Arie Leib Sheftel — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

Our father –Aryeh Lev Sheftel   1905-1980/ Written by his daughter Esther Asher-Sheftel

We were born here in Israel after that war. In retrospect, we see ourselves as branches of a tree whose roots are deep in Vilna: our mother, Paula née Rabinovici, who was born in Vilna, was always very proud of Polish culture; our father was a proud Jew in the spirit of "Jerusalem of Lithuania". Growing up, when we were asked where the family had come from, we said "Vilna". In our naivety, we thought that it was a world of its own.

But is it really so surprising? All our father's friends were from Vilna or the surrounding area.  They came from all walks of life: restaurant owners, bank clerks, skilled artisans, a painter, artists, educators and intellectuals. Their common bond   was pride and love for Vilna.

The people from Vilna have a special cadence in their speech; they were easily identifiable as soon as they started talking. Their Yiddish sounded different; I could understand their jokes, puns and songs and, unlike our friends' parents, they spoke fluent Hebrew, Vilna, my parents' "land", was something special of which we were also proud…

We spoke Hebrew with my father and. when he was away on business, we would write to him in Hebrew. Our strongest link to him is the letters he wrote us; they were beautifully written, the sentences were clear and included puns and quotes from Jewish sources. Sometimes he would decorate the letters with "prizes", stickers of animals or dolls. He was concerned about all aspects of our life and would ask us what was happening at school and at home, whether we were eating properly and what we did during the summer vacations. He would encourage us to read and not waste our time in idle play.

As a child, I was amazed at my father's ability to quote from the poetry of Bialik, Tchernikovski and Y.L. Gordon; his knowledge of the Bible, the prophets' speeches and, of course, his favorite "Ecclesiastes"(Kohelet), was prodigious.

My father was a social activist in Vilna and also here in Israel. Between the two world wars he was a member of the board of "Hehalutz" on behalf of "the Labor Zionists" and a representative on the Vilna council. After the war he was busy with the rehabilitation of the remnants of Polish Jewry, documenting and collecting documentation about the Holocaust for the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

He reached Israel in 1947 and went straight to Rishon Lezion where his sister was living. He threw himself into life here: he was elected to the first Knesset on behalf of the Labor Party; he was a member of the Public Relations department of the Prime Minister's office and mayor of Rishon Lezion. In the drawer of his desk I found rough drafts of speeches he had made on various occasions, and that was how I learnt about his rhetorical skills and the depth of his cultural immersion.

My father was a man of principle, renowned for his integrity and honesty; he always kept his word and "stuck to his guns". He was adamantly against the reparations from Germany, contrary to his party's line, and he may well have paid a personal price for that.

My father had a very good education: he graduated with the first class at Tarbut, a Hebrew high school where he continued as a teacher for many years. In the ghetto, among other things, he was also headmaster of the high school. In an interview in "Ha'aretz" in 1966, he said: "Hundreds of my students passed me in the furnaces; I can never forget them." He was proud of the school but, even prouder, of his students. A former student, Michael Shemyavitz, told us about their emotional meeting after the war. They met in the market place in Lodz and, as they were talking, my father asked Michael what he was doing. He then told Michael, in no uncertain terms, that what he was doing was demeaning for a graduate of Tarbut. From that day on, he decreed, Michael would be a counselor for a group of youngsters who were preparing to make Aliyah. That was a turning point in Michael's life; he too made Aliyah and they kept in touch over the years.

The most honored guests in our home and at various family functions were my father's students and their families. If a person is the template of his motherland, then "Jerusalem of Lithuania" was my father's template. He worked hard to bring us up on the same values he had been brought up on there.

My father was demanding: we had to be the best in everything….not just in the humanities, but also in general knowledge, science and handcrafts. He wanted us to be "women of the world". He used to say to us: "You don't know what the future holds, where life will toss you. You must be prepared for anything in life - golden hands but also a head on your shoulders. That way you will be able to survive the hardest times, who knows? Be strong and don't let anyone see your weaknesses".

We only learnt about my father from the stories he told us about other people from Vilna, however, we knew very little about his personal history. He never mentioned his parents, his former life or where they lived. For years he kept secret the fact that he had had a family before the war. My father's first wife was Faina Pargament and they had a son, Yitzhak. A bronze tombstone stood on his desk and, beside it, a small burning wick in memory of his sister, Faiga, his wife and young son and all those from Vilna who perished in the Ponary forest, may they rest in peace. While we were growing up, we often sat in front of this tombstone in my father's study but never asked about it.

As chidren, what did we know about his ghetto? Our first memory was that this ghetto was a special place where people lived a full life both above and under- ground.  We always knew that the Vilna ghetto was unlike other ghettoes. As a child, secretly, I was often sorry that I had not been there…

in the ghetto there were shows, a choir, a large library, musicians and poets and even a dancer. The Jewish holidays were celebrated in the classrooms. We knew the words of the lullaby "Softly, Softly" that was composed in the ghetto. At my wedding in Tel Aviv, my father and his friends from Vilna mounted the stage and sang the partisans' song "We are here!"

Over the years we learnt about the underground activities, the preparation for the revolt, the groups that were active in the ghetto, the controversy about Gens, the death of Wittenberg and the escape through the sewers.

This year, my sister Hannah and I, went to the March of the Living. We wanted to draw closer and touch the memories of the past. We toured Vilna with mixed feelings. Our father's spirit was with us on this trip: every now and again, a voice would remind us that we were standing on the accursed ground of Lithuania.

One of the emotional highlights of the trip was a poster on the walls of the ghetto: a lecture by Lev Sheftel on Sunday, the 19^th of July, 1942 at 4 p.m., on "The Ghetto in the Middle Ages". It was very moving to see my father's name on the walls of the ghetto in Vilna. What amazing strength there was in that ghetto! Coming home after a hard day's work, the people in the ghetto would buy a ticket and listen to a lecture. Where did they all have the strength and the courage to maintain the human spirit!?

There, and also in Israel, the guiding principle of my father's legacy was the preservation of man's humanity. He would say: "Don't let your spirits drop, even when a sword is at a man's throat, he should never despair."

In the stories my father told us about the escape from the German camp as well as the way he acted during the war; we picked up what he wanted to teach us more than we learnt of his personal story.

What happened when the ghetto was liquidated? Once again, the public aspect of the story clouds his personal story. We can only pick up scraps of memory from his stories about other people: everyday heroes who managed to live honorably and did not fall into despair.

How did he survive? What happened in the last days in the ghetto? What happened to him? When we got older, we learnt that my father had been sent to camps in Estonia and then to a concentration camp in Germany. He managed to escape but, a short time later he was caught and sentenced to death, when the German army was already in retreat from the Allied Forces. In the turmoil, he managed to escape again and reached Elba where he waited for the American army. And on the day the ghetto was liquidated? We heard about Strashun and we knew about the fortifications in the ghetto.

This was how my father portrayed Vilna on the day it was destroyed: books and the Jewish spirit served as a defense against evil and horror. In the words of Aba Kovner: "When we ran out of sandbags, we used encyclopedias, Bibles, holy books,  dictionaries, and then leather-bound classics."

 Over the years we discovered that there was also a lower Vilna: prostitutes, thieves, a black market and suspicious deals…my father must surely have known about them, but he chose to leave us "Jerusalem of Lithuania" as his legacy.

The Jewish spirit of Vilna was not extinguished on the 23^rd of September, 1943. My father kept the home fires that Vilna had sparked burning. He continued his work for the remnant of European Jewry in Israel and the world. He created a family, friends and a city. His conscience guided him in all his actions. He was a mensch!