Ben-Tsiyon Klibansky
Historian & Electronics Engineer
M.Sc.
Ph.D.
Beyond the End
ISBN 978-965-597=205-4
The essay Beyond the End chronicles the life of a remarkable historical figure, the pedagogical director and educator at the Kovno Orphanage, who met her tragic end in October 1941, walking with her students towards the killing pit.
The protagonist, Genya Ziv, was born in 1894 in the remote yet renowned town of Salant, located in the Kovno Governorate of the northwestern Russian Empire. As the daughter of a religiously learned and enlightened upper-middle-class family, she was sent at a young age to acquire knowledge and education at a Jewish gymnasium far from home. There, she studied for seven years, followed by an additional year of pedagogy, graduating with honors and a private teaching certificate—a discriminatory practice prevalent in Tsarist Russia against Jews. After completing her studies, she joined her mother in managing the family pharmacy, while also volunteering to provide private lessons to underprivileged girls.
During World War I, Genya and her family, like other Jews from the Kovno Governorate, were expelled by the Russian military authorities. In their refuge city of Vilna, they endured severe hunger. A year later, the German occupying authorities permitted her family to return to Salant, where they slowly began the process of rebuilding their businesses.
With the establishment of the Lithuanian Republic and the institutionalization of Jewish autonomy, Genya Ziv was appointed in 1919 as the head of the local school founded by the Hebrew organization Tarbut. She held this position until the great fire in her town in 1926, which also destroyed the school. During the long interim period until the school’s reconstruction, she began studying philosophy and pedagogy at Kovno University.
Genya Ziv completed her academic studies in 1931, coinciding precisely with the establishment of an orphanage for girls in Kovno. She was asked to serve as the pedagogical director of the new institution, whose students came from the most vulnerable segments of Jewish society in Kovno and its vicinity.
In the late 1930s, she contemplated immigrating to Palestine and establishing an educational institution there, and she even acquired a significant plot of land for this purpose. The Holocaust, however, tragically cut short the realization of these aspirations and dreams.
The essay Beyond the End aims to illuminate the character of this devout, proto-feminist, and scholarly woman with an independent and tenacious spirit. Although she did not conform to societal norms or integrate into the conventional bourgeois order of her time, she forged her own unique and independent paths, fulfilling her ambitions through continuous self-reflection and a profound personal emotional journey.