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Rabbi Yehuda Leib Zlotnik was born in Plock on January 8 1887, but his name is closely connected with Gombin. This is due not only to his 1911-1918 tenure as rabbi of Gombin, but also to the fact that Gombin figured prominently in his scholarly works.

When he was three years old, his father, Abraham Yitzchak Zlotnik, passed away, and he was educated by his mother, Chana-Nekhe, who had to support the ten surviving orphans. He studied until age ten in religious schools, and thereafter with his brother Jonah Mordechai who was the rabbi of the town of Zakroczym. In 1910, when he was 27 years old, he passed the government examinations and left to study at the Volozhin yeshiva. He already had a reputation as a sharp scholar and one year later, in 1911, he was chosen as rabbi of Gombin, where he lived until 1919. During his service in Gombin he did a great deal of work for the community and helped develop the Zionist movement. He became a central figure in the spiritual and cultural life in Gombin.

In 1920, Yehuda Leib Zlotnik was among the founders of the religious Zionist party “Mizrachi” in Poland. His position as general secretary of the party forced him to leave Gombin and settle in Warsaw. In addition to representing “Mizrachi” at the Zionist congresses (1925, 1929, 1931 and 1935), he traveled on assignment to various countries. By the end of 1920 he was chosen as the president of “Mizrachi” in Canada and settled in Montreal. In the service of the international Zionist movement he visited the Land of Israel and South Africa in 1925, Argentina in 1935, and Australia in 1946. From 1938 to 1949, he was director of Jewish education in Johannesburg, South Africa. From June 1949 and until the end of his life he lived in the State of Israel. He passed away in Jerusalem on September 21, 1962.

Yehuda Leib Zlotnik was not only a Zionist leader. He was also a prolific writer and scholar. He began writing at the age of seventeen. He wrote in Hebrew a biography of Jesus of Nazareth, but the work was never published due to censorship. He also wrote poems in Hebrew and Yiddish. Some of them appeared in “Hakol” (The Voice, Warsaw, 1899). In 1915 he published articles about the Zionist program in “Lodzher folksblat” (Lodz People's News) under the pseudonym Yehuda Elzet; and he published tracts in “Moment” against religious Jews who opposed Zionism.

Some of his most significant and interesting works focused on Jewish folklore. He was a contributor to the “Collected Books” of the well-known philologist and folklorist Dr. Noah Prilutsky. He also published a series of booklets on folkloric themes, including “Jewish Food”, “Treasures of the Yiddish Language”, and many others.

The tombstone of Pinchas Shachar at the Gombin Cemetery

[Pages 167-169]

Rajzel Zychlinsky, our poet born in Gombin, holds an important place in Yiddish poetry. She has recently published a new book of poems called “Silent Doors”. The book was enthusiastically reviewed by critics and admirers of her poetry. The following excerpts come from a work on Yiddish writers by the literary critic Abraham Shulman.

In Rajzel Zychlinsky's poems the word combinations are unexpected, the scenes are unnatural and weird. Together with the feeling of bizarre injustice, one feels in her lines that the poet is rendering in words our imposing and useless islands of silence.

Here is a poem where simple words short-circuit into an unexpected experience. The poem, which consists of only ten short lines, is entitled “In front of the Mirror”:

How many women have already seen
Their first grey hair
In the cold eyes of the mirror.
The dream has ended,
We step into reality
The world becomes clear and white,
The water freezes.
A blue piece of ice
Becomes our ship.

Another poem, a shocking, unforgettable poem that makes us shudder and feeds our depressed and sinister anxieties, has just twenty words:

At night
When I sleep
My skeleton guards my bed.
With white knees
A white fiddle.
From its eye sockets
The moon shines – sonatas
In my dream.

The being of her poems is often permeated by madness. Their colors are twilight. Their philosophy is the philosophy of white clinics, scalpels, surgery. But it is interesting that despite this, despite her naked loneliness, Zychlinsky is not an asocial poet. In the backdrop of many of her poems there is a flat improbable reality, characters like “tall, hot black men”, “grey women from the shops”, “old people, transparent, going from silence to silence”, a “chased off drunk from the church. Rajzel Zychlinsky's God? “Every morning I pray at the chimney, to the Godlike fool on my roof”. Her desires? “I want to be a black woman with yellow eyes that drinks the moons”. Her joy as a poet? “The dialogue of man's candlesticks with green beads is older than me. It will continue after I am gone. I tremble with joy when the sun embraces me”. Her accompanying landscape?

