Hoffenbartel, Shmuel

Son of Miriam and Mordechai, was born on December 21, 1926 in the city of Naron, east of Galicia. He studied in a “cheder” and in a public elementary school where many Christian youth immediately suffered and consoled himself with the vision of the future when he immigrated to Israel with his parents. At the age of 13 he was subjected to the horrors of the war and the German invasion. He fled with his father’s house to the Russian-occupied area and was sent to a labor camp in the Siberian forests, and he, too, was forced to work with them. After the Stalin-Sikorski agreement, Polish citizens were released from forced labor and allowed to move to Uzbekistan. Where his parents and brothers died of epidemics, all three in one month. He studied ritualism and worked to support his brother and two younger sisters. In 1943 he was granted Russian citizenship, and he was drafted into the Soviet army and served for two years in the war against the Germans. After the war, he managed with great effort to motivate his brothers and sisters, who had already been educated in Russian schools, to agree to leave Russia and immigrate to Israel. With the repatriation, they returned to Poland and, following the traces of the annihilation of the Jews, could not stay there and continued on their way to a DP camp in Germany. Where they obtained the letters of their uncles from the United States and one of the uncles, a boyless boy, begged them to come to him in order to legalize him. But Shmuel’s eyes were on the land of the Jews. He arranged for his brothers and sisters to immigrate to Israel in the framework of Youth Aliyah, and he himself joined the Hagana and underwent training in the Willsbach camp. In June 1948, he immigrated to Israel as a conscript in the Nahal Brigade and served in a unit of the Jerusalem Brigade and took part in battle activities in the vicinity of Jerusalem, and was proud of his right to be a soldier in the Israeli army. As a holy and expensive vessel, and even when he went on a short vacation, he was not part of it, but this did not take more than two months, for on the 26th of Av, 5708 (August 26, 1948) he fell on the front of the study farm in the eastern part of Jerusalem. On August 30, 1950, was transferred to eternal rest in the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.