Kneifel, Ze’ev (Willy)

Ze’ev (Willy), son of Leah and Avraham Kneifel, was born in 1913 in the city of Stanislavov in eastern Galicia to a family of workers with many children. The family fled to Teplitz, northwest of Bohemia, in the Sudetenland,. Ze’ev was forced to stop his studies at an early age and to join the workforce in order to help the family. Unable to obtain one of the few certificates allocated to the pioneers, he continued his agricultural training in several farms and in urban training in various jobs in Prague. Unable to bear the status of the “eternal pioneer,” which lasted five years, and after the Nazis took control of Prague, Ze’ev decided to take the initiative and embarked on the path of illegal immigration to the Danube and the Black Sea and in April 1939 arrived in Israel and joined Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar. His sister also qualified for the ship “Patria”, which drowned in the port of Haifa. The rest of his family were murdered in a Nazi camp during the Holocaust, and so he survived alone from the large family. At the beginning of the Second World War he volunteered for a unit of guardians who guarded the shores of Palestine. When he was released he returned to the kibbutz and to work. He married Esther, and he had a son, Yoav, and a daughter. As a member of the Haganah, he fulfilled his duty and in January 1943, while bringing ammunition from the north of the country, he was arrested with two other members of the agriculture. He was sentenced to five years in Acre prison and released by pardon on the occasion of Germany’s surrender on 11 May 1945. Ze’ev continued his quiet and modest life in the agriculture and his family. On the 27th of Iyar 5708 (5.6.1948), Ze’ev was hit directly by the first bomb that the enemy plane had thrown at the farm. His body was located 20 meters from the excavation, his right hand holding his rifle. He was been laid to rest in the cemetery in Ayelet Hashahar.