קהילת יהודי ברשאד

Arnold Daghani (born Arnold Korn, aka as Dagani) (1909-1985), painter, born in Suceava, in the historical region of Bukovina, Romania (then part of Austria-Hungary). In the 1930s he moved to Bucharest and studied economics. After the annexation of northern Bukovina by the Soviet Union in June 1940, he moved with his wife to Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in the Soviet area. However, in the summer of 1941 after the start of the war against the Soviet Union, the area was captured by Romania and in 1942 Daghani and his wife were deported to Transnistria, but were caught by the SS when trying to escape and sent to a forced labor camp near Mikhailovka in the Nazi occupied Ukraine. In the camp he secretly kept a diary with paintings of evefry day life in the camp. They managed to escape to the Romanian occupied Transnistria, wher they were again arrested and detained in the Bershad ghetto. He was released in December 1943 and returned to Bucharest.

Groapa este in livada de vişini (“The grave is in the cherry orchard”), his camp diary, was published in 1947. It was translated into English and in German. The German edition published in 1960 served as evidence in the Federal Republic Germany for a number of investigations of Nazi crimes in forced labor camps.

After the establishment of the Communist regime in Romania, he refused to create in the Socialist Realism style advocated by the regime and to join the state artists’ association. He continued to draw secretly scenes of every day life.

Daghani immigrated to Isreal in 1958, but was not permitted to bring with him many of his drawings. He consequently lived in Israel, Switzerland, southern France and in 1977 he settled in Hove, near Brighton, in southern England. Many of his works are part of The Arnold Daghani Collection at the University of Sussex in United Kingdom.

Mordechai (Mordhe) Goldenberg (1883-1941), poet and journalist, born in Zgurita, Moldova (then part of the Russian Empire). He grew up in Otaci (Ataki) and then in Râșcani, both in the historical region of Bessarabia, now in Moldova, and later settled in Căprești, a Jewish colony in Bessarabia, living there until 1934, when he moved to Secureni (now Sokyriany, in Ukraine). After Bessarabia was again controlled by Romania, following the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Goldenberg was deported to the concentration camps in Transnistria. His wife and daughter committed suicide a short time after deportation, and he died a few months later in the Bershad ghetto. During his life he contributed to a number of periodicals in Yiddish, including Unzer Tsayt and Chernovitser Blater, both in Cernauti (then in Romania, now Chernivtsi in Ukraine), and Tribuna in Bucharest. His Hebrew poems and short stories were published during his life, while his Yiddish poetry was included in the bilingual collection Reshafim BaArava (1940) and republished posthumously in Tel Aviv in 1946. Goldenberg was highly estimated and his work influenced many of his contemporary Yiddish writers, including Samuel Leib Blank (1891-1962), Beniamin Michali (B. I. Michali) (1910-1989), and Herzl Rivkin (1908-1951).