Hebrew Editor's Comments

To the reader,

This book was written by our parents for us, their children that were born and raised in Israel. Jezierna was a vague concept for us, 'the Jewish Shtetl" (town) we studied at school, another chapter of the horrible story about the fate of those who stayed there and perished in the Holocaust.

My parents, Sarah of Marder household and Yitchak Charap, like many other parents, did not share their broken hearts with us. They carried their pain, but spared us, their children, from it.

However, it was not just their pain they spared us from, they also withheld the rest of the stories from us. Emerging life stories, rich in endeavor, and the hopes and dreams of their relatives and the town's people. The silencing of the stories and the pain left the characters blurred and faded into a pale background. A net full of holes, of vague knowledge and shredded facts.

I think of how the elders of the town went on their own from Haifa to Jerusalem to unveil the memorial board to the town in the Holocaust Cellar on Mount Zion. They had each other to hug there and to cry. They did not take us, the children, with them.

Drop by drop we became conscious of what had happened there to families and friends who stayed behind. We were busy with our own things, studying, working, raising children, and did not ask questions.

They prepared this book for us, to read when we were ready, when we would want to know. Our parents wrote large portion of their testimonies in Yiddish, a language we found hard to understand, partly, because it, too, was 'silenced'.

Years passed. The Iron Curtain parted. People started travelling to these regions to see, to touch, maybe to try to understand. I also travelled, twice. It was not easy to find Jezierna. We were surprised to discover that the borders had shifted, and the town is now in Ukraine, not in Poland.

Coming there I found that the great Jewish community that used to live there was completely erased. Most people of Polish origin had left, and the majority were Ukranians, that came after the war. The Jewish cemetery turned into a grazing field, with bits of broken tombstones sticking out of the ground. Near neighboring Zborov I was led to the site of a monument, indicating the site of a mass grave, probably of Jewish victims from the whole area.

With the advent of the internet, I joined a group of Jezierna descendants, many of them were from the USA. I was asked to support them translating the book into English. I said I would be happy to help if we could also make a Hebrew version of the book. Suri Greenberg, born in Toronto to a father from Jezierna, took it upon herself to edit the book in English. We looked for and found Jezierna descendants, both in Israel and abroad, who agreed to donate and support our endeavor. Suri and me worked together in full cooperation. After almost 10 years of hard work, the Hebrew translation of the book was fully online.

I encountered many surprises while working on this text. Many stories found their way to be told. I learnt there was a Jewish cooperative bank in the town as well as there was a Hebrew school; and a sage, who was a 'miracle maker' whose grave was honored by Jews and Ukrainians alike. I found a quotation from a Yiddish newspaper that Jezierna excelled in the number of Jews who were agricultural workers! And in another instance came to learn that there were Haaretz newspaper readers in the town… However, alongside these stories the majority of the book is dedicated to the war's horror and its consequences which includes the story of the fate of the commander of the concentration camp located in the town.

The Yiddish poems in the book, written by Jezierna poets, were added without translation.

The translation to Hebrew was done mainly by volunteers, almost all of them family members of descendants from Jezierna. The work may not always be professional, but people's willingness to be recruited makes up for it, in my opinion.

Talila Charap-Friedman
August 2020

English by Sari and Maya Avis

My father Yizchak (Israel) Edell z”l was born in Jezierna in 1909, into the Eidel, Packet, Fuchs and Engel families. My grandparents emigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1914, and their extended family was able to join them before WW2 began. The spelling of the Austrian surname Eidel was converted to Edell.

In 1932, when he applied to the Polish (at that time) government for a copy of his birth certificate, it was signed by Markus Marder, Talila's grandfather, who was the recorder of population records [Metrical Book] of the Jewish community, for the successive governments.

My interest in genealogy was aroused by my cousin Sara Edell-Schafler-Kelman zb”l, who traveled to Europe several times, to search through government records for information about families from Jezierna and other shtetls. My interest in Jezierna was stimulated by the stories told by my aunt Anne Edell zb”l, about her life as a young girl in Ozerna.

For several years, I volunteered with JewishGen's program of transcribing Birth, Marriage and Death records which were available for towns in Austria/Poland, present-day Ukraine. In 2008, I joined the website www.soc-genealogy.jewish/Jezierna, organized and managed by Andrew Rosen zb”l, of Tucson, Arizona, for the shtetl's descendants. There are several villages and towns with 'Jezior' (Polish for water/lake) as part of their name. Our shtetl was confused with a different town. Thanks to Andy's persistence, both the US Geological Survey Department and JewishGen corrected their information and map location for the town.

The chapters of this Memorial Book were written in anger and tears, in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, German and English. Members of our descendants group suggested that the Yizkor Book should be translated into English so that we and our descendants would be able to read the truth about our ancestors lives and deaths and about the destruction of the Jews of this shtetl.

Among the participants in the descendant's group was Talila Charap-Friedman, granddaughter of Markus Marder, the official who recorded the data of my father's birth. Talila's parents, Sara Marder-Charap and Yitzhak Charap arrived in Palestine in 1933, and settled in Haifa. Her father was one of the committee members who organized and printed the Jezierna Yizkor Book in Haifa in 1971.

Talila rightly insisted that the Yizkor Book should also be translated into Hebrew. She coordinated volunteers to do this and I offered to edit the English translation. In effect we became co-editors of the translations, helping each other with all problems in all languages.

We began our work in the spring of 2013 and completed the sacred mission in the summer of 2020. During that time, Talila made 2 trips to Ozerna, now in Ukraine. In 2008, she became familiar with the town's location and sites mentioned in the Book. The cemetery is now a grazing field, with bits of broken tombstones sticking out of the ground. In 2016, she tried to resolve questions that arise from the stories. The location of the towlyka, the hill near the Kozowyk family's home, which is the site of the mass grave of Jezierna's murdered Jews has not been identified. However, she was able to find and visit the burial place in Poznakowski's garden, of those who were transferred to and murdered in the Zborow Ghetto.

Our thanks to:

- Lance Ackerfeld, Yizkor Book Director, and Joel Alpert, Yizkor Book Publisher, together with the other JewishGen volunteer experts in computer interface and printing books.
- Donors who provided financial assistance to pay professional translators.
- Volunteer translators, all of whom gave generously of their time and expertise in languages.
- Zen Eidel zb”l, editor of the chapter about Life of the Jezierna Jews in America.
- Committee of Former Jeziernians in Israel, who wrote, edited and printed the original Sefer Jezierna in 1971

Suri Edell-Greenberg
English Translation Editor

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