Kupermintz, Yehezkel

Son of Leah and Abraham, was born in 1928 in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. With the outbreak of World War II, his studies in elementary school were stopped and Yechezkel fled with his family to the Russian occupied zone. Because of their refusal to accept Russian citizenship, they were exiled to Siberia. Where his mother and elder brother and father Nasser died following an informer and sentenced to life imprisonment. For a while the boy stayed with two other boys at the older sister, who was trying to provide them with their food. He then fled hundreds of kilometers on foot in the Siberian winter cold from Novosibirsk to Central Asia. He was admitted to a Russian orphanage and educated there in the spirit of Russia and the Soviet regime. When the return of the Polish refugees to their country began (the repatriation), Yehezkel also returned with the rest of his family. Together with his brother Ze’ev, he joined a kibbutz of Zionist youth and all of them passed through the “Bericha route” to a Zionist pioneering training commune of their movement in Germany. Where Yehezkel specialized in work on a tractor. When he was in Germany, he learned that his father had returned from Russia with a broken leg, but Yehezkel could not go to Poland to see his father because he might lose the opportunity to immigrate to Israel. In a letter of apology, he reassured his father that in any case they would soon meet in Palestine. In 1947 Yechezkel arrived in Israel with his group as part of Youth Aliyah and joined the “Hatat” group of the Zionist youth movement in Even Yehuda. After the dispersion, the group continued to work as a single worker. When the War of Independence began, they refused to accept him because he looked too young. After raising his real age in the recruiting office, he was accepted to the Alexandroni Brigade and fulfilled every command and task with precision, both in training and in service, contradicting all opinions about his “too young” age. His entreaties were also joined to a unit that took action against the village of Tira in the Sharon region and was given the role of a scout. In this battle, he fell near Tira with several of his friends on 4 May 1948, and was brought to rest at the cemetery in Tel Mond.