Bena Shklyanoy

Memorial Book of Shebreshin Bena Shklyanoy

This Yizkor book of the Shebreshiner community, one of the more than one thousand Jewish communities in Poland destroyed, is published 42 years after the massacres in the shtetl, and 39 years after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the end of the Second World War. Is it not too late? Is it not in the sense of too little, too late? Has not everything already been written about the destruction of Jewish life in Poland? Has the material not already been exhausted? Of course this sad chapter in the history of our people has not been forgotten, but everything which has been written up to now has not emphasized enough the extent of the loss: the tragic end of the life-giving, thousand year old Jewish existence in Poland. Many yizkor books of the devastated communities have been published, but it is not sufficient. Every one of the survivors wants to cherish the memories of the past, everyone wants to see his own city and story in the book, wants to immortalize that which is most intimate to him. Every city and shtetl was a little world of its own, a Jewish world with social institutions, political parties, organizations, schools, and synagogues, and a shared tradition. It is all unforgettable and demands expression. Such was also Shebreshin, a shtetl in the Zamosc area, Lublin province, which was populated by 8,000 people before the war, 3,000 of whom were Jews.