Azriel Berenstein - continued from page 1

The Berensztejn home in Lanovits had a large garden and since they also had a large storage shed for wood and a business area with parts for sleds and wagons next to the house there was a 3 meters high fence enclosing the entire commercial area of their property. Behind the garden there was a hill (600 meters high) which the children used for sledding in the winter. Below the hill was a river (wider than the Jordan) full of reeds on its banks.

In Lanovits most people cooked on a trinishka—a three legged affair of iron, under which was a wood fire. Azriel’s family, being well to do, had two ovens built into the wall (as at his grandfather Kovka’s home). The walls with the ovens were three meters long. The ovens heated the house . A third oven, in the kitchen, was used for cooking. The end of one of the two large ovens reached the kitchen. At this point there was a recess in the oven which could hold pots. This was used for warming up food and for the chulent on Shabbat.

When Azriel returned to Lanovits from Shumsk at the end of World War One he saw trenches near their house. In addition, prisoners of war (captured from the Austian Hungarian Empire Army) were being kept in the enclosed, walled commercial area belonging to them which was adjacent to their home. Among the prisoners there were also Austrian Jews. Azriel’s father had a large barn with straw. His father found out who the Jewish prisoners were and gave them a place to stay in the barn, but he also invited some non-Jewish prisoners into the barn so as not to create anti Semitic feeling. He bought some calves and among the prisoners there was a shochet, so the Jewish prisoners could have kosher meat. Veal, being lean meat, was much less expensive than beef, which was prized for being fatty, and so they had veal. . Some of the prisoners visited Azriel and his brothers. They had left children at home and this was a chance to be with children.

Those prisoners (who were from the AustroHungarian army) from the Galician part of Poland were used to drinking coffee. Until WW1 Lanovits was a part of Russia and people drank tea or cocoa. Coffee was not drunk. These Austrian and Galician Jews brought coffee drinking to the Jews of Lanovits.

When the Czar was deposed in 1917 the Jews of Lanovits danced in the streets, marching in a procession with the Torah scrolls. It was rainy weather and Azriel remembers that there was mud up to his knees.

In 1920, in the Polish revolt against Russian rule, the Poles finally established their control over this area . This happened on Yom Kippur Eve 1920. Again, the enclosed commercial yard belonging to Yisrael Berensztejn adjacent to his house served to house prisoners—this time the Russian prisoners of war taken by the Polish.

The Poles wanted to find out which of the prisoners of war were communists and using a ruse they found eight who were. (They did this by having someone ask the prisoners of war if any would like to volunteer to serve in the Bolshevik Army. Those who answered affirmatively were judged to be communists.) A Polish military tribunal was set up in the dining room of Azriel’s( parent’s ) house and all of those prisoners who had volunteered for the Bolshevik army were sentenced to death. In the garden some prisoners were ordered to dig a pit. Azriel and his brothers stood in their bedroom which overlooked the garden and watched the proceedings. The procedure was to stand the condemned prisoner near the pit and shoot him at closest range in the head so that he would fall into the pit. Each time the children heard a shot they shouted “Shma Yisrael.”

There was a mikve and a bath house which was built below their house, beneath the hill, close to the river. The following morning, on the day after the executions, the woman who was in charge of caring for the mikve and the bath house came to speak with Azriel’s father. She told him that when she had come to the mikve very early that morning (as she did every day to clean it) she found a man there—one of the prisoners who had been in Azriel’s father’s yard, had been sentenced to death, and had managed to escape. He had hidden in the mikve. He told her that he was a Jew. The woman had given him civilian clothing and he had escaped!

(RK Azriel corrected the text up to this point)

Life After World War One

After the First World War was over and Lanovits became a part of Poland, Jewish merchants from the former Galician part of Poland appeared in the town to do business. The Galician Jews were more advanced than the Wolyn Jews had been and brought progress to Lanovits. Azriel’s father’s business developed and he was able to buy out almost all his partners so that he had only one Polish partner. Azriel’s father exported grain to all over the world. One of his Galician Polish Jewish business contacts suggested that it would be advantageous if Bumi and Azriel studied Polish, so they were sent to an elementary school in Zbarash where they studied in the Polish language. (They studied Russian at home.) They finished the 4 year curriculum in two years. Then they were sent to Tarnopol, a much larger city which was about four hours from Lanovits by slow train, to study at a gymnasium. There were five gymnasia in Tarnopol. Azriel’s father’s business agent in Tarnopol arranged for the boys to study at the most rigorous, which was the “classical gymnasium.” ( RK : Classical Latin and Greek were an important part of the curriculum.) Of the 40 pupils in their class 22 were Jews!

