Fleischer
The annual memorial meeting - remembering those who passed away in 2019 – 2020. The meeting was held via Zoom on December 24th, 2020. This information was submitted by his daughter, Dr. Sigal Berkowitz-Fleischer, Meitar.
Wilhelm Zeev (Wilek) Fleischer, the only child of Izidor and Chana, was born in Drohobycz on February 10th, 1925 and passed away on November 5th, 2019.
The family owned an iron casting factory. Zeev had a happy childhood. Until the age of 14, he attended the Konarsky elementary school and the Sternbach high school. From age 14 to 16 he attended a Russian high school in Drohobycz.
During the years 1941 – 1943 he was in the Drohobycz ghetto with his parents. For thirteen months in 1943 – 1944, Zeev, his parents and fifteen others were hidden in a bunker under a factory. The bunker was dug 1.5 meters (about 60 feet) below ground and its size was a total of 8 square meters (about 86 square feet). His engineer uncle designed and built the bunker.
When the town was liberated by the Russians in 1944, Zeev joined the Red Army. In 1945 he spent three and a half months as a German prisoner of war. After the work he worked as a medical assistant in Prague. He returned to Gliwice in Poland and completed his pharmacology studies in 1950 in Wroclaw. That same year he made Aliyah to Israel and settled in Beer-Sheba where he was the first public pharmacist in the entire Negev district at the “Shetel” clinic of Kupat Holim. In 1957 he married Czeslawa Sandauer, a dentist, and they had two children: Michael Fleischer (a senior researcher at a Hi-Tech company in the United States) and Sigal Berkowitz-Fleischer (a Pharmacology professor at Ben-Gurion university).
Throughout the years Zeev wrote hundreds of poems in Polish and Hebrew.
He is survived by his partner Paulina Zommerstein, his son Michael, his daughter Sigal and four grandchildren.
May his memory be a blessing.
Submited by Zeev Fleischer, Beer Sheba
Zeev tells about himself, his family and Bruno Schulz
Zeev tells about Bruno Schultz in Tel Aviv
Zeev Fleischer about his family and himself before and during WW2 and life in Israel after the war
Read the article from "New Republic" newspaper
