Rapaport, Elimelech (king)

Son of Feiga and Shalom, was born in 1914 in Chelm, Poland. In 1933 he received a diploma in the city of Kovel. He studied mechanics at the Polytechnion-Wolberg in Warsaw and suffered from the anti-Semitic frenzy of the Polish students. In the summer of 1939 he was drafted into the Polish army and participated in World War II until the disintegration of the Polish army. With the retreating soldiers he moved to the Russian occupied territory and was exiled to slave labor in the Siberian forests. When the Russo-German War broke out, he joined the Polish People’s Army and took part in the repelling and causing the Germans. At the end of the war he went through all the hardships of the DP camps and the illegal immigration and at the beginning of the summer of 1947 he arrived in Israel. Elimelech began to work in a factory and said that the ruins of his life and the assimilation of the land had been destroyed. During the War of Independence he was drafted into the army and served in the Golani Brigade. The Syrians invaded the Jordan Valley on May 16, 1948, took control of several of the regional authorities, but were stopped by our forces in Zemach. On May 18 the Syrians launched an attack on a plant with the help of artillery and tanks. At first, the town of Tzemach fell, and finally the police station and the defenders retreated under Syrian fire towards Degania. In this battle he fell on the 9th of Iyar 5708 (May 18, 1948.) He was laid to rest at the military cemetery in Degania Aleph,