Jewish Reconstruction Committee in Bialystok

... (This moving poem was written by Ruwen Rybalowski in memory of his daughter Frida, killed in the Bialystok ghetto uprising on August 16, 1943. He wrote these lines while standing over the grave of seventy heroes buried in the Zabia cemetery in Bialystok, his daughter presumably among them. Ruwen Rybalowski, who spent the war years in Russia, returned to his home- town at the end of the war. He submitted this elegy to the Jewish Reconstruction Committee in Bialystok in December 1946. Mr. Rybalowski, the late brother of Izaak Rybal, General Secretary of the Bialystoker Cen- ter in New York, spent the rest of his life in Uruguay, where he died in 1955. His younger daughter, Liza, whom he mentions at the end of the poem, also passed away there in 1972. This poem was copied from the original by Dr. Szymon Datner.) ...

... The Jewish Reconstruction Committee in Bialystok was created after the city was liberated from Nazi occu- pation. In fact, our committee was the first of any Jew- ish city in Poland to organize after the war. At first there were only fifty Jews in Bialystok. Then others who had hid out in the forest and the bunkers arrived, followed by Jewish repatriates from the Soviet Union. ...

... (Editor’s note: Dr. Szymon Datner, the esteemed edu- cator, researcher and historian, the author of a number of important volumes about the Holocaust, devoted the postwar years to recreating in detail much of the grue- some saga of the destruction of East European Jewry. Dr. Datner, who was the first Bialystoker Jew to return to the city, in ruins after the war, and who became the Chairman of the first Jewish Reconstruction Committee in Bialystok, has earned a prominent place commemo- rating the glory that once was Bialystok. ...