The guests from Israel, Dr. Dafna, a professor of social sciences at Tel Aviv University, and her husband Yachud Beniachu, a professor of oceanological sciences at Tel Aviv University, were brought to Panevėžys by…the website of Panevėžys Jewish Community.
The couple set themselves the goal of coming to Panevėžys and finding in the archives of the Jewish community of Panevėžys not only documents about Jewish life in the city, but also about their grandparents and great-grandparents.
And the exchange was successful for both sides. And it is unclear who won more.
After a long correspondence with the Beniachu family, they sent a large number of copies of historical photographs and information about their family. Documents were found in Panevėžys about the fate of their grandparents and great-grandparents in Lithuania, as well as in Latvia and Belarus. In Community’s archive, the guests discovered for the first time a photo of the former Panevėžys Jewish-Hebrew high school with a stamp. And after comparing the photos they sent and the material from the archives of the Community, it turned out that their grandfather Yachuda Schnaider had five children (photo from 1912).
Grandfather Yachuda himself studied at the Panevėžys Hebrew Gymnasium and graduated from it in 1926. He was an active participant in Jewish organizations. After that, he taught at the Hebrew high school. He was killed in 1941 in Kiev “Babi Jar”.
Mrs. Dafna sent unique photos from her archive, from which Panevėžys Jewish Community learned a lot of useful historical information about the Jewish youth organizations that existed at that time. Most of the members of those organizations were killed during the Holocaust.
