BS” D 8 Sivan 5781 Erna Rosenstein was born on 17 May 1913 in Lvov. She was a Jewish painter and poet, who studied at the Vienna Academy for Women (1932-34) and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków (1934-36). She was linked to the Kraków Group, and had a very close artistic friendship with Jonasz Stern. During the Second World War she stayed in the Lvov Ghetto and then hid in Warsaw and Częstochowa. After the war, she worked, among others with Tadeusz Kantor and Jonasz Stern within the Kraków Group. In 1949 she married Artur Sandauer and went to live in Warsaw. After the war she published several poetry books and was a fertile painter. Further information on Wikipedia. Photograph © Jacek Kucharczyk, shown under fair use.…

BS” D 5 Sivan 5781 Laura Kaufman was born in Kraków on 16 May 1889, the daughter of Bernard. She was a professor of genetics in the agricultural department of the Marie Curie-Skłodowskiej University in Lublin, an excellent biologist and a geneticist, a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. On September 1907, the 18-y.o. Kaufman, as one of very few women, started to study in the Jagiellonian University, to which she would be attached for all her life. She died on 9 August 1972. One of her students commented that her death was the ending of an era. She belonged to that generation of Polish scientists, which reconstructed the country after years of oppression. May she rest in peace. (photo from the web-page of the Lublin Scientifical Society.…

BS”D 29 Iyar 5781 Włodzimierz Sztejn (Stein), of blessed memory, son of Naum, was born on 11 May 1913 in Sławuta. Sławuta was a city, in which in 1870 about 65% of the inhabitants were Jewish. Between the two World Wars it was within the USSR, on the border with Poland. During the Second World War the Germans murdered almost all the Jewish inhabitants of Sławuta, and one of the few survivors was Włodzimierz Sztejn. After the German aggression on the USSR on 22 June 1941 he was taken prisoner as a soldier of the Red Army. In order to hide his Jewish origins he destroyed his documents but had to explain his circumcision. He came up with the idea that he could be a Circassian Muslim soldier, Emir Husein.…