SIME YASHUNSKI (SIMA JASHUNSKI-FAITELSON)

SIME YASHUNSKI (SIMA JASHUNSKI-FAITELSON) (b. February 6, 1925)

            She was born in Kovarsk, Lithuania; she lived 1944-1970 in Kovno.  She graduated from a Jewish public school, later becoming a tailor.  In 1941 she was confined in the Kovno ghetto, and there she composed poetry of which some were sung in the ghettos and camps.  In October 1943 she was among the shipment of Jews deported from Kovno to Estonia; she succeeded in escaping and then decided to join the partisans, but in fighting against the Nazis, she was caught and brought back to the ghetto, and then transported to the Ninth Fort.  Twenty of her poems were later collected and published, and seven of them were published in Folksshtime (Voice of the people) in Warsaw (April 19, 1961).  She made aliya to Israel in 1972.  A number of her ghetto poems were included in M. Yelin and D. Gelpern, Partizaner fun kovner geto (Partisans of the Kovno ghetto) (Moscow, 1948).  Her work was also represented in: Y. Kaplan, in Fun letstn khurbn (From the recent destruction) (Munich) 10 (1948); Abraham Zvie Bar-On and Dov Levin, Toldoteha shel maḥteret (The story of the underground) (Jerusalem, 1962).  In book form: Laydn, kamf, frayhayt (Suffering, struggle, freedom), poetry (Tel Aviv, 1985), 53 pp.; some of the poems herein have musical notation attached.  She was last living in Tel Aviv.

Source: Sh. Kolanski, in Folksshtime (Warsaw) (April 19. 1961)

Khayim Leyb Fuks

[Additional information from: Berl Kagan, comp., Leksikon fun yidish-shraybers (Biographical dictionary of Yiddish writers) (New York, 1986), col. 298.]