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The author of this book of memoirs, my fellow citizen Yedidya Efron, z”l, I never knew personally: when he, a sixteen-year-old boy, left our shtetl of Amdur for Argentina with his whole family, I was in my first or second year of life. And when, in October of 1952, I came to the country, I did not find my fellow citizen, much to my sorrow, among the living. But I did know Yedidya Efron from the chapters of his memoirs that he had published in the periodical “Grodner Apklangen” [“Echoes of Grodno”], published in Buenos Aires by the Landsman Organization of Grodno and Surroundings. I read the memoirs with great interest, and I was amazed at the author's phenomenal strength of memory. Although not written according to any literary “Shulchan Aruch” [that is, rule book], without literary pretentions, but with great observational ability and particularly with a moving attitude toward the Jews he describes his cast of characters.

Yedidya Efron's descriptions truly reminded me of many, many shtetl types whom I remembered, some of whom

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Have even been recalled in fine literary form (some under their own names and some with made-up names) in many of my stories and recollections from my childhood and youthful years. Because the same Jews, the same types lived and in that small shtetl of several hundred Jewish families, everyone knew them.

Yedidya Efron recalls all the Jews from his old home with nostalgia–not only those with book learning and the upper class citizens but also the simple, common Jews who could barely recite a chapter of Psalms. We sense a special attitude of piety in him for the Amdur rabbis, and especially for the famous rabbi Rabbi Avraham Ezra, z”l (who was the great-grandfather of my wife Fanny) whom he praises so much.

I think: Perhaps this is because the memoirs were written soon after the Third Destruction, when Amdur was wiped off the map by the German executioners and no memory remains of the Jews there?…Their last road was through the Kelbasin Transit Camp, near Grodno, to Maidanek and Treblinka.

It is necessary to understand this nostalgia that some of us share, the pain that dominates us, the will to memorialize the past, to recall–each according to his abilities–the generations of Jews from our conflagrated old home------

Unfortunately Amdur did not merit to have a Yizkor Book like many, many other cities and towns. The surviving remnant of Amdur, spread out across the four corners of the world–including Argentina–did not have the proper interest and could not agree on how to raise the necessary funds…

For this reason, the memoirs of Yedidya Efron are particularly

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Valuable. In truth, his descriptions do not include all aspects of the shtetl–the historical, the communal, the economic. We do not see in him the political movements of recent times, beginning in 1905 when the young Jews of Amdur, like those in all the other cities and towns of czarist Russia, were inflamed with revolutionary fervor. We do not get the battles among parties and directions: the “Bund,” the Socialist Revolutionaries, the anarchist Zionist-Socialists, leftist and rightist Zionists of all shades. This is simply because Yedidya Efron was already in Argentina and he did not experience those years in his home town.

Over all, Efron did not try to write a monograph about Amdur: He only memorialized a gallery of shtetl types. His descriptions serve as a reflection of Jewish life only in his time, in his years in Amdur. He was not fated to experience all the eventual developments and metamorphoses in his old home, but he was fated to avoid the great disaster when his old home was reduced to nothingness by Hitler's cannibals------

With his memoirs, Yedidya Efron constructed a grave monument for our shtetl of Amdur, while his book is simultaneously a monument to him–to the author.

And it should be remembered that it is fitting that these memoirs find salvation between covers (after the manuscript lay abandoned for many years)–and that is through the author's son, the famous sociologist Dr. David Efron, who has taken up his father's unpublished work with great insight and honor for his father.

Yes, our Amdur…

I would like to conclude this introduction with an elegy that I wrote and that is called –

My Shtetl Amdur My shtetl Amdur! I'll not see you again, Like my good, beloved years of youth. Left after the black Shoah without a Jew, Left without a Jewish generation. Some were thrown into the wide, broad world Over countries, cities, across the sea. And some of your sons and daughters have gone To Treblinka's hellish flames. Your whole assemblage of Jews is gone, Gone on its last road to quiet martyrdom– Now again the lush meadows there are green, and Now again the corn sings in the field. The old cemetery alone remains, Lonely, mournful, alone. In those sad days of Elul No one visits their ancestors' graves. No Jewish merchants, no Jewish shops, In the streets all is strange. No familiar Jewish face. No Shabbos, no holiday. Windows grey and plain, No mother lighting Shabbos candles.

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From the shul no melodies are heard, No tunes ring out on Days of Awe. From the white-spired church one hears Their harsh, loud singing. In Jewish homes suffused with prayer, With years of Yiddishkeit, with joy and woe, Now icons hang in corners And Aryans by law live there. My shtetl Amdur! I'll not see you again, Like my good, beloved years of youth. Left after the black Shoah without a Jew, Left without a Jewish generation. Lodz–August, 1946.

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Our cities and towns stand deserted and empty. Six million Jews who were educated in the morality of the Ten Commandments, of the Torah and the Prophets, were killed as martyrs. Silenced are the mystical melodies of the prayers, the voice of the Torah. Gone are the schoolboys and the yeshivas that taught generations the lesson Tzedek, tzedek tirdof–Justice, justice shalt thou pursue. The civilized world looked on with indifference at the slaughter of the Jewish people. And we, spread out across all the continents, are described in the line, “A prisoner cannot free himself from prison” [Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 5a].

“Good things come to those who deserve them”–the shtetl of Amdur, like hundreds of other cities and shtetls in Poland was made “Jew-free” by the German beasts. Tens of thousands of families were wiped out. The holy chains that survived for generations were broken. Who will remember Amdur, that important link in the golden chain of Yiddishkeit, with all of its nuances?

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Among the first families that came to the colonies founded by Baron Hirsch was the family of Mordechai Efron from the shtetl of Amdur in Grodno Gubernia,. R' Mordechai Efron–a learned Jews, full of fine Jewish qualities–and his modest wife Pesha–raised a generation that will occupy an important chapter in the history of the Jewish settlement in Argentina. And even more, their son Yedidya, the author of the memoirs.

Yedidya Efron, a “great scholar” and “supporter of Torah scholars,” had already found in his early years the path that had been designated for him by Providence: Yedidya, the Master of the Torah, became a “teacher of Torah,” a teacher of schoolboys.

In order to report about the significance of R' Yedidya's entrance into the mission of education in those years, it is sufficient to recall that the pioneers found themselves “in the situation of the generation in the wilderness.” Not only did those pioneers have to deal with empty, wild steppes, where there was no sign of civilization, but also education in their first Jewish schools was very far from what the Lithuanian and Russian Jews understood by the word education and learning. They lacked educators like Yedidya Efron, a”h.

But with the assumption of leadership of Jewish school matters by R' Yedidya Efron, the whole matter took on a different cast. Quietly and modestly, without acclaim for his accomplishments, he exercised his positive influence on the whole course of education in the schools, which until then had been an arid area. Education received his proper corrections, and it strove to awaken in students feelings of pride for the Jewish past, a national consciousness, and the right direction for the future.

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Thanks to his innate abilities, Yedidya, a”h, attained the position of director of Jewish education in the whole country and in this extraordinary post he embodied the saying, “Love work, hate public office” [Pirke Avot, 1:10]. He was involved with all around him, close to all who needed support, and so he was dear to everyone.

Yedidya Efron was a man of perfection, and he had a rare memory, as can be seen in his memoirs about his birth city of Amdur. He memorializes in his memoirs the shtetl with its scholars, everyday people the rabbis and the sextons, the rich and the poor, the observant and the heretics, the happy pauper and the Shabbos-goy. He shows them all with the faith and trust that were the source and foundation for our preserving them, for our morale. We see clearly how the spiritual qualities of all these folk-types overshadowed their material existence.

That little Amdur was one of the little places that existed in Lithuania, Russia, and Poland that incubated messianism that formed the Khov'vei Tzion [Lovers of Zion], where the seeds were sown for the present Jewish state.

Yedidya Efron has memorialized the shtetl of Amdur and its annihilated community in his memoirs, with its gallery of touching, folksy Jews.

Good things come to those who deserve them!

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