ELYAHU-ELYOSHA GOZHANSKI (August 1, 1914-December 21,
1948)
He was born in St. Petersburg, and
at age three his parents brought him to Grodno.
He studied in religious primary school, later graduating from a secular
high school. In 1932 he moved to
Palestine and joined Kibbutz Glilim, near Haifa. The kibbutz sent him to the agrarian school
Mikveh Yisrael (Hope of Israel), from which he graduated in 1936. Afterwards, he went on a trip to see his
parents in Grodno. There he became
involved in illegal political work, was arrested, and sentenced to eight years
in prison. As a Palestinian citizen, he
was successful in 1938 in returning to Israel.
Back in Israel he became a surveyor and construction worker. In 1941 the British police arrested him as a
leading Communist, and after a year in prison he was freed. He published pamphlets, as well as stories
and many articles—in Yiddish and in Hebrew—in the press publications of his
party. Among his writings: Grodno
(Tel Aviv, 1945), 52 pp.—“in place of a gravestone” for his father, Yitzkhok
Gozhanski, a well-known lawyer who for many years was head of the community
council and a member of the city council in Grodno, and who was murdered by the
Nazis. From 1947 he made three trips to
Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries, with the aim of creating
assistance for the war of independence in the Yishuv in Israel. On his return home from Prague on the last of
these, he was killed when the airplane in which he was flying crashed in the Peloponnesian
Mountains. Shortly after his death, his
book appeared: Der mentsh hot gezigt (The man was victorious), “a
chronicle of a city,” with forewords by Sh. Mikunis and D. Sfard (Warsaw-Tel
Aviv, 1949), 220 pp.
Sources:
Obituary in Dos naye lebn (The new life) (Warsaw) (December 31, 1948); “A
briv fun elyahu gozhanski tsu a. pomerants” (A letter from Elyohu Gozhanski to
A. Pomerants), Grodner opklangen 2 (Buenos Aires, 1948); Y. Papyernikov,
“Der letster fli” (The final flight), a poem, and A. G., “Grodne” (Grodno), Grodner
opklangen 12 (1948); D. Sfard, in Dos naye lebn (January 10, 1949);
A. Pomerants, in Morgn frayhayt (New York) (January 17, 1949).
Yitskhok Kharlash
and Aleksander Pomerants
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