Who are some of the best-known Jewish leaders during the Holocaust, and what did they accomplish?

Rabbi Leo Baeck and Dr. Otto Hirsch – Leaders of German Jewry during the Nazi years. Their leadership helped to unite and sustain German Jewry in the face of the regime's onslaught. Baeck and Hirsch gave up opportunities to emigrate in order to stay with the community. Hirsch paid for this with his life in 1941; Baeck managed to survive the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Adam Czerniakow – Chairman of the Warsaw Ghetto Judenrat. Czerniakow, an engineer by profession and a prewar leader of the second rank, assumed the chairmanship of the Warsaw ghetto after many of the first rank of leaders fled the German invasion of Poland. Responsible for the administration of the largest ghetto in occupied Europe, Czerniakow earned a reputation for fairness and wise leadership in an extremely difficult situation. When the Nazis asked him to provide lists of Jews for deportation in July 1942, he committed suicide rather than comply with their demand. 

Mordechai Haim Rumkowski – Head of the Judenrat in the Lodz ghetto, 1939–44. He was an authoritarian leader who advocated a "salvation through work" policy, in which as many Jews as possible would work in industries for the Germans and thus assure their survival. At the end of July 1944, the remaining Jews in the ghetto – 65,000 out of 204,000 – were deported to Auschwitz.

Mordechai Anielewicz – A leader of the Hashomer HaTza’ir Zionist youth movement in Warsaw, who became an underground leader in the ghetto. He commanded the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which he fell on May 8, 1943.

Tuvia Bielski – A Jewish partisan leader in the forests of Belorussia, Bielski set up a "family camp" in the forest for Jews who had escaped the Germans. Despite the difficulty of protecting a large group of civilians of all ages, and pressure from the Soviet partisan movement to disband the camp, he stubbornly continued to protect it. His group ultimately included some 1,200 people, most of whom survived.

Emmanuel Ringelblum – A Polish Jewish historian and social-welfare activist in the Warsaw ghetto, he created an underground archive code-named Oneg Shabbat, to which many people contributed and whose goal it was to record what was happening in Warsaw and elsewhere. He was murdered in 1944, but much of his archive was retrieved from the rubble of Warsaw after the war.

Robert Gamzon – A leader of the French Jewish Scouts who became an underground commander during the German occupation, he organized the establishment of many children's homes, and smuggled many youngsters to safety by having them delivered to neutral countries or into hiding among French peasants. He also led many raids against the Germans in 1943–44.

Reszo Rudolf (Israel) Kasztner – A Hungarian Zionist activist, in 1944 he negotiated with Adolf Eichmann and his associates in an attempt to halt the deportations to Auschwitz, facilitate the flight of Jews from Nazi territory, and later have the Nazis turn over their camps to the allies without further harming of the inmates. As part of the negotiations, one train carrying 1,684 Hungarian Jews was released and the passengers reached Switzerland. Kasztner was later accused of collaboration with the Nazis. Assassinated in Tel Aviv in 1957, he remains a controversial figure to this day.