Preskovsky family papers

Collection of documents and photographs relating to Chana Tykocka Preskowski (donor’s mother) who together with her two small daughters, Bella (b. 1933) and Lea (b. 1935) travelled in the spring of 1939 from Tel Aviv to Grajewo, Poland to visit her parents, Mordechai and Ryvka Tykocki. With the German invasion of Poland and the Soviet annexation of Eastern Poland, Chana and her daughters were unable to leave. Jacob Preskovsky, Chana’s husband and the father of the two girls, was a Palestinian citizen, and he managed to arrange for “Emergency Certificates” for his wife and children. They reached Palestine in the fall of 1940. All the relatives in Grajewo and in Pruzany were murdered by the Germans during the Holocaust. In the summer of 1940, Bella Preskovsky went to T.O.Z. summer camp in Bialystok and was treated there as a “celebrity” from Palestine. Many of the children depicted in the photographs from the summer camp may have been deported from the Bialystok ghetto to Theresienstadt in 1943. Includes correspondence from the Tykocki family in Grajewo and from the Preskowski family in Pruzhany, Poland (the donor's maternal and paternal family) to the Preskovsky family in Tel Aviv, dated between 1938 and June 1941; in Yiddish.