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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 (Yehezkel 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.
