[Cz-L] Aid, letters and packages to Transnistira

Hello to all,
 
On the topic of aid and packages being sent to Mogilev-Podolsk and other areas in Transnistira, I would like to highlight the activities of "The Bukovinian Committe" which was founded by Rabbi Moses Josef Rubin of Campulung-Moldevenesc and also included many other activists chief among them Mr. Nathan Klipper.
 
See below chapter written by Ze'ev Walter Ellenbogen.
 
 
(1) The Bokovinian Committee
Soon after the first deportations to Transnistria in October 1941, an active
aid group for the deportees and those being forcefully held in the Czernowitz
ghetto was formed in Bucharest by private initiative. Dora Litani, a researcher of
the Jewish Holocaust in Romania, termed this group “the Bukovinian Committee.”
This aid initiative began principally as an outgrowth of the arousing of the ex-
Bukovinians in Bucharest to help their relatives and friends who had been
deported to Transnistria. The center of this arousing was in the small synagogue
established by Rabbi Rubin from Kimpolung near his home in the capital. Rabbi
Rubin had moved to Bucharest after being publicly humiliated in the streets of his
city by the Legionary (fascist) Police in 1940. Most of the worshippers in this
synagogue were also former Bukovinians who had recently settled in the capital
and who were strongly connected to their relatives and friends now in Transnistria.
Testimony of the circumstances surrounding the beginning of this group’s
formation was given in Yad Vashem by attorney Dr. Rivka Ruckenstein, who
became one of the main activists in assisting the Transnistria deportees, and
particularly the children who were orphaned there:16 “On Succoth 1941, I received
a postcard from my father.... He informed me that they were waiting any moment
for the deportation of the entire Jewish population [of his city Suceava] to an
unknown destination. ‘God help us,’ he wrote. With postcard in hand, I ran to
Rabbi Rubin.... I burst into the Yizkor service shouting and crying, and the
postcard with the awful news passed from hand to hand. We gathered to find
advice on how to help our brethren. Among those gathered were Mayer Falik and
Sumer Wolf from Suceava [actually Radautz, Z.E.], Rabbi Rubin, Dr. Jacob
Schechter, and Bibring from Czernowitz. We decided to send an officer or a senior
official to follow the deportees in order to determine the location of the
deportation. This was the beginning of aid activity for the deportees.”
We do not have information about the circumstances under which Nathan
Klipper, who at this time had just evaded deportation and found refuge in
Bucharest, joined the nucleus of this group. But it is clear he became a main
activist early into the group’s operation, and was the acting coordinator of the
dispatches to Transnistria and communications with the deportees in the area. In
this way Dora Litani determined that the Bukovinian Committee in Bucharest was
founded “at the initiative of the wealthy philanthropist Nathan Klipper.”17
Additional names connected to the committee at different periods in its
operation were Sumer Wolf, Gerzer, Salo Schmidt, Akiba Ornstein, Berthold
Sobel,18 as well as a non-Jew, the engineer Traian Procopovici, who served as the
treasurer at the beginning of the group’s operation.
In his book, The Black Book of the Suffering of the Jews in Romania 1940-
1944, M. Carp expressed the following about the committee’s activity: “This
committee (which was formed) of private initiative operated discreetly but
14
intensively. The sums that were collected by this handful of people reached about
$200,000 in value at that time.”19
Rabbi Rubin’s synagogue served as the first quarters for the activities of
this aid group, and it seems that donations and pledges of the worshippers when
they were called to Torah were an important source of income for the committee at
its inception. After some time the management of the group’s operation moved to a
room, which was rented by Klipper for this purpose, in the home of the widow of a
Romanian general. These secret quarters served both for meetings of the group and
for organizing the dispatches to Transnistria and preparing the lists of recipients.20
The funds collected by the committee came mainly from two sources:
donations from people of means and from solicitations in the synagogues, which
took place mostly on Sabbath and the holidays. As attorney Ruckenstein testified,
“the rabbis allowed this activity (on Sabbath and holidays) since they saw it as a
duty for saving lives” [which overrides Sabbath laws].
The Bukovinian Committee undoubtedly deserves the credit for being the
first in community aid to the Transnistria exiles. It began its activity at a time when
any help to the Transnistria deportees was utterly forbidden, when those who
violated this prohibition could expect severe punishment, and at a time when the
exiles were at the height of their distress. From the testimony of Saul Schnap in
Yad Vashem we learn that “the dispatch of the first aid (of the committee) was
medicine for typhus. About 5,000 capsules of Cardiazol [medication for
strengthening the heart, Z.E.] were gathered from all that was available in the
pharmacies in Bucharest. The shipment was taken by a Romanian courier to the
Mogilev Committee, and its receipt was acknowledged.... The first sum which was
handed over (to the committee) was 500,000 lei. It was brought by Gelber, the
treasurer of the Jewish community, who had not received instructions from his
superiors to do so. He declared that if thousands of Jews were dying there, he
would also take (upon himself) the risk of being accused of having authorized the
use of the community’s (the union’s ?) money without receiving instruction.”21
Indeed, the first entry in the bookkeeping accounts of the Mogilev Deportees
Committee which list the receipts and expenditures of the “Aid Committee” for the
period December 4, 1941 through July 2, 1942, is “the Union of Communities
(Uniunea) by Klipper 300,000” (apparently net, after payment of transfer fees).22
Saul Schnap testifies that after several months of underground operation, a
somewhat legal cover was given to the work of the committee, by connecting it to
the social welfare system of the Jews’ Center; this, due to the efforts of Filderman
and the heads of the social welfare department of the Jews’ Center and the
Autonomous Aid Committee. According to the witness, this arrangement allowed
the group to intensify its activities.
The significance of the aid shipments to the deportees’ committees by the
committee in which Nathan Klipper was the central activist, can also be learned
from the fact that due to his request and to allow him some supervision on the
outlay of aid funds, Nathan’s brother Moritz was appointed as a member of the
first committee of the Mogilev exiles23 and his father-in-law Karl (Yehezkiel)
Bronstein as a member of the committee of the Shargorod exiles.
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Received on 2011-11-13 11:29:48