Nisan, Nisan

The name of the month is Babylonian; in the Torah it is called the month of the Aviv , referring to the month in which barley was ripe. It is a spring month of 30 days. Nisan usually falls in MarchApril on the Gregorian calendar. In the Book of Esther in the Tanakh it is referred to as Nisan.

According to Rabbi Joshua, "The world was created in Nisan."According to the Kabbalists and Chassidism, the world was first created in the "realm of thought" or in "embryonic state" in Tishrei, and came to the contemporary stable state of the "realm of action" in Nisan, possibly not until the time of the Exodus. Menachem Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl wrote that the pre-Exodus world was considered "nonexistent" due to its originally unstable chaotic state. The last Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and some other Jewish mystics believed differently, that is, the physical world was created in Tishrei, while the "supernal idea" of creation had emerged earlier, in the month of Nisan.

It is in deference to her death that the "Great Shabbat" is commemorated on the Shabbat before Passover rather than the calendar date of the miracle's occurrence, Nisan 10.

When reports of the mass murder in the killing center leaked back to the Warsaw ghetto, an organized resistance began forming, which managed to smuggle a modest cache of arms into the ghetto. On the 14th of Nisan of 1943, the remaining 35,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto (from an original 450,000) staged an organized uprising, and drove back the Nazis with a rain of bullets when they came to begin the final removal of all Jews. The Jewish resistance lasted 27 days. A heroic stand was made in an underground bunker under 18 Mila Street, where hundreds of fighters, including the 24-year-old leader of the uprising, Mordechaj Anielewicz, met their death. Although the Ghetto was burned to the ground by Iyar 3 , a few stray survivors hid in the rubble and fired at the Nazis for two months longer.

Source: Wikipedia > Nisan