The sun set
In its final red.
The birds flew over
From grey to black
And became still.
The blind man
Who looks at eternity
What will he do with our neck?

Rajzel Zychlinsky is a great Yiddish poetess. Saying that someone is “great” may sound like a cliché. For me, it is a real pleasure to be able to use the word and feel that, in this case, it does mean the real thing.

[Pages 170-172]

Until my departure to America in 1921, Hanoch Goldshmidt and I were inseparable friends. We were active in the Gombin Bund and we were arrested together. After my release I left for America, but we did not lose contact. The idyllic Polish town surrounded by forests remained deep in the hearts of all those who had left. In America, the Jewish emigres from Gombin followed the news about the idealistic movement that we had helped to build and remained active under Hanoch Goldshmidt's leadership. We continued to help them grow from America, supporting their organization and struggle.

Hanoch Goldshmidt came to the Bund in a peculiar way. He was born in 1889 to a poor but respected family. His father was a religious teacher, and Hanoch was a pious child when the winds of revolution galvanized the towns of Czarist Russia in 1905. In our town there was talk about a clandestine group called “Achdut” (Unity), which included youngsters who did not believe in God, wanted to bring down the Czar, and gathered every Saturday in the forest to secretly smoke cigarettes and sing “subversive” songs.

This pious boy, the son of the religious teacher, decided that he must find the leader of the “Achdut” group and “teach him a lesson”. So Hanoch went looking for Jacob Rothbart, the founder and leader of the Bund in Gombin (who today lives in Pittsburgh). The result, however, was completely different from what the pious Hanoch expected. He did not teach a lesson to Rothbart. It was Jacob Rothbart who taught the lesson to him. Hanoch Goldshmidt became a Bundist.

Fundamentally, Hanoch was a man who strove for completeness. Simply embracing the ideal of socialism was not enough. He decided to take a more decisive step: he became a worker, learning the craft of boot-upper making. There were not that many Jewish boot finishers (yiddishe volkers) in Gombin, but they were known as a very progressive and revolutionary group. Hanoch Goldshmidt set an example for other religious students: in Gombin, one could take the path from the Heder and the Yeshiva to the workshops of the town's craftsmen.

Hanoch Goldshmidt was a calm person, but he was really passionate about the movement. After 1905, when the founding leaders of the Bund left Poland, he became the soul of the movement in Gombin.

Because of a speech impediment (he stuttered a bit), Hanoch was not a great public speaker. But he had a remarkable knack for persuading people to join the movement. After the 1905 failed revolution, he worked tirelessly with the town's youngsters, instilling in them the sense that it was important to read good books, pay attention to social problems and political issues, and join the struggle for a better life. Hanoch spent his Saturdays in the forest, reading books and explaining things to the groups of kids who sat around him.

Under the Czarist regime, unions were illegal. In Gombin, however, we managed to establish a union that embraced workers of all the different trades. In 1908, the union organized a strike. We opened a free kitchen for the workers and purchased equipment to start a worker's cooperative. It was a bitter struggle in which Hanoch Goldshmidt distinguished himself as the most effective leader.

In 1909, Hanoch and I were denounced by the bosses. We had to leave town. Later on, we returned home. Throughout the most difficult years of Czarist repression we maintained a group of young men and women and a small illegal library. We kept in touch with Bundists from other towns, especially during the summer months when some Bundist activists came for vacations in the forests of Gombin. One of them was the well-known Bundist leader from Lodz Israel Lichtenstein, who would later serve as Bund representative in America, and died in 1933.

Hanoch Goldshmidt and his wife Ruchele

Hanoch Goldshmidt was everywhere. In addition to working as an employee at the cooperative, he ran educational activities for the youth and was active in all the other institutions of the movement.

Particularly moving was his relationship with the younger generation. He almost never thought of himself. Day and night he was busy with the activities of the movement. A letter had to be written to headquarters in Warsaw? The youngsters needed help with something? The orphanage was running short of coal? Hanoch Godshmid was always busy. Here I should mention that, back then, the Bundist comrade Sonia Celemenski worked in our orphanage. She later married Emanuel Novogrudski and died a martyr's death in the Warsaw ghetto.

The first free municipal elections of the restored Polish republic were held in 1919. The Bund party saw the fruits of its work in Gombin: the four candidates presented by the Bund were elected to the municipal council. Had we presented more candidates they would also have been elected….

