En Vrac

Shmuel Stimler was born in Rzeszow, Poland in 1923, into a chassidic family. Rzeszow's pre-war population was 50 percent Jewish. He studied in the local one-room “cheder” (Torah school). From among all the schools in the area, my father and one other student were selected to be tested for the famed Chachmei Lublin yeshiva, a prestigious post-high school academy for Torah study. In the summer of '39, my father passed the entrance exam. But his dreams were crushed by the outbreak of World War II.