Memorial Book of Kamenets Litovsk, Zastavye, and Colonies (Kamyanyets, Belarus)

This Yizkor Book memorializes the Jews of Kamenetz‐Litowsk-a shtetl in an area that changed hands over

the centuries, from Lithuania to Poland to Belarus. It was situated on the banks of the Leshna River, in the

shadow of the "Sloop", a 14th‐century fortress tower. The Jews of the town took great pride in the

Kamenetz Yeshiva, a center of advanced Talmudic learning. Young men from all over the world flocked

there to study and to bask in the presence of the renowned Boruch‐Ber Leibowitz, the prodigious head of

the yeshiva.

The Jewish presence was obliterated by the Nazis during World War II. The Jews of the town were first

confined to a ghetto, then expelled and transported to death camps. Only one Jew, Dora Galperin, was

hidden by local Christians and survived in and around the town-traumatized by her experience for the

rest of her life. A few others who had been expelled survived the brutal conditions of work camps. The

small number who returned after the war could not bear their neighbors' animosity and emigrated to

Israel and other countries. Nothing remains in Kamenetz of the centuries‐long Jewish presence-no living

Jew, not even a trace of the Jewish cemetery.

The essays in this Yizkor Book also describe the thriving pre‐war Jewish community. There are biographies

of mid‐19th century Kamenetz adventurers (Menachem‐Mendel of Kamenetz, Yisrael Ashkenazi) who

settled in Israel in the trying conditions of those times. One essay tells us about the 19th‐century career of

a fiery orator, the Maggid of Kamenetz, who emigrated to London in 1890. Two writers (Yeḥezkel Kotik,

Falek Zolf) contribute colorful autobiographical pieces on life in the town in the late 19th and early 20th

centuries. We learn about Kamenetz's travails during World War I: the influx of refugees, the German

occupation, the epidemics, the blaze that destroyed much of the shtetl, and the bandits-escaped

prisoners‐of‐war who hid out in nearby forests.

Other essays describe Zionist organizations, the hard‐working communal volunteers, a successful amateur

theatre, a self‐trained orchestra that performed when the Kamenetz Yeshiva was dedicated, and the

experiences of Jewish pupils attending the Polish elementary school in the 1920s. Several articles tell us

about the last Chief Rabbi of the town, the charismatic Reuven Burstein, who perished in Auschwitz; he

was an enlightened, tolerant leader with a profound religious interpretation of Jewish history. Another

tells the story of a brilliant PhD mathematician from Kamenetz, Ayzik Gorny, for whom "Gorny's Theorem"

was named; he was teaching in a French university in 1940, yet shared the fate of his fellow

Kamenetzers-sent from France to his death in Auschwitz. And we are told about the achievements of

those who had left: the proud, new lives of the immigrants to Israel; and the philanthropic

accomplishments of the immigrants to America. Both groups joined hands to memorialize the town and

to write the Yizkor Book. Finally, a detailed necrology, authored by Meir Bobrowski, lists all the

Kamenetzers, more than 1,700 in number, who perished at the hand of the Nazis.