In America we closely followed Hanoch Goldshmidt's indefatigable work in Gombin. The repression of 1920 did not slow him down and the party remained united. He remained in his post as the recognized leader of the worker's movement in Gombin until the end of 1938, when he emigrated to Brazil.

In far away Rio de Janeiro, Hanoch remained the same passionate Bundist he had been his whole life. Every letter he wrote reflected the same heartfelt conviction that had been so characteristic of him when we worked together in Gombin.

[Page 173-174]

My father Marek Wolfowicz was born in Gombin in 1883. His parents wanted the best education for their children, which was not easy in a small provincial town like Gombin. Marek received his elementary education at home and later graduated from a technical school in Lodz.

From early on, Marek Wolfowicz showed a disposition to help others. Rather than living for himself, he got involved in activities focused on improving the lives of everybody in the community. As a youngster, he became very active in the socialist movement.

Marek Wolfowicz cuts a ribbon at the opening of the Zionist library

In the United States Marek Wolfowicz worked for the Edison Company. However, he could not stay there. The pull of Gombin was too strong. When the First World War ended, he returned to Gombin and dedicated all his time to community work. He was elected to the municipal council and opened our home to all the needy, Jews and non-Jews. They came to him for help and advice. Many Jews brought letters in English from their relatives in America. My father would spend time with them, patiently translating and explaining the content of the letters. I remember how happy he was when the government placed a huge order designating the shoemakers of Gombin as suppliers of boots for the Polish army.

Marek's work as municipal councilman was only one aspect of his activity. He was also a well-known Zionist personality and mentor of Zionist youth organizations. In addition to organizing meetings and artistic performances, he personally assisted many of those who emigrated from Poland to Palestine. He was convinced that a Jewish homeland in Palestine was the only solution for the Jews.

Marek's father Zelig Wolfowicz, head of one of the affluent Jewish families of Gombin

When Marek came home on Friday evening we were a unified family. After the traditional meal we would remain seated at the table and spend time together. Friday nights and Saturdays were the loveliest days of my childhood.

The war put an end to our normal life. In November 1939 the Gestapo came to our house to arrest our father. At the last moment he escaped through a side door and never returned.

Marek went to the Warsaw ghetto where he continued to be active maintaining regular contact with the Zionist organizations. He helped to support orphanages, surrounding himself with the other Jews from Gombin who were in Warsaw.

The last time I saw my father was on September 5, 1942. During one of their selections, the SS included my mother in a transport to Treblinka. My father could have saved himself, but he stood beside her and together they were sent to their death.

Our parents Mania and Marek Wolfowicz were murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka. They had dedicated their lives to the ideal of a Jewish homeland, but they did not did not live to see the establishment of the State of Israel and the realization of their dream.

[Page 175-176]

My father, Reuven Potchekha, was born in Plock. He was a tall slender Jew whose demeanor imposed respect. He had bright blue eyes and a Herzl–like beard that framed his gentle face. He was a supplier of boots to the Russian military, a business that offered jobs to many Jewish families of Gombin.

His work required him to go on long trips all over Russia and maintain contact with leading Russian personalities. He spoke perfect Russian and he loved to talk for hours about his travel adventures, keeping his listeners in suspense.

Reuven Potchekha was often asked to intercede for Jewish soldiers who were serving in the regiments to which he supplied boots. I remember incidents in which his intervention helped improve the conditions of the Jewish soldiers, many of whom were far from home in the lonely vastness of Russia.

Despite his prestigious position in the town, he never held any formal office in the community. He saw those offices as a way of exercising power, and he believed that power leads a man to temptation. He was offered important positions numerous times, first in Plock and later in Gombin. He turned all of them down.

When we lived in Plock many inmates from the local prison worked for my father in the manufacture of boots. Most of them had been artisans before their incarceration, and the others had learned the trade while in jail. Of the approximately one hundred prisoner shoemakers, about ten were Jewish. My father sent me to work as a bookkeeper in the penitentiary. I will never forget how the Jewish prisoners opened their hearts and shared with me their tragic stories. They were victimized by the non–Jewish inmates, many of whom were vicious anti–Semites. My father often appealed to the Russian prison director on behalf of the Jews, but there was always the fear that any improvement in their conditions would only inflame the hatred of the anti–Semites. In the end, my father could no longer bear it. He did not renew his contract with the prison, and that was one of the reasons for our move from Plock to Gombin. My father arrived in Gombin with a plan to recruit 100 shoemakers to continue the production of boots for the Russian military.

Reuven Potchekha carried out the plan with his characteristic energy. With the help of his cousin Helerman he called a meeting of Jewish and Polish shoemakers, who at that time were suffering from lack of work. Within a few days, my father succeeded in recruiting enough shoemakers and opened his first large workshop for those who wanted to work in a group. Many others preferred to work independently from home.

The boots for the Russian cavalry had to be of top quality. Gombin was an ideal place to produce them because there were well qualified shoemakers, makes of boot–uppers, and tanneries with first class craftsmanship. My father's business attracted more Jewish families to Gombin, including leather merchants, tanners, and makers of shoes and boots.

I remember well our move to Gombin. Only my mother was sad. It was hard for her to leave our comfortable house and our many neighbours and good friends. My father was filled with enthusiasm and I liked the idea as well, despite the fact that I would have to leave behind the Plock high school and become a “greenhorn” student in Gombin. We packed up all our stuff in large crates - our polished glassware and silver carafes, our silver Menorah, and my father's holy books including the heavy leather–bound Gemara. My father packed his books by himself, he would not let anyone else even approach him. I busied myself with my mother's prayer books and my own Russian books…

Our arrival in Gombin was a big event in our lives. Here, as in Plock, our house became a warm Jewish home. More importantly, we brought new life to the Jewish artisans. Dozens of Jewish families were directly connected to my father's businesses. Throughout the years, Reuven Potchekha's initiatives played a key role in the economic life of the Jews of Gombin.

[Page 177-178]

There are many documents in the archive of the Gombin Society that serve as mementos of our destroyed town. They include the letters, reports, and statistics of Gombin's “Gemilat Hesed Kasse” (savings and loans society), all of them written in the clear beautiful calligraphy of Meir Zeideman, secretary of the loans society and of the Jewish community board.

My brother Meir was very popular in Gombin. He was an unusual kind of Jewish intellectual, a self–educated man who put his talents at the service of the community. Everyone in Gombin came to him asking for help with paperwork and official letters, which he would compose in his exquisite handwriting. He was also the chronicler of the town, passing on the local news and information to the Jewish scholar Jacob Leshchinsky, who collected materials from all cities and towns for his economic and demographic research.

Meir Zeideman was born in 1910. At thirteen he ended Polish school and, like many other Jewish boys, he had to stop his studies in order to work and help his family. Fortunately for him, he got a job at the Zionist library, where he avidly read everything he could. Within a short time he was known as the “remarkable guy” who had read all the books available in Gombin. He went on to more ambitious things, taking correspondence courses until he was able to graduate with a high school degree.

When the Union of Manual Workers was founded by Chaim Luria, Meir Zeideman helped as an aide. Displaying his talents, he gradually worked his way up to the important position of secretary.

Later on, he was involved in the establishment of the “Gemilat Hesed Kasse” as assistant of Abraham Tiber, the first secretary of the savings and loans society. Once again, it was only a matter of time for Meir to eventually rise to the post of secretary himself.

Meir Zeideman's main achievement came in the 1930s, when his Union of Manual Workers obtained a majority in the board of the Jewish community.

Meir's popularity lay in the fact that he would do anything to serve the town and its people. He became the official writer for all the Gombin Jews who needed to submit documents and petitions to the authorities. His reputation transcended the boundaries of Gombin. People would come to him from all the neighbouring towns.

When Jacob Leshchinsky announced a contest for the best monograph about a Jewish town there were hundreds of participants, but it was my brother Meir's monograph of Gombin that won the prize.

Meir Zeideman was also a poet. Some of his poetry was published in the magazine “Literary Pages”. Proficient in Hebrew, he translated Bialik's famous poem “The Kidnappers”. In the town's political circles, he advocated for a combination of socialism, Zionism and religion. His ideal was a movement that would “Keep the Faith” through a mixture of leftist ideology and traditional Jewish piety. At one point, he admitted that it was not easy to find other people who shared that particular kind of vision.

In 1937 Meir married Roize Hodys from Gombin and had a son. The occupation of Gombin by the Nazis sealed the fate of Meir Zeideman, his family, and the rest of the Jewish community. In the Spring of 1942, they were deported to their deaths at Chelmno extermination camp.

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