Mordechai Hillel Kroshnitz

Mordechai Hillel Kroshnitz was born in 1915 in Baranavichy

Kroshnitz was born in 1915 in Baranavichy, the youngest of 3 children of Leah and Yaakov Kroshnitz. He studied in a cheder and a Hebrew high school of the Tarbut network, then took external matriculation exams and an accounting course in Warsaw.

As a youth he was active in the Zionist socialist movement Dror (Frayheyt), and at 17 he served as secretary of its district council. At the Shachariya kibbutz in Vilna he met Mina-Tamar Feibushevitz, and they married in 1936. In Lubcha he helped organize a strike of about 150 rural women workers.

During World War II he fled from the Nazis to Lubcha, where he held posts in the Soviet district council. After the German invasion in 1941 he fled east to Samarkand, joined the Red Army and was wounded at Leningrad.

After the war he organized Poale Zion activity in Upper Silesia and managed a kibbutz of survivors in Bytom. He became a leader of the survivors in Germany and helped organize illegal immigration and overseas volunteers for the IDF. In 1949 he moved to Israel with his wife and 2 children.

In Israel he was secretary of the Clerical Union in Haifa and later volunteered as a labor law advisor. He wrote 4 books in Yiddish, edited Yizkor books and the Haifa yearbook, and received the Rubinlicht Prize in 1982. He died in 1998.