Shalom Markowitz

The Central British Fund (CBF) put together a large team of people to look after the Boys.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The British government offered 1,000 visas to bring the Boys to the UK but the caveat was that the CBF were responsible for their care and would pay all the expenses.

Markowitz was born in 1917 to an Orthodox Jewish family who had come to Britain from Belarus in the nineteenth century. He was the youngest of nine siblings. His father ran a greengrocer’s shop in Whitechapel.

At the age of 18, Markowitz went to study theology at the London School of Jewish Studies. He received a bachelor’s degree but left before being certified for the Rabbinate.

During the Blitz, Markowitz ran a home for Jewish children who were evacuated from London to Surrey. As a theology student, he was released from military service.

He married his wife Edie in1942.

At the end of the war, in June 1945, he joined Jewish Committee for Relief Abroad and Jewish Relief Unit (JRU) and was the commander of the unit sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Before leaving for Germany, he gave his wife Edie a written document, agreeing to a conditional get (Jewish writ of divorce),  in case he disappeared.

Markowitz directed the Bachad hostels programme and played a role in the illegal Aliyah Bet emigration to the Palestine Mandate. He was probably a member of the Haganah as his wife recalls that the basement of a hostel that they ran in Cazenove Road in London was used as a centre for the Jewish underground.

The couple both participated in the founding of Kibbutz Lavi in 1949, and had two children.