BEYLE DODYUK-LIKHTSHTEYN

BEYLE DODYUK-LIKHTSHTEYN (November 17, 1909-October 1941)

            She was born in Kovle (Kovel), Volhynia.  Her parents, Moyshe and Dvore, were both teachers.  She received a secular Jewish education.  In 1928 she graduated from the Polish Jewish high school in Kovel.  In 1929 she moved to study at Vilna University and graduated with distinction from the humanities faculty.  Her Master’s thesis was (in German): Das Siedlungselemente der deutschen Kolonien (The existing settlement in the German colonies).  In 1930 while a circle of Jewish socialists was coming into being around the periodical Fraye shriftn (Free writings), edited by Y. N. Shteynberg, she was an active leader and contributor.  She was a teacher in the only Jewish school in Poland for mentally challenged children and later a teacher in the Tsisho (Central Jewish School Organization) school in Lintup (Lintupe).  Together with her husband, the pedagogue and writer Reuven Likhtshteyn, she translated from German Professor Alfred Adler’s Der Sinn des Lebens (The meaning of life) as Der zin fun lebn (Vilna, 1938), 238 pp.  In 1939 she and her husband became teachers at the twelfth Soviet middle school.  After her husband was murdered in Ponar, she was unable to manage with her two small children.  Out of fear that her children’s wailing would betray them, she was unable to go into hiding and remained in the “small ghetto” of Vilna.  Unable to fight further for her life and for the lives of her children, during a mass murder she voluntarily submitted and was murdered with her children.

Sources: A. Ayzen, in Afn shvel (New York) (September 1947); A. Shimayte, in Afn shvel (November-December 1947); Shimayte, in Di goldene keyt (Tel Aviv) 8 (1951); L. Bayon, in Lerer yizker-bukh (Teachers’ memorial book) (New York, 1954), pp. 122-23, 216-19; Pinlkes kovel (Records of Kovel) (Buenos Aires, 1951); Sh. Katsherginski, Khurbn vilne (The Holocaust in Vilna) (New York: Tsiko, 1947), p. 199.

Zaynvl Diamant and Leyzer Ran