Kestenbaum, Zvi (Shiro)

The only son of Chana and Yaakov was born on May 7, 1913 in the town of Yaborov near Lvov, east of Galicia, and grew up in Lvov, where he completed elementary school and joined the “Hashomer Hatzair” In 1934, he participated in the training unit in Przemyśl and spent about a year and a half there, where he returned to action in a nest in Lvov and then moved to a training company in Katowice and prepared to immigrate to Eretz Israel. He himself had already acquired a passport and a permit, but his documents were stolen or the documents were lost on the verge of leaving He escaped from the Nazi invasion of Russia, where he worked hard and dangerous work, and recently worked in a kolkhoz in Uzbekistan, surviving hardships and illness, for he had the courage and encouragement of his belief that he would finally arrive in Israel to his kibbutz. He had contacts with the emissaries of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai who had come to Teheran, and had also made contact with members of his movement in Russia, encouraged the hopeless and desperate spirit, and provided real help to them. Through Peres, but to the units that participated in the liberation of Poland. After the war he went to Romania, where he devoted himself to working for his movement among the remnants of the youth who gathered from Russia, Poland and the ghettos and contacted the rescue operation of Jewish Brigade soldiers. He moved to Trieste and worked in the “Bricha” organization to transfer Jews from Russian-occupied countries to the concentration of immigration in Italy. On January 18, 1946, he arrived in Israel on a small and crowded cargo ship. After three weeks of detention, he was released and joined Kibbutz Yad Mordechai. He was absorbed in work and social life and was about to enter into a marriage with his girlfriend, but the compensation for his sufferings and wanderings, which he found here with his modest happiness, did not last long. The War of Independence that broke out put him in battle. Zvi acted as a soldier trained in a machine gun against the Egyptian invader, and fell, and his machine gun, next to an Egyptian tank that broke into the agriculture on the 14th of May 1948. He was brought to eternal rest in the cemetery at Yad Mordechai.