Lubenchik, Naftali (Shaul)

Son of Olga and Eliezer. He was born on 19 November 1913 in Tambov, Russia. When the Russian Revolution broke out, his family moved to Riga, where Naftali graduated from high school. He then traveled to Berlin and studied history and political economy at the university. After completing his studies, he returned to Riga and devoted himself to work at the Zionist Student Union. In 1934 he immigrated to Palestine with his wife and settled in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, he studied history and philosophy for several years at the Hebrew University and maintained himself and his wife in construction work. He was a member of the Revisionist movement and of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, and after the split in the organization in 1940 he was one of the first activists of the Lehi underground, and in the early years of 1941 he was sent to Syria under the Vichy regime Where he held talks with Otto von Hentig, the German representative in accordance with Lehi’s policy at the time, to negotiate with the Italians and Germans for cooperation in the war on the assumption that this would save European Jewry and their territorial concentration in the Land of Israel as a Jewish state. The talks had no results, because in June 1941 Syria and Lebanon were occupied by the Allied powers. After the British discovered him, he was transferred to Israel, first imprisoned in the Mizra detention camp, and later in the Acre prison. In October 1941 he was deported with 250 of his arrested comrades to the deportation camp of Asmara, Eritrea. On April 20, 1946, he died in the hospital of the bar in Eritrea after an improper treatment of the amoeba disease. When he was about to die, he asked his friends: “If anything happens to me, I want my bones to go to the land.” However, this wish can only be fulfilled after three and a half years: then it was transferred from the Jewish cemetery Of Asmara to rest in Jerusalem. He died and left behind a wife