Shmuelowitz, Menachem (Mendel)

Son of Tzippora and Moshe, was born in 1925 in the town of Teitsch, in the Carpatho-Ross region of the Czech Republic. He grew up in a traditional rural environment and trained himself from his youth to work in the fields of his father until the outbreak of World War II, and the murderous Nazis also destroyed this community. The parents were murdered and the brothers separated. Menachem was taken to the Auschwitz death camp, but was transferred to forced labor in coal mines, and only thanks to his strong physique he had been in a difficult experience for years. On the way back, the Nazis transferred him to Buchenwald and from there to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by the Allied armies, and found his brother who thought he was dead. But this time the brothers parted voluntarily because his brother wanted to remain in the Diaspora and Menahem strove to go to Zion. He arrived at the Pocking camp in Germany and waited for his immigration. In the meantime, he joined the Irgun, underwent military training in a training camp of the organization in Germany, and boarded the Altalena on June 21, 1948. Among those arrested in Camp Yonah and Kiryat Meir, he escaped from the detention and joined the IDF. “This is not an opportunity for internal accounts,” he used to say, and he did. Menachem joined the Carmeli brigade, but the truce prevented him from participating in the actual war. He sat on a placard at Birwa and his soul set out to renew the fighting, but fate wanted otherwise. Not by a fallen man: a venomous serpent had beaten him, and by the time he was able to treat him dead, on the 2nd of Elul 5708 (September 6, 1948) he was brought to eternal rest in the military cemetery in Haifa.