I. M. Weissenberg Memorial

Abraham Lewin

1941

Eulogy Read at a Commemorative Evening in Honour of Yitshak Meir Weissenberg, 13 September 1941

We live in a prison. We have been degraded to the level of homeless and uncared-for animals. When we look at the swollen, half-naked bodies of Jews lying in the streets, we feel as if we find ourselves at some subhuman level. The half-dead, skeletal…

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Written while the author was living in the Warsaw ghetto, the I. M. Weissenberg Memorial text serves as both a eulogy and a reflection on the dehumanizing conditions of the Holocaust. Its subject, I. M. Weissenberg (Yitshak Meir Vaysenberg), was a prominent Yiddish writer known for depicting shtetl life through the lens of class struggle and social tensions. Lewin delivered this tribute on September 13, 1941, during a commemorative evening honoring the third anniversary of Weissenberg’s death; the text survived because it was deposited into the Ringelblum Archive (Oyneg Shabes).
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