ESTER-ROYZE HAYTNER

ESTER-ROYZE HAYTNER (1906-1942)

            She was born in Lodz, Poland, into a poor, Hassidic family.  She studied in a Polish public school.  In her youth she was involved with the Orthodox women’s organization “Bnos Agudas Yisroel” (Daughters of Agudat Yisrael); she was also active as an instructor and speaker.  Over the years 1922-1925, she studied in Sore Sheriner’s teachers’ seminar in Cracow, later working as a teacher herself in a Beys-Yankev school in Będzin, where she lived until WWII.  She published poems, sketches, and stories in such serials as Beys yankev zhurnal (Beys Yankev journal) and Kinder-gorten (Kindergarten) in Lodz.  Her children’s songs, which were sung in the Beys-Yankev schools in Poland, are of particular value.  During the Nazi occupation, she escaped to Cracow and was later living in Książ Wielki.  She was shot by the Nazis at a deportation site during the liquidation of the local ghetto in the summer of 1942.

Source: Antologye fun religyeze lider un detseylungen (Anthology of religious poetry and stories) (New York, 1955), pp. 168-74.