June 2012

Dear Kremenetser / Shumsker,

This August marks the 70th anniversary of the massacre of the Kremenets and Shumsk Jewish Communities. The Israeli Organization for Survivors and Descendants of the city of Kremenets and the town of Shumsk is holding its annual Memorial on August 14, 2012 at the Seminar HaKibbutzim in Tel Aviv.

In Remembrance of the people from Kremenets/Shumsk who perished in the war years, we are soliciting Kremenets and Shumsk descendants to submit photos of their family members who were lost in this tragedy.

We have already started to collect photos from our Israeli members, - and those of us that are involved in the construction of this presentation are finding it to be an extremely moving experience because of the way that it illustrates the scope of this tragedy with real and familiar faces. All of us have grown up with this story as part of our family history and the accumulation of common photographs creates a powerful shared story. Thus we would like to include photographs belonging to our American - Kremenets/Shumsk brethren as well. We may even find photos of our family members in each other's photographs.   Please consider adding your family photos to this initiative so that your family that disappeared into the abyss of the Summer of 1942 can be remembered in 2012.

If you have photographs of relatives who lived in Kremenets or Shumsk and who perished in the Holocaust and you would be willing to include them in our Remembrance Presentation, please scan them and send them to Susan Sobel susan.sobel.kishon@gmail.com.  Please include in your email, any names, dates or other family information that you would like included on the slides, and please indicate whether the pictures are of people from Shumsk or from Kremenets.

Susan Sobel  susan.sobel.kishon@gmail.com (from a Kremenets family)

Rachel  Karni rakarni@netvision.net.il   (from a Shumsk family)