FROYM OSHRI (EPHRAIM OSHRY)

FROYM OSHRI (EPHRAIM OSHRY) (May 2, 1915-September 28, 2003)

            He was born in Vilna  [other sources give the smaller city of Kupiškis, nearby in Lithuania] to devout parents.  While still a child, he was brought to Kovno, and there he studied at a religious elementary school, yeshivas, and with private tutors.  He was later an external student.  At age eighteen he received rabbinical ordination and became a rabbi in Kovno.  He was confined in the Kovno ghetto, and during the liquidation hid out in a secret dugout, emerging from there on December 3, 1944 when the Russians took the city of Kovno.  He returned to Poland with the repatriation of Polish citizens, and from there moved on to Italy.  He was the founder and head of a yeshiva for survivor children in Rome.  From 1948 he was living in the United States as a rabbi in New York.  He began publishing articles in 1933 on education and religious questions in: Yidishe shtime (Jewish voice) and Yidishe lebn (Jewish life) in Kovno; and he published articles on his experiences in: Morgn-zhurnal (Morning journal), Forverts (Forward), and Der id (The Jew) in New York; Keneder odler (Canadian eagle) in Montreal; and Hatsofe (The spectator) in Tel Aviv.  Among his books: Divre efrayim (Commentaries of Efrayim) (New York, 1949)—aside from treatises on religious life, there can be found here an extensive number of responsa from the Kovno ghetto which illuminate the religio-ethical situation of the Jewish population in the ghetto, and it also contains a listing of 208 Jews who were murdered in Lithuania; Khurbn lite (The Holocaust in Lithuania) (New York-Montreal: Bukh-komitet, 1951, 468 pp., with an preface by Khayim Liberman.  He also prepared for publication Di yidishe lite (Jewish Lithuania), a monograph concerned with the life and death of 107 Jewish communities in Lithuania.

Sources: Shmuel Niger, in Tog-morgn zhurnal (New York) (April 5, 1951); Y. Y. Sigal, in Keneder odler (Montreal) (September 12, 1952); Dr. Y. N. Shteynberg, in Zamlbukh lite (Anthology Lithuania), vol. 1 (New York, 1951), p. 1312; Dr. Shmuel Grinhoyz, in Zamlbukh lite (Anthology Lithuania), vol. 1 (New York, 1951), p. 1753.