Scienceשלום חולבסקי

Shalom Cholawski

Shalom Cholawski was a writer and historian of East European Jewry who fought as a Jewish partisan commander during the Holocaust.

1914 to 2011The Nesvizh ghetto revoltJewish partisan command in BelarusResearch on Jewish resistanceCo-founding the Moreshet institute

Died: 22 May 2011, Israel
Occupation: historian
Education: Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Wars: Eastern Front

Shalom Cholawski was born in 1914 in Lida

Shalom Cholawski was born in 1914 in Lida, then in the Russian Empire and today in western Belarus. He studied at the Tarbut teachers' seminary in Vilna. He later ran the Tarbut school in the town of Rakov near Minsk.

During World War II he was among the first members of the Jewish underground and a leader of the revolt in the Nesvizh ghetto on July 21, 1942. He escaped to the forests and helped found and command the Zhukov Jewish partisan unit in Belarus. The unit disbanded after the Red Army took the area in July 1944.

In late 1944 he founded the Jewish organization PHH with Yitzhak Zuckerman and led it in Poland and Germany, as part of the Bricha movement. In 1948 he moved to Israel and joined Kibbutz Ein HaShofet, where he taught literature. He testified for the prosecution at the Eichmann trial.

He helped found the Moreshet institute and coordinated it from 1962 to 1966. In 1977 he earned a PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a thesis on the Jewish underground in the ghettos of western Belarus. He wrote 8 books, mostly in Hebrew, and died in 2011, buried at Ein HaShofet.