreign rule of Nazis in Poland, so too were Zionists in Palestine fighting to cast off the yoke of the British Empire. Meanwhile, many Betar members made good on their movement's pledges to defend the Polish state. Those who survived the Holocaust sought to ensure that their resistance activity against Nazi rule was on public record.