For his Bar Mitzvah Azriel received a Kodak camera, a rarity in Lanovits. He developed the pictures himself in a darkroom that was set up in their house. There was a 10 second “waiting period” and so he appears in many of the pictures which he took. (RK : I saw many wonderful pictures which Azriel took in Lanovits and later in Palestine with this camera.)

Azriel’s paternal Grandfather, Kovka Berensztejn, of Shumsk, had a heart attack when he was about 60 years old. Kovka and Edes’s youngest daughter, Breindel, was born in 1907, the year that Azriel’s older brother Eliezer (Luzer)- who later went to Argentina- was born. So Grandmother Edes, and her daughter in law, Golda, had babies the same year. Kovka had the heart attack because Breindel became very ill and it was thought that she had died. When they were “washing her body” she suddenly revived. A few days later Kovka had the heart attack. (RK I don’t know when this happened.) Kovka died in 1922.

In 1923 Yisrael Berensztejn, Azriel’s father passed away. This happened just after a Zionist delegation had come to speak with him to ask him to set up a flour mill in Palestine. The plan was that Yisrael’s sister Ethel and her husband Aharon Szonsztejn and Yisrael’s brother Feival Berensztejn would go to Palestine to supervise and work in the mill. Two hours after the delegation left Yisrael’s house he died. Azriel and Bumi were then at school in Tarnopol. Uncle Feival arranged for the boys to come to the funeral and when they arrived on train they saw the whole town gathered for their father’s funeral.

Both of Azriel’s forbears, his grandfathers, Kovka Berensztejn of Shumsk and his great grandfather, Chaim Mordechai Rabinovitch of Lanovits had flour mills and were experts in this area.

In 1929 Azriel and Bumi finished the gymnasium in Tarnopol. Bumi wanted to go to the University of Prague and traveled to Prague. He was staying at a hotel. He witnessed a Communist demonstration in the streets and then met his father’s agent in Prague. When Bumi got back to the hotel a policeman was waiting for him and began interrogating him. He said, “Your father is Yisrael Berensztejn of Lanovits and your grandparents are Kovka and Edes of Shumsk.” It turned out that this Czech policeman had been one of those prisoners of war who had been penned up in the yard of his father’s house in the First World War. He was so grateful to Bumi and Azriel’s father for having treated him so humanely and insisted on taking Bumi home to show his family the son of the man who had helped him when he was a prisoner of war. In the end Bumi was not accepted at the School of Medicine in Prague and so he went to medical school in Slovenia. He studied there for three years but returned to Lanovits at the time that Chamberlain came to Berlin and it was clear that war was imminent.

Azriel himself did not want to attend university. He had joined Hanoar Hatzioni and wanted to be a halutz . He went to hachshara (RK: a preparatory farm for life in Palestine) and in 1932 received a certificate (RK : the term for the document which would allow him to legally immigrate to British controlled Palestine.) but just at that point he got his draft notice for the Polish army. He joined the Polish army and because of his educational qualifications was due to get officer training but since he had a long standing problem with one eye he was discharged after a very short time.

Azriel was in the leadership of the Noar Hatzioni. There he was called ZUNIK (his nickname) MUSKAL. Why Muskal? Because he came from Lanovits which was in the past Russia---“Muskal, from Moscow.” Kibbutz Tel Yitchak is a kibbutz established by Hanoar Hatzioni and when the Hanoar Hatzioni Organization had it 70th anniversary celebrations there not too long ago, Azriel made himself a name tag with the name Zunik Muskal. He said that he was the only one of his age to attend!

Azriel said that he heard Jabotinsky speak twice, once in Tarnopol when Azriel was at the gymnasium there and once in Lanovits when Jabotinsky spoke in the synagogue. The placards announcing the speech said, “Jabotinsky, hero of Gallipoli to speak.” As a result not only the Jews but all the Polish army officers came to hear him. (Actually Jabotinsky was not a hero in Gallipoli at all.)

Azriel said that the leaders of Hanoar Hatzioni were even better speakers than Jabotinsky, who was acknowledged to be a very good orator. All the students joined Hanoar Hatzioni. Their kibbutz was organized like those of Hashomer Hatzair, but they were not socialists.

When Azriel came to Palestine he was at the Noar Hatzioni kibbutz in Hod Hasharon. When the kibbutz dissolved (because they realized that they would have to wait years to get land on which to establish a settlement) the members were offered parcels of land adjacent to the kibbutz. This is where Azriel built his home and where his son Meir also built his home. In the Kibbutz, Azriel was the “chatzran” the job of handyman which demands expert technical ability and “golden hand.” Later Azriel worked in roofing homes and today Meir’s business deals in distributing roofing materials. Azriel still does the books for the business.

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