1 Minski Street

Bialystok from the liberated concentration camps. Our town was a transit point for these survivors. The former home for incurables at 1 Minski Street served as a reception center. We met with them and exchanged information, warmth and friendship. At the same time, we conducted a regional convention in which sixty elected delegates chose an area-wide Reconstruction Committee, of which I had the honor to serve as Vice- President. Our work received much favorable notice in all parts of liberated Poland. We organized a kosher kitchen, which served three to four hundred lunches a day, and a kosher butcher shop. We founded a small yeshiva for those former students who had joined the Partisans in the forests. Our committee was considered a mini kehilla. Our activities on behalf of Jews did not please our Polish neighbors, who attempted to disband us by complaining to the authorities in Warsaw. Passover was fast approaching. How would we provide matzah for the community? After all, we had no connections outside Bialystok. Oddly, when Jews we ...