The Vale of Tears

According to the publisher's notes: "Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung (1912-1998) was born in Dukla, Poland. His memoir of surviving the Holocaust is a first-person account of fleeing from Nazi-occupied Poland during the first two years of World War II. As an Orthodox rabbi, he is specifically targeted and persecuted, and in the fall of 1939 he leaves the shtetl of Dukla and travels, desperately trying to find refuge, to a myriad of towns -Rymanow and Sanok in Poland, then across the Soviet border to Linsk, Lemberg, Lutsk, Lida, Soletshnik and Voranava and then across the Soviet-Lithuanian border to Eyshishok and, finally, Vilna. While escaping across the borders of German-occupied Poland into Soviet-occupied Poland, and finally to Lithuania and then to freedom in Kobe, Japan, and Shanghai, China. Rabbi Pinchas Hirschrprung astutely observes his position in the Jewish communities, the violence against Jews and the urgency of seeking freedom. The Vale of Tears is replete with Talmudic and Torah scripture and psalms as Hirschprung holds onto his faith through the chaos. Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung arrived in Montreal, Canada, in December 1941 and wrote his Yiddish-language memoirs, titled Fun Natsishen Yomertol: Zikhroynes fun a Polit (From the Nazi Vale of Tears: Memoirs of a Refugee) in 1944. His memoir was published in Montreal's daily Yiddish-language newspaper, Der Keneder Adler. The Vale of Tears is its first English translation. Hirschprung became the chief rabbi of Montreal in 1969 and led Montreal's Jewish community until his death in 1998."

The Azrieli series of Holocaust survivor memoirs, Series VIII

Toronto, ON

The Azrieli Foundation

2016

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