Shenkar, Dr. Yitzhak

Yitzchak, son of Moshe and Sarah-Rivka Shenkar, was born on August 22, 1887 in Krakow, Poland. Yitzhak was a member of a family of rabbis. He studied medicine at Vienna College in Austria specialized in surgery. Yitzchak joined the Austrian Army in the First World War where he reached the rank of Captain. In 1927 returned to his hometown in Poland as director of the surgical department at Jewish Hospital. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Yitzchak was immediately recruited into the Polish Army as chief surgeon on the Eastern Front. With the fall of Poland, he was conscripted as a lieutenant colonel into the Soviet army. When the German army invaded in 1941, he was captured by the Germans and as a Jew he was imprisoned in an extermination camp in Transnistria. In the camp, Dr. Shenkar founded a clinic and under primitive conditions saved hundreds of Jews from death. In 1945, Yitzchak made aliyah to Israel and for a month he was imprisoned in the Atlit camp. A year later, he met his family, whom he had not seen for seven years. In Eretz Yisrael, Dr. Shenkarbecame a doctor in the Clalit, and was a surgeon in Beilinson and Assuta Hospitals. He secretly treated Underground wounded during their military activity. During the attack on Jaffa, he came to the aid of the Irgun fighters, and operated on their wounded at the Freud Hospital within the framework of the Israel Defense Forces Military Hospital in Safed. He spent many nights in the operating room to save the lives of the fighters including
Injured persons from the Druze community, and also provided medical assistance to residents of Safed and its environs. During his military service, he died on the eve of Yom Kippur (October 13, 1948) from an illness as a result of his years of suffering and wandering. The next day he was buried in the military cemetery in Nahalat Yitzhak.
He left behind a wife and two children, a daughter and a son.