Schneider, Zevulun

Son of Zelda and Yaakov. Zevulun was born on July 7, 1915, in Poland, in the town of Nskohish near the provincial town of Kowel. He was the fourth of a family of ten children: five boys and five girls. Zevulun grew up in Poland and in his youth was a member of the Betar movement and was active in its defense. With the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939, Zbulun and two of his brothers, Reuven and Zvi, fled to Russia in the offensive that began World War II. Zevulun was arrested by the Russian authorities on suspicion of spying for the Nazis because of his Aryan appearance and his German name, and after being released he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Siberia, in eastern Russia. He joined a partisan unit and met again with his brothers Reuven and Zvi, who told him that the rest of his family, who had not fled to Russia, had been murdered in the Nazi death pit. Later in the war Zevulun separated from his two brothers: his brother Reuben succeeded in immigrating to the Land of Israel, after being a member of a group of avengers who liquidated Nazis at the end of the war. Traces of his brother Zvi disappeared after the Russian occupation and it became unknown what happened to him. When the world war ended Zevulun wandered along the roads. He came to Salzburg, Austria, where he met Lena Rettig, a member of the Dror youth movement. Together, they arrived in Italy as part of the “Irgun HaBiricha” after a difficult four-day trek and two hundred and eighty kilometers in the snowy Alps in the European winter. After an eight-month stay with the training in Bari, Italy, they left secretly on the ship “Shaar Yashuv” on their way to Eretz Israel on the eve of Passover seder 1946. The British soldiers discovered the ship with a reconnaissance plane, enforced a detention of the illegal immigrant ship by a British destroyer, which led her to Haifa. In Haifa, the immigrants were brought to a deportation ship that took them to Cyprus, to a detention camp in the winter camps near Famagusta. In the detention camp in Cyprus, Zevulun married Lena Retig. In August 1948 Ziva (Zelda) was born in a British military hospital in Nicosia. After two years in a detention camp in Cyprus they were released. On 30.1.1949 Zevulun and his family arrived in the State of Israel. At first they stayed at the immigrants’ home in Beer Yaakov, where they moved to live with the family of Lena, who were veteran Israelis and lived in Nes Tziona, Haifa and Givatayim. This was until the small family settled in an abandoned house in an abandoned Arab village of Jamusin near the junction of the Yarkon and Musrara – Ayalon streams in northern Tel Aviv. Zevulun was unemployed for a few months, until he joined the Israel Police in early 1950. He served in the Tel Aviv area. In September 1950, the son Chaim was born. Policeman Zevulun Schneider fell during his service on 20 Iyar, May 5, 1953. He was killed in an accident in the southern workshop of the Tel Aviv police and was buried in the civil cemetery in Kiryat Shaul, since policemen were not considered the fallen soldiers of Israel. A long struggle by attorney Yehoshua Rotenstreich and with the help of Knesset members, the policemen were recognized as the victims of the Israeli regime. Zevulun was thirty-eight years old when he fell. He left a wife, two children and a brother.