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Mystery from the songbook of the forgotten patrol officer and poet - Walla! news

2022-05-03T07:55:16.965Z


In the National Library, an attempt is made to understand what the songs of a 13-year-old boy, an Israeli from Holon who was an officer in the patrol, accumulated for a legacy of songs in Yiddish written by an elderly and destitute poet who came to Israel alone after World War II. Now, the family and friends of Shalom Lieberman, who was killed while on duty, are putting together the pieces of the puzzle


A mystery from the songbook of the forgotten patrol officer and poet

In the National Library, an attempt is made to understand what the songs of a 13-year-old boy, an Israeli from Holon who was an officer in the patrol, accumulated for a legacy of songs in Yiddish written by an elderly and destitute poet who came to Israel alone after World War II.

Now, the family and friends of Shalom Lieberman, who was killed while on duty, are putting together the pieces of the puzzle

Eli Ashkenazi

03/05/2022

Tuesday, 03 May 2022, 10:43 Updated: 10:47

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Died two weeks before his 20th birthday.

Lieberman (Photo: Official Website, Yechiel Lieberman)

Shalom (Shuli) Lieberman has already begun planning his medical studies at the Technion immediately after being released from permanent service in the Carob Regiment.

He and his unitmate, Eli Shemesh, used to study together and challenge each other on various issues.

One day they encountered a complicated problem in mathematics and found no solution to it.

Meanwhile, Lieberman, a young lieutenant in the patrol and platoon commander, went on patrol. During the patrol, he finally found a solution to the mathematical problem and was already waiting to share it with his friend Shemesh. Elisha (26) The three were



killed.The fatal accident occurred on December 9, 1971, two weeks before Lieberman's twentieth birthday.


His love for the exact sciences began in high school, after discovering the logic that accompanies them.

A memorial booklet issued by his family and friends a year after he was killed states that "he is fascinated by the perfection of inner reason and the beauty of the laws of nature. He is able to sink for hours and then argue for a solution.



The dedication to the exact sciences and excellence in them brought to an end the childhood period in which he wrote songs.

From the age of eight he wrote songs and at school was considered a "little genius" in literature.

"Once the teacher raises him before the whole class and he reads one of his poems," the booklet read in his memory.

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Served as a platoon commander in the Carob Regiment.

Lieberman and his unit mates (Photo: Official website, Yechiel Lieberman)

"He started writing songs at the age of eight," said Yechiel Lieberman, Shalom's brother, who is four years older than him.

"His songs are full of joy, cheerfulness and wisdom and above all - sensitivity and love," reads a booklet in his memory.



Nearly 51 years have passed since Lieberman's death and only recently have two notebooks been discovered, including the poems he wrote.

The way they were found was surprising.

"We received the archive of the Yiddish poet Meir Halpern," said Dr. Yochai Ben Gedalia of the National Library. "This is a large archive of a man who wrote a lot, on every piece of paper.

Everything is written in Yiddish, in untidy handwriting, and suddenly in all the material we found two notebooks in which songs are written in Hebrew, in a child's handwriting and in a very neat way.

The contrast was really noticeable and looked weird.

On the notebooks was written the name of the child, his age and the school where he studied.

"We saw that it was Shalom Lieberman from the Gordon School in Holon who wrote the songs in 1964 when he was 13," said Ben Gedalia.



A search of the National Library's network showed that eight years later, an IDF officer named Shalom Lieberman from Holon was killed during his military service. Today, it turned out that the



songbooks

belonged to the boy Shalom Lieberman, who a few years later became a platoon commander in the Carob Regiment and was killed in the Jordan Valley while on duty.

An Israeli from Holon, who became an officer in the patrol, to a large estate full of Yiddish songs written by an elderly and destitute poet who came to Israel alone after World War II.

From Lieberman's Songbook (Photo: Official Website, Yechiel Lieberman and the National Library)

Lieberman and his family in Holon (Photo: Official website, Yechiel Lieberman)

When the revelation of the notebooks was brought to Yechiel Lieberman's attention, he shed light on the interesting connection between his brother's childhood songs and Halpern's Yiddish songs.

Shalom and Yechiel were the sons of Avraham and Rivka Lieberman.

The parents, born in Poland.

Rebecca survived the horrors of the Auschwitz extermination camp and lost many of her family members in the war.

Avraham managed to escape east from the clutches of the Nazis, was imprisoned in a Russian labor camp and sent to ten years in prison after being caught while trying to escape.

At the end of the war he was released from prison.

In 1947 they married and then immigrated to Eretz Israel.

Shortly afterwards Yechiel was born and four years later Shalom (Shuli) was born.



As a child, Shalom roamed the sand hills that surrounded Holon a lot, entered abandoned defense positions and found ancient coins and pottery.

During parachute training held in the area he looked with admiration at the soldiers falling into the sands.

It is written about him that he was devoted to his parents and assisted in the various household chores.

When necessary even tar and whitewashed the roof of the building where they lived.

In addition, he was active in the Ha - Shomer ha - Tsa'ir youth movement.

In the youth movement and at home, the values ​​of justice, equality, brotherhood and love stood out.

These values ​​are also present in his songs.

Thus, for example, a song appears in his songbook that he wrote at the age of 13 and even read "Como Black Brothers."

Among other things, he wrote in the song:



"Who dared to discriminate against you, to

humiliate you,


to deprive you of your rights?

Although


they managed to turn you into slaves,


but here you are freed brothers!





A month earlier, on May 1, 1964, he had written a poem called "The Workers' Blood" in which he wrote about "their pure blood flowing to the lake, equality, justice and peace."

From Lieberman's Songbook (Photo: Official Website, Yechiel Lieberman and the National Library)

In the youth movement and at home, the values ​​of justice, equality, brotherhood and love stood out.

Lieberman (Photo: Official Website, Yechiel Lieberman)

At the end of that year, in December, he also wrote a song about an IDF soldier, Avraham Juri, who served in the Nahal on Kibbutz Yad Hana, which was then on the border with Jordan.

Jury was killed in a battle with Jordanian soldiers while trying to rescue his wounded friend.

He was killed the day before Lieberman turned 13.



"Beams of rays of joy, ziv and


penetrating gaiety are swallowed up in the thickness of the clouds of gloom


and in the darkness, among the darkness,


will move him a glimmer of light, a won and pure ray,"



he wrote in the first verse of his poem.



Yechiel, the brother, said that the poet Meir Halpern was a friend of their father and would come many times to visit their family.

Like the Lieberman family, Halpern also lived in Holon.

On those visits he would also devote time to the two children - with Yechiel he would talk about music, a field in which he was interested and understood well and with Shalom he would go over his poems and the two, the older poet and the younger child, would talk about poetry.

Shalom also asked the older poet to teach him to write Yiddish, a language their parents also spoke at home.

When they did not want Yehiel and Shalom to understand, they switched to Romanian.



Halpern was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1905. In 1937 he published his first book of poetry and his other poems appeared in literary newspapers and publications of poetry groups.

According to Ben-Gedalia, "before the Holocaust, he was considered a significant poet."

With the German invasion of Poland he fled to Russia.

During the war he enlisted in the Russian army and served under Politburo in one of the army units.

At the end of the war he arrived with the Red Army in Munich.

After the war he remained in Germany and lived in a DP camp.

In 1949 he published a second book of poems in Munich.

He immigrated to Israel later that year.



He lives alone in a small, cramped apartment in Holon.

His circle of acquaintances was very limited, though one can learn from his estate that he had some connection with writers and poets in Yiddish, in whom Avraham Sutzkover and others are known.

He stopped publishing his poems and yet continued to write non-stop in piles of paper that had accumulated in his apartment.



Alongside the connection with the Lieberman family to Halpern were also two young Israeli friends, Zvi Tauber and Yoav Ran.

These were two students who found in him a fascinating interlocutor on topics of music and literature.

Tauber later became a professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and a producer of flutes.

From Lieberman's Songbook (Photo: Official Website, Yechiel Lieberman and the National Library)

Tauber says Halpern was an interesting person.

"I was a undergraduate and graduate student and started learning Yiddish with him. Yoav Ran and I tried to convince him to publish a book of his poems, but he refused."



Tauber notes that Halpern was already exhausted and his apartment was neglected.

Both students did an order and cleaning operation in the apartment.

One day, at the end of August 1980, when a magistrate came to visit him, the door was locked and after he did not receive it, he broke down the door and found Alferen dead.

Was 75 at the time of his death.

After his death the two young students published a book with a small portion of the many poems he left behind.



Even in his lifetime, ten years earlier, Halpern had agreed to publish one and only song.

It was a song in memory of his friends' son.

The booklet published by the family and friends of Shalom (Shuli) Lieberman, an officer in the Carob Regiment, opens a poem in Yiddish, a poem that the poet Alfaren dedicated to the child of the poet he loved so much.



"The birds flew to them.


No beep was heard anymore


or, how mute is the air, how mute is ...


My twenty-year-old child went -


he placed the soldier's beret next to him.


The intoxication of victory echoed around


in the sadness and tragedy of others ...


Now the wind blows in the grass in the


grass and in the gray hairs of the mother ...


Now the last rays of light


of the poor father fade ...


Ah, heaven, when will evil cease


over the poor people ?! "

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Source: walla

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