Leibel Koriski — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Leibl Koriski, a native of Vilna, was thirty-three when he began to work in The Zionist Coordination Committee for the Redemption of Jewish Children 

As a child he attended Tarbut school and, from his youth, was a member of Hashomer Hatzair. Prior to the war, he headed the printing workers' union in Vilna. He went through the war in the heart of the Soviet Union and in the Soviet army. His wife and his daughter, who was born during the war, remained in occupied Vilna and perished in the Holocaust. When he arrived in Poland after the war, with the aim of continuing to Israel, the emissary to Hashomer Hatzair, Shaike Weiner, met the young counselor and recruited him for activity in the movement. After all he had been through, Koriski had no interest in engaging in political activity, but when he was offered the opportunity to return children to their families, he willingly joined the movement, prolonged his two-year stay in Poland and devoted himself to this mission. On his motives for assuming the role he said:

My family and wife, with our daughter who was born in the meantime, remained in Vilna but did not survive. I had no knowledge of their fate, no trace of them ... The offer to rescue the children who remained with gentiles, in monasteries and villages, and return them to the bosom of Judaism appealed to me ... I was also fascinated by the fact that I also had a daughter I did not know and did not see, who was born in the ghetto ... maybe I'll find someone too, maybe my wife before she went to her death, handed our daughter to someone for safekeeping, as I learned, happened in similar cases ... If we have to stay in Lodz for a while, let's do a job that I think is useful so  that I can help do something very essential for the nation.

From: Nahum Bogner, Zionist Coordination for the Redemption of Jewish Children, The Central School for Teaching the Shoah, and Center for Educational Technology