[Page 10]

David Fuchs		19
Avraham Rappaport		21
Members of the Yizkor-Book Committee of the Zinkov Society in NY		23
Activist Women's Committee of the Society in NY		23
R'Moishe'le z”l		28
Pictures from Zinkov		31
Ruins of the Turkish Citadel. Map of the town		34
Nachum Yoshpeh		35
The family of Yechiel Yoshpeh		36
Shmuel Friedman		37
The Zionist organization Hatechiya (Revival) in Zinkov		39
A group of Zinkov pioneers [halutzim] on the way to Eretz Israel in 1921		40
A group of Zinkov pioneers at Herzl's grave in Vienna		41
Yosef Yoshpeh		44
A group of Zinkov activists of the underground Zionist organization in 1925		45
Israel Roitbord		47
Netanel, Ite and Israel Roitbord in 1914		49
Rivka Shloime's and her husband z”l		52
The synagogue		54
Israel Ben-Shachar		55
Baruch Laskin		58
Avraham Gosakov z”l		66
Moshe Garber		73
Shlima Binem's the baker and her family		74
The amateur Drama-Club in Zinkov		80
The Hazamir [Nightingale] Association in Zinkov		82
A group of Zinkov emigrants on their way to America		83
The family of Zosia and Babbe Segal in 1926		84
A group of former Zinkov residents, Haifa 1922-1923		86
Moshe Greenman		89
Avraham'ke Nemis' family		90
Berl Kiberik the Staroste and his family		92
The Hebrew School in Zinkov, its teachers and students		99
Yitzhak Frenkel		104
Aharon and Necha Frenkel		105
Zinkover working at paving a road in Rishon LeZion		107
A group of Zinkov former residents working in Haifa		108
Garber, Shmuel Lipe Senders and wife Rachel, Moshe Garber's parents		112
Itzik Hersh Wolfbein and wife		114
Yosef Ben-David		117
Israel Einkoifer's family		125
R'Meir Yosef (the Black Rabbi) with a part of his family		127
Shlomo Ben-David (Blinder)		128
Ezra Aharons Kogan and his family in 1914		135
Yehoshua Senders (“the photographter”)		149
Aharon (Arke) Shenkelman and his wife Yente		148
Yakov Hassid and his wife Rivka nee Sadikov		163
David Blinder		165
Izia Beitelman and his wife Rachel		171
Yehudit Weinblatt-Loifer, her husband and her daughter		176
Rachel Baskales and her daughter Esther		179
Shachna and Sara Wasserman and family		181
Shabetay Zalas' father and family		183
ShlomoIsrael Einkoifer and his wife		185
Israel Einkoifer his son and nieces		187
The Schreibman family		189
The Averbuch family		192
Note Beloz (Nesis) and grandson		193
Luni (Lieb), son of Chaim and Sheine Weintraub		195
Beile Yoshpeh z”l		207
Chelik Yoshpeh z”l		208
Fani Yoshpeh-Grabelski z”l		209
Eliezer Schwarzman z”l		210
Aba son of Moshe Nissim z”l		212
Zev Nissim z”l		212
Milia Goldenberg nee Feuerman z”l		212
Mendel Weissman z”l		213
Dov (Berl) Sliternik z”l		214
Malka'le HY"D [May God avenge her blood]		215
Harry Zala, wife and friend		220
The Memorial Monument		222
The inscriptions on the monument		223
The new fence of the cemetery		223

[Page 11]

My beloved friends have thrust upon me the role and responsibility to speak for and edit for modest and precious people. These are people who come from a town of the slaughtered, who have come to recall what happened to them and to eulogize the families of the dead, those who have been felled by the depravity of man and the genocidal murderers, alongside millions of our brothers and sisters.

A precious storehouse of Jewish existence and normal life, serene and honest, has been revealed herein, accompanying love of the Jewish people and love of the national tradition – a love that unites all the scattered people of Zinkov with their brethren in Israel.

This treasure of the Zinkov Book elevates and glorifies its image, and adds to it splendor and worth. It breaks away from the enclosure of modesty, its initial character, and through this force joins the literature of the nation, the literature of the destruction and the Holocaust. It adds waves of tears to the flood of tears of our generation.

Not just that – it creates an opening toward the hope of nation and humanity. The remnants of Zinkov in Israel, though not significant in number, are mighty, and together with their fellow townspeople in the Diaspora, they cling to the belief in the prosperity of the State of Israel, and in its thriving future for our people, and in its international integration with nations of redemption and peace.

[Page 12]

It is at once my privilege and my weighty and painful task to gather, organize (thematically and stylistically), and combine into a single work of remembrance, individual accounts of human experience, and memories of a quiet and comfortable youth spent in the Ukrainian countryside. I have been entrusted with collecting into a single spiritual vessel the hot tears shed for destroyed homes, beloved parents, brothers, and sisters, who were ruthlessly murdered by tyrannical and eternally cursed Nazism.

Behind the flow of bloody tears, the slaughtered world of Jewish life in all its splendor, customs, and folklore becomes revealed to us, the readers. Kind and sincere people have written chapters of Jewish history in Podolia during the first half of the twentieth century. These chapters are collected into an entire memorial book that will, like other memorial books of the era of murder, be useful as documentary sources for Jewish historians.

While editing this memorial book, I was particularly intrigued, and challenged, by the linguistic differences in the material (Hebrew, Yiddish, English) and the geographical variety of the individual writers. It is gratifying to point out that the writers of the Yiddish sections, though they have lived in America for many years, nevertheless retain a warm connection with their home of their youth as well as to the rich folk language of their personal homes. They also remain deeply attached to the Hebrew language that they learned in the cheder and talmud–toyre schools during early childhood, and the aroma of Torah is often felt in their Yiddish usage. ^[1]

[Page 12]

Just as colloquial are the Hebrew sections of the memorial book that were written by Zinkov natives living in Israel, who came to the country many years ago. Most of them were Zionist pioneers, who personally participated in building the country and defending it. Their memoirs are written in the language that became the natural language of their thoughts and experiences.

A small part of the material was written in English, by writers living in America. They did so in order to make the memorial book at least partially accessible to the grandchildren and great–grandchildren of Zinkov Jews in the United States and Canada who, unfortunately, do not read Yiddish or Hebrew. This will evoke the memory of the mass murders perpetrated by the Nazis on their people, on their ancestors in general, and in Zinkov in particular.

None of the writers of this memorial book is a professional author, and I did not try to turn them into professionals. While editing the materials, I made only the changes necessary to eliminate linguistic, grammatical, and stylistic errors, to avoid redundancies, and to render a few articles more readable.

This memorial book is published thanks to the generous and strenuous efforts of Zinkov natives in Israel and in America, in the hope that it would function as a family history in the homes of Zinkov natives throughout the world. The book therefore includes as many images as possible of Zinkov residents (besides the photographs of the murdered martyrs and their families). This was done so that everyone would be able to find the unforgettable images of relatives, friends, and those near and dear.

However, in spite of the local character of this memorial book, this volume – as a page of modern Jewish history – will be just as interesting to broader circles of readers, and will certainly join the growing ranks of Holocaust literature that can be found in community archives and libraries in Israel and in Jewish cultural centers throughout the world.

Translator's footnote:

1. The cheder/cheider/heder/kheyder and the talmud–toyre were traditional elementary religious schools for boys. Return

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[Page 15]

[Page 16]

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[Page 17]

On behalf of the citizens of Israel who fled Zinkov, we extend our hand to any of our townspeople across the seas. Through the power of a great love of our land, which has beat within us from the beginning of our youth, we have become pioneers in building the land during the times of harsh national birth pangs. We stand here as well on the defensive line for the peace of our land, fighting for its independence, yet we have never forgotten, nor shall we ever forget, what was wrought by the genocidal murderers, murderers of our nation, toward our precious town, of those who ruined our families and our precious friends, within whose boundaries we were raised.

Together with all our fellow townspeople scattered in the Diaspora, we today establish this memorial monument, joining flesh and spirit in producing this memorial collection, which will tell for generations the pleasant and modest life, steeped in Jewish tradition, friendship and good community, which reigned in our town before the Holocaust, bearing a lament for our town which was destroyed, its sons and daughters, its elderly, its women and children, who were wiped out, killed, murdered, dying the sacred death of martyrs.

May it be so that their memories stay in our hearts and be blessed forever.

[Page 17 – Hebrew] [Page 18 – Yiddish]

Dear friends and Zinkov natives,

We present to you the work of a small group of Zinkov natives, who for years have been greatly affected by the fate of their murdered home–town people and are unable to find peace. We could not let the dreams of our young people also be buried under the ruins of destruction, or prevent our burning sorrow for all the Jewish men, women, and children from being properly expressed, and be totally forgotten with the cruel passage of time. We could not accept the fact that each small house and alley, each sacred spot, each marketplace and meadow, so well known to us and in which we spent so much time, should not be memorialized, as a commemoration of ruin. ^[1]

With our simple Yiddish language and our meager artistic talent, we started sketching out events, figures, and occasionally even laughing at certain characters. We collected images, and presented as best we could a gallery of familiar and beloved faces of bygone times and of today. Our possibilities were limited. There were many historical facts that we could not collect or establish. However, we have here set out for you all that we had; we have made available for future historians a glimpse of the life, and murder, of a Jewish community that was deeply rooted in Ukrainian soil.

Above all, we present you with faithful documentary evidence by living witnesses who survived the terrible destruction, and can recount the terrible chronicle of our destroyed home for history and for future generations.

May the Zinkov Memorial Book stand before the court of world conscience, as the greatest accuser of the barbaric Nazi people–murderers.

The American Committee to Commemorate the Town of Zinkov

Moyshe Garber, Moyshe Grinman, Borekh Laskin, Dovid Fuks, Avrom Rapoport, Yisro'el (Sanis) Roytbord

Translator's footnote:

1. The term ‘commemoration of ruin’ refers to the traditional practice of leaving an unpainted patch inside a home, as a reminder of the destruction of the Jewish Temple by the Roman Empire in 70 CE. Return

[Page 19]

I congratulate all brothers, sisters, and friends, as well as the Book Committee, on the publication of our memorial book, the Zinkov Pinkes. ^[1] In the name of our Society, I express my heartfelt thanks and acknowledgment to the small group of faithful and devoted sons of Zinkov for their tireless work, which they put into these two sacred projects in order to preserve forever the memory of our martyrs.

Dovid Fuks

We now have two symbolic memorials for our brothers,

[Page 20]

monuments which are also an eternal flame burning in their memory. These are two pillars of light that will illuminate our future lives, and warn us that every possible measure must be taken to make sure that the bitter, gloomy past with the terrible, barbaric deeds of the brown–and–black Nazi epidemic shall gradually be forgotten and totally vanish into the darkness of distant days.

And, last but not least, special thanks and praise are due to our Zinkov natives and friends in Israel and America, for their generous material support, without which we would never have been able to complete these two great and sacred achievements.

We also extend heartfelt thanks to our distinguished editor, Professor Shmuel Eisenstadt in Tel Aviv, his esteemed wife, and the entire staff of workers who made possible the high intellectual standard of the book. Thanks to his devoted work with us, Professor Eisenstadt joined our circle, as though he too was a member of our family circle.

Translator's footnote:

1. Shtetls typically had a pinkes, a record book in which the noteworthy events of the Jewish community, good as well as bad, would be documented. The term pinkes in this title thus refers to a longstanding tradition in Jewish culture. The Hebrew title of Holocaust memorial books usually starts with Pinkes, followed by the name of the town in which the community lived. Return

[Page 21]

Avrom Rapoport

The mission of this memorial book is clear. First, to present (as far as possible) the horrifying, catastrophic murders that took place in Zinkov. Second, to create a book that would serve as a document narrating the life of Jews in Zinkov from its earliest days to the tragic hours of its annihilation. The chapters in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English are arranged according to topic and order. Especially remarkable are the descriptions of human characters and of the landscape. The unique manner of speech, with all its special features, nuances, and local quirks, is also presented here to a certain degree. Our writers had, if not their own style, their own manner of expression – the Zinkov mode. In fact, they drew on their Ukrainian Yiddish folk vocabulary.

Considering this memorial book as a collective work, it is clear that it expresses the deep cry of

[Page 22]

pain and longing for those murdered and for their home, in which each of us was profoundly integrated.

Thinking that such an important documentary work could have remained in manuscript form and not been published, never to be seen by the eyes of a reader, we are deeply grateful to our brothers, natives of Zinkov, Moyshe Garber, Yisro'el Roytburd, Moyshe Grinman, Dovid Fuks and Borekh Laskin, for their tireless efforts to facilitate the compilation of the manuscripts and images and the publication of this remarkable book.

[Page 23]

Members of the Memorial Book publishing committee of the Zinkov society in New York Seated (from right): Moyshe Grinman and Moyshe Garber Standing (from right): Yisroel Roytburd, Benny Laskin, Dovid Fuks

[Page 24]

Committee of Zinkov women activists in New York, who assisted in publication of the Memorial Book: Standing: Itta Grinman, Sonya Fuks, Polya Garber Seated: Beyle Laskin, Khane Roytburd

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