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Lenchner Tenenbaum, Shoshana

Lenchner Tenenbaum, Shoshana


Shoshana, daughter of Margalit (Friel) and Yitzhak-Tzvi Tenenbaum, was born on October 25, 1920 in Poland, in the town of Radomsk, south of Lodz. The town had a small Jewish community with a well-known Torah center. Shoshana attended elementary school and a secondary school for trade in the city. From a young age she was a member of Hashomer Hadati and was educated in a religious Zionist spirit. On the eve of World War II, Poland was the focal point of world Jewry in the fields of religious, national, political, social and cultural activity. There were about three and a quarter million Jews living there. The severe economic crisis that gripped the world at the end of the 1930s had a major effect on Poland’s agriculture, exacerbating anti-Semitic tendencies and pushing the feet of the Jews, who were considered to have a key position in economic life. They suffered from an anti-Jewish economic boycott and growing pogroms. On September 1, 1939, World War II broke out with the German invasion of Poland and its conquest in the lightning war (“Blitzkrieg”). Immediately thereafter, anti-Jewish decrees and regulations were issued that resulted in the social isolation of the Jews, their economic deprivation, and the undermining of all their systems of life. In the following months, ghettos in which the Jews were concentrated were established on Polish soil, and from there they were sent to concentration and extermination camps in Poland and Germany. About three million Polish Jews perished in the war. Poland was the main killing ground of the Jews during the Holocaust. Shoshana was sent to the ghetto with her entire family. Everyone else perished, only she survived until the liberation. Even when she was in the Nazi camps she continued the activities of Hashomer Hadati, and encouraged the spirit of her friends. After the victory over the Nazis she joined the “Ichud” kibbutz in order to immigrate to Israel with him. A kibbutz of the Torah v’Avodah movement was established in Sosnowiec and moved to it at the head of a company of religious societies. She was later appointed director of the “Torah V’Avodah” kibbutz in Bedzin and managed it with great talent, when she was loved and admired by all her friends. Due to her vital work, Shoshana was required to remain in Poland and to delay her immigration to Eretz Israel, while the members of the kibbutz she directed set out. On the way to Israel, the members were caught by the Polish border police and imprisoned in the town of Ribnik, and Shoshana was summoned to their aid, as a friend said: “According to the instructions of the movement’s Central Committee, Shoshana devoted herself to the liberation, Days and nights he ran from place to place, from judge to prison to lawyer, until they were all released on bail until trial, and by the time they were tried, they were already far beyond Poland’s borders. ” The days of her stay in Rivenik took place during Passover. The hotel did not have a kosher kitchen, and Shoshana, who jealously guarded her faith, made do with a week of matzo and tap water. Shoshana later arrived in Germany and joined the kibbutz in Eschenbach, near Bamberg. On Lag B’Omer 5747 (May 1947), she married Naftali Lanchner, her favorite. Four months later she was forced to leave her husband, who remained in the movement’s positions abroad, and immigrated to Israel. As soon as she arrived, Shoshana joined Kfar Etzion, the first Gush Etzion settlement. She soon became part of the farm and liked his friends. A friend told the kibbutz: “The joy of youth, the singing of a bright life, kindness, seriousness and responsibility for the tasks of the hour – these were the lines that stood out in her.” Two months after Shoshana arrived in Kfar Etzion, the UN partition resolution was passed, in November 1947, according to which Gush Etzion was not included in the Jewish state. Immediately after the decision, the Arabs of the area attacked the Gush and the roads from Jerusalem, and besieged it from all sides. In the following months the block was besieged, and supplies arrived in armored convoys or from the air. All the residents of the older bloc, Shoshana among them, served in the Haganah in the framework of the Etzioni Brigade (Brigade No. 6). Contact themShe served in the Guard, completed a first aid course and was prepared for every role, and in those days wrote to her relatives in Tel Aviv: “An error It is fundamental to give up and surrender at this fateful moment. The recent events [the fall of the 35th Convoy] affect us negatively, but we must not give up, but we are here perhaps more than you are there, and yet we are hopeful that we will win. We must be proud that we live in a fateful period, when the destiny of the Jewish people will be decided: to be or to cease … The situation here adds new qualities to the person: He becomes hard-hearted, stubborn and obstinate, So that we will not have to be ashamed and we will be able to continue with the enterprise in which they started … We do not fall in our spirit, we feel strong and proud of ourselves Accomplices, in the great and God willing we hold. The day will come tomorrow fresh and bright – and we will! ” Due to the importance of the settlements on the way to Jerusalem, the Jordanian Legion attacked them even before the British Mandate ended. On 12 May 1948, the Etzion Bloc was attacked by Legion soldiers, reinforced by armored vehicles and artillery, and together with a large Arab force from the neighboring villages. They occupied several outposts in the vicinity of Kfar Etzion. The next day, 4 Iyar 5708 (13.5.1948), the Arabs attacked the village itself, and when the armored Arab Legion broke into the village, Shoshana – with the other medics – was in a shelter under the building of the German monastery that served as the headquarters. The enemy, who could not penetrate the shelter, blew up the building and its ruins buried all its inhabitants, and more than a hundred defenders of Kfar Etzion fell on the same day, among them Shoshana, some of whom were shot after they surrendered. The next day, the 5th of Iyar 5708, the day of the declaration of independence, the three other settlements fell in Gush Etzion – Revadim, Ein Tzurim and Masuot Yitzhak. The remnants of their defenders went to captivity in Jordan. Shoshana was twenty-four years old when she fell. Left a husband. The bodies of the fallen remained in the area, Jordan, for a year or more. Their remains were collected in a special operation by the military rabbinate in 1949 and they were laid to rest in a large mass grave on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, at a state ceremony held on the 17 th of November 1949. “She did not see with her own eyes the bright day that arose for the people of Israel, the delicate soul that dreamed a dream of splendor and purity was cut off, and the chain of her family was cut off by bringing the last remnant to the altar of the homeland. In the second volume of “Goily Ash” – a book prepared by the Ministry of Defense and from the literary-artistic estate of the fallen sons, letters were published by Shoshana from Kfar Etzion to her relatives. This hero is a “last scion”. The survivors of the Holocaust are survivors of the Holocaust who survived the last remnant of their nuclear family (parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters) who experienced the Holocaust in the ghettos and / or concentration camps and / or in hiding and hiding in territories occupied by the Nazis and / Or in combat alongside members of the underground movements or partisans in the Nazi-occupied territories who immigrated to Israel during or after World War II, wore uniforms and fell in the Israeli army.

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