Częstochowa - My Home Town (1950)
- by Aba Kaufman
This Yizkor Book of memoirs, written by Aba Kaufman, was published in New York, in 1950. It was published by Joseph Kaufman.
A feature of this book is an index of several hundred names of those born in Częstochowa, who were victims of the Nazis.
Not a great deal is known about the author. In the Yizkor Book, “Czenstochov” (1958), Dr. W. Gliksman writes the following about him:
“Aba was the classical type of ‘landsmann’ who maintained, in addition to the physical one, a spiritual connection also with the ‘Old Home’. For him, in his lonely life, being a ‘landsmann’, became an ideal which he quite literally practised at every opportunity day‐to‐day.
He had his unique ways and manners of bringing the duty of a ‘landsmann’ from theory into practice. He never lost the foundation of maintaining his ties with his birthplace.”
Gliksman goes on to say:
“His plan, to publish a collection of names of Częstochowa landsleit victims of Nazism, serves as an example. Aba, peace be upon him, gave Jewish people back the names that the Germans had desired to erase from this earth.”
In translating this Yizkor Book, every effort has been made to translate, as accurately as possible, the Yiddish text and to transliterate (and double-check) the names of people and places as they would have been spelt in a historically, accurate manner (surnames may have been changed post-War). This includes the use of Polish diacritics where appropriate.
(Such care and research may not have been carried out in translations of this Yizkor Book appearing elsewhere.)
PLEASE NOTE: A great number of people are mentioned in this book. If any of these landsleit have relatives, who were in the Landsmannschaften, please email us if the spelling of their name is incorrect.
This Yizkor book, in its entirety, has been professionally translated into English
for the FIRST time.
The professional English translation of this Yizkor book has been made possible by the financial support of the
Wolf Rajcher z”l and Dora Rajcher z”l were both Holocaust survivors from Częstochowa.
They were prisoners in both the “Big Ghetto” and the “Small Ghetto” and, until liberation, were slave labourers in HASAG-Pelcery. Following the War, they emigrated to Melbourne Australia.
Upon the passing of both his parents, their son, Andrew Rajcher, established this charitable fund in their memory.
Chapters/articles are listed in the order in which they appear in the Yizkor Book.
(The numbers in brackets, after each article, correspond to the appropriate page numbers in the Yizkor Book.)
Introduction (1-5)
The Partisans’ Song (6-6)
Cultural Work in Częstochowa (7-7)
The Eighth Anniversary of the Destruction of Częstochowa (8-9)
A Letter from Poland (10-10)
Names of Częstochowa Holocaust Victims (11-17)
Names of Częstochowa Holocaust Survivors (18-23)
ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
Dave Horowitz-Larochette
IMPORTANT NOTICE
While the English translation is available for download, it may not, either in part or as a whole, be distributed or published without the prior written permission of Andrew Rajcher, the copyright-holder of this English-language version of the Yiddish Section of this Yizkor